Kirjahaku

The Shakespearean stage offered London playgoers a glimpse of the illiterate and rural plant cultures rapidly disappearing from their increasingly urban and sophisticated lives. The same cultures also circulated in popular texts offstage: bawdy tree ballads, botanical tales, almanacs and accounts of kitchen physic. Here Bonnie Lander Johnson argues that, while Shakespeare's plants offered audiences a nostalgic vision of childhood, domestic education and rural pastimes, this was in fact done with an ironic gesture that claimed for illiterate culture an intellectual relevance ignored by the learned and largely Protestant realm of print. Addressing a long-standing imbalance in early modern scholarship, she reveals how Shakespeare's plays – and the popular, low botanical beliefs they represent – engaged with questions usually deemed high, literate and elite: theological and liturgical controversies, the politics of state, England's role in Elizabethan naval conflict and the increasingly learned realm of medical authority.

In this book, Bonnie Lander Johnson explores early modern ideas of chastity, demonstrating how crucial early Stuart thinking on chastity was to political, medical, theological and moral debates, and that it was also a virtue that governed the construction of different literary genres. Drawing on a range of materials, from prose to theatre, theological controversy to legal trials, and court ceremonies - including royal birthing rituals - Lander Johnson unearths previously unrecognised opinions about chastity. She reveals that early Stuart theatrical and court ceremonies were part of the same political debate as prose pamphlets and religious sermons. The volume also offers new readings of Milton's Comus, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Henrietta Maria's queenship and John Ford's plays. It will appeal to scholars of early modern literature, theatre, political, medical and cultural history, and gender studies.

In this book, Bonnie Lander Johnson explores early modern ideas of chastity, demonstrating how crucial early Stuart thinking on chastity was to political, medical, theological and moral debates, and that it was also a virtue that governed the construction of different literary genres. Drawing on a range of materials, from prose to theatre, theological controversy to legal trials, and court ceremonies - including royal birthing rituals - Lander Johnson unearths previously unrecognised opinions about chastity. She reveals that early Stuart theatrical and court ceremonies were part of the same political debate as prose pamphlets and religious sermons. The volume also offers new readings of Milton's Comus, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Henrietta Maria's queenship and John Ford's plays. It will appeal to scholars of early modern literature, theatre, political, medical and cultural history, and gender studies.

'Rich and replenishing ... I felt lovesick for it after it was done' ELEANOR CATTON, Booker Prize-winning author'I really loved this book' JENN ASHWORTH'A brilliantly ambitious and authentic cultural history. A real treasure.' ROWAN WILLIAMS, former Archbishop of Canterbury__________In the past, we were deeply bound to all things green and growing. We once knew the landscape and the plants around us as well as we knew ourselves. But today our relationship with plants and nature has grown distant - we have lost a sense of plants as precious.Vanishing Landscapes tells the story of how plants disappeared from our daily lives one by one. First were apples, then household medicines like saffron, cloth dyes like woad, grapes for making wine, and then, eventually, the timber and reeds we used to build our houses and the wheat we grew for our bread. In their place came the first corporation, the first factory, the banking system, private property, global trade, and modern medicine.The history of these plants shows us how we became modern, but it also shows a path to recover some of what we have lost. In Vanishing Landscapes, Bonnie Lander Johnson goes in search of the old life and the people who are still connected to the land. She meets farmers in Ireland, wine makers in Yorkshire and cloth dyers in the Highlands. She cuts reeds in the watery Norfolk fens and camps overnight in a West Country orchard to gaze up at an unchanging sky.Vanishing Landscapes brings to life a world we never knew but still long for, and reminds us that it's not too late to find a way back.

Writer Phillip Lopate described the essay as ‘an open-ended adventure, an invitation to doubt and self-surprise’. The essays in this special issue use the form as a platform to allow a multitude of voices to ring clear, inviting us to explore topics as varied as nature, trauma, last lines of poetry, and Esperanto.Featuring writing by Tom Bailey, Susmita Bhattacharya, Bonnie Lander Johnson, Constance Kresge, Christopher Linforth, Zachary D. Shell, Rob McClure Smith, Charlie J. Stephens, S.Y. Tam, Jack Young, and Anna Vaught