Reading Green in Early Modern England by Leah Knight (review)

Introducing Reading Green, Leah Knight points out that ‘green’ did not mean in the early modern period what it means today (that is, linked to protecting the natural environment), and that she intends to discover, or ‘read’, what it did then mean. Knight gathers a wealth of material into three parts, each covering physical and figurative aspects of early modern interpretations of green.

Part I considers the senses of sight and smell and their relationships with literary examples, looking first at the idea then current, that green was an ‘optical restorative’ (p. 18) – that is, could ease eye strain – and then discussing the fashionable use (later a sign of pedantic fustiness) of green-lensed spectacles by many, including Samuel Pepys. Only later is the idea’s classical heritage mentioned. The place of smell in the early modern period is also investigated through, in one example, the use of the pomander not only as an object thought to hold disease at bay, but also as a literary term for a work intended for carrying about (such as Becon’s Pomander of Prayer, or Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay).

In Part II, the dominant theme is trees, looked at through ‘the myth of Orpheus as a mover and shaker of all things green’ (p. 63), and, more literally, as a place where grafting took place, or words could be written. Rather than Aristotelian faculty psychology’s belief that plants had souls, Knight argues that Renaissance herbalists and writers, such as Lodge and Spenser (Shepheardes Calender) saw the mobility of trees (the Orphic myth) as central.

Part III is headed ‘How Andrew Marvell read Gerard’s Herbal’. In many self-referential words – off-putting to this reader – Knight presents what she would have written had she not discovered A. B. Grosart’s earlier work on the topic.

Knight’s interpretations are often disputable; for instance, that Wyatt’s ‘in a net I seek to hold the wind’ (from ‘Whoso list to hunt’) is about the ‘sighing or whispering wind’ (p. 53), when it is more likely to refer to what is impossible. Above all, it is the insufficiently sifted modern critical material that prevents success. Use of the Early English Books Online collection for primary sources is laudable, but for at least some of Knight’s texts there are also excellent editions which might have provided further insights.