Tiffany JoWerth, The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 449 pp. £103.00. IBSN: 9780198903963 (hb).

Stones', as Werth emphatically demonstrates, 'were neither dull, dead, nor indifferent matter across England's long Reformation' (4).Seeking to redress the underappreciation of the role of religion in shaping early modern ecological sensibilities, Werth finds in stone a syncretic medium through which to harmonise an ecomaterialist appreciation of non-human material vitality with a historicist attention to the Reformation's heightened scrutiny of the material.Animated by a theological charge, stones are agential, vital, if at times fraught, loci of divine intervention and conversion.Both 'densely material and a foundation for the abstract imaginary' ( 14), Werth foregrounds how lithic substances are implicated in narratives of creation, transformation and perdurance that underpin, though are not confined to, religious discourses.Indeed, Werth traces the contours of the 'lithic imagination' (2) in the negotiation with stones and stoniness across a range of visual and verbal material.Broadening thus the scope of her investigation enables Werth to balance her historicist focus on religious change with a sensitive, selective application of queer and critical race theory, thereby enriching her interrogation of the social practices and hierarchies mediated through the lithic.'Part One: Lithic Creations' foregrounds the foundational role of stone in establishing boundaries of being and belonging in the three primary domains of Werth's study; the nation state, the human and the early English church.In her opening chapter, Werth adopts a practice of 'lithic chorography' (41) to argue that stone is an active, and occasionally resistant, partner in attempts to assert a local or national identity.Layered with, and into, representational strategies claiming an English identity, the physical stones Werth analyses emerge as 'storied matter [] testif[ying] to a constantly renegotiated lithic-human symbiosis' (46).Maintaining her focus on this generative 'lithichuman symbiosis', Werth's second chapter reads between Genesis and the myth of Deucalion to outline how lithic substances subtend the borders of the human.Those biblical and classical accounts posit humans as both gendered from, and constituted of, a base mineral substrate provides the grounding for Werth's reassessment of Edmund Spenser's iron man, Talus, not as a figure of steely viciousness but as emblematic of a shared lithic humanity.To conclude this initial section, Werth charts how first continental Catholicism, then English Protestantism, reappropriate lithic biblical narratives of other religious denominations to claim spiritual authority.Her chapter culminates in an illuminating discussion of Protestant bible iconographies which 'index the word to a foundational lithic bedrock' (152) through their rendering of David, the author of Psalms, beside a stone altar.