{"product_id":"the-lithic-imagination-from-more-tiffany-jo-werth-9780198903963","title":"The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton","description":"\u003cem\u003eThe Lithic Imagination from More to Milton\u003c\/em\u003e explores how stones, rocks, and the broader\u003cbr\u003emineral realm play a vital role in early modern England's religious and cultural systems, a role that, in turn, informs the period's poetic and visual imagination. The scale of the human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England's long Reformation provide a conceptual framework for the various stony textual and visual archives this book studies. The texts and images participate in specifically English histories (literary, artistic, political, religious) although Continental influences are frequently in dialogue. The religious orbit encompasses the Christian rivalry with Jewish culture, touches on Christianity's tension with Islam, but most intently centers on the antagonism between Catholic and variants of Protestant and Reformed belief. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe volume features canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton, and Pulter, but puts them in company with lesser-known religious polemicists, alchemists, anatomists, painters, mothers, and stonemasons. Accordingly, the multimedia archive includes drama, lyric, and prose as well as biblical illustrations, tapestries, church furniture, paintings, anatomical drawings, and statues. The lithic too is capaciously construed as a continuum of rocky as well as mineral forms ranging from bodily encrustations like the kidney and bezoar stone, to salt, iron, limestone, marble, flint, and silicon. The assemblage of materials bears witness to aspirational imperial fantasies and looming colonial conquests; it engages in both syncretism and supersession; upholds and subverts gender hierarchies; limns the race-making category of hue with desire; and supports, and sometimes thwarts, elitist ideologies of an elect, chosen people. All come together via the storied pathways of stone as densely material and as a foundation for the abstract imaginary along the \u003cem\u003escala naturae.\u003c\/em\u003e Across the lithic-human fold, stone promises, fascinates, betrays. As alpha and omega, stone can herald salvation or it can threaten with damnation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Tiffany Jo Werth\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0198903960\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780198903963\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Oxford University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 09\/27\/2024\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 448\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover","brand":"Tiffany Jo Werth","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":46110927388927,"sku":"9780198903963","price":135.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_b5dca350-1c04-4aa8-9fd5-b34cfec54988.jpg?v=1725470171","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/the-lithic-imagination-from-more-tiffany-jo-werth-9780198903963","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}