The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton

Explores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm played a role in early modern England's religious and cultural systems that, in turn, informs the period's poetic and visual imagination. It studies the writings of Thomas More, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Lady Mary Wroth, John Donne, and John Milton, amongst others.

Tiffany Jo Werth (Ph.D. Columbia University) is an Professor of English at University of California, Davis. Her research interests include Renaissance literature, Reformation history, print culture, posthumanism, and the long history of environmental narratives. She is author of The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) and co-editor of Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (University of Toronto, 2019), and has published in a variety of journals. She has been a Mellon long-term fellow at the Huntington Library and currently serves as the Program Director for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.