Today’s guest is Jessica Rosenberg, who is the author of a new book titled Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022). An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami, Professor Rosenberg has contributed book chapters to Shakespeare and Hospitality and Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Literature and published articles on “The Poetics of Practical Address” in Philological Quarterly and “The Point of the Couplet” in ELH: English Literary History.

Botanical Poetics, a wide-ranging study of print culture around poetry between the years 1568 and 1583, investigates the intersection of literary history and horticultural practice. The book includes new interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Romeo and Juliet, as well as George Gascoigne’s A Hundred Sundry Flowers and Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay. Botanical Poetics offers a variety of fresh concepts for the study of early modern poetry such as “the ecology of small forms” and “slippery poetics.” Not least of all, this book explores what it meant to “read like a pig” in the 1570s.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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