Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of analysis and brings together some of the rich and innovative ways that scholars are expanding the discussion of plants and botany in Shakespeare’s writings. The essays gathered here all emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life, whether culturally,...

This book is the first monographic attempt to follow the environmental changes that took place in the frontier zone of the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the one hand, it looks at how the Ottoman–Hungarian wars affected the landscapes of the Carpathian Basin – specifically, the frontier zone. On the other hand, it examines how the environment was used in the military tactics of the opposing realms. By taking into consideration both perspectives, this book intends to pursue the dynamic interplay between war, environment, and local...

The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature tracks an important shift in early modern conceptions of selfhood, arguing that the period hosted the birth of a new subset of the human, the eco-self, which melds a deeply introspective turn with an abiding sense of humans’ embedment in the world. A confluence of cultural factors produced the relevant changes. Of paramount significance was the rapid spread of literacy in England and across Europe: reading transformed the relationship between self and world, retooled moral reasoning, and even altered human anatomy. This book pursues the...