: <i>Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print</i>

Jessica Rosenberg's Botanical Poetics exfoliates the sundry delights of plants, demonstrating in a meticulous yet wide-ranging manner the ways they inspired and shaped literary practices in sixteenth-century England.Rosenberg defines botanical poetics as "a theory and practice of inscription that understands books' material form and possible futures on the model of vegetable life."The "genius" of the vegetable, as she elaborates, "is its potential, in only fragments, for relocation and resumption of new life" (3).That such vitality could be extracted without diminishing the "original stock" was one of the primary "vertues" attributed to plants and books alike in the period, Rosenberg argues, illustrating how this kinship is expressed in an aesthetics that straddles openness and constraint, routine and error, expectation and surprise.Rosenberg advances this argument in five dedicated chapters and two "branches."The introduction offers a simultaneously vast and detailed survey of sixteenth-century English "plant books," a genre Rosenberg defines as books whose "titles link them to the world of plants" (9).These include prayer books, epigrams, translations, and miscellanies whose composite forms especially evoke vegetable gatherings.Titles advertise themselves as "arbors," "flowers," "bowers," and "nosegays"-commodities that offer "consumable delights," but ones filled with "a prodigious potential for dispersal and regeneration" (15).Rosenberg's expertise in book studies is impressively displayed in her analysis of printed ornaments and sammelbands in chapter 1, where she establishes a central concern with aesthetic contingency in gardens physical and literary.Inspired by the "lexicon of virtue across plant books" (30), wherein the word (as in the period) is typically spelled "vertue," chapter 2 asks "what changes if we see : : : the turn of the e instead of the masculine uprightness of the I"?The former spelling, Rosenberg asserts, is associated more with a dynamic, transspeciate, nongendered vitality than the manliness that takes precedence in Roman tradition and spelling.In botanical "vertue," Rosenberg discovers a "more ecological view of the cosmos : : : that places human artisans in positions of interactive dependence, subject to the rhythms and patterns of nonhuman capacities" (84).Branching off this chapter is a formidable if brief meditation on the "ecology of small forms" in Romeo and Juliet.Exquisite close readings (of Queen Mab, the "mickle grace" of herbs, the pun, the couplet) magnify the