Downing Fellow has two new books published
Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson, Fellow in English at Downing, has had two new books published by Cambridge University Press.
The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants delves into literary engagement with plants across 2000 years and from various cultures, including the Latin, Norse and Anglophone traditions, and looks at prominent plant genres and the literatures of major global regions.
Across its chapters, the handbook explores the portrayal of plants as beings that do or do not resemble humans, their role in geopolitical conflict, and their influence on literary forms. It investigates how we have used plants to navigate modernity’s cultural and intellectual shift from theological engagement with the created world to the discourses of modern science.
Dr Lander Johnson’s second book, Botanical Culture and Popular Belief in Shakespeare’s England, shows how the Shakespearean stage offered London playgoers a glimpse of the illiterate and rural plant cultures rapidly disappearing from their increasingly urban and sophisticated lives.
It argues that while Shakespeare’s plants offered audiences a nostalgic vision of childhood, domestic education and rural pastimes, this was in fact done with an ironic gesture that claimed for illiterate culture an intellectual relevance ignored by the learned and largely Protestant realm of print.
Addressing a long-standing imbalance in early modern scholarship, the book reveals how Shakespeare's plays – and the popular, low botanical beliefs they represent – engaged with questions usually deemed high, literate and elite: theological and liturgical controversies, the politics of the state, England's role in Elizabethan naval conflict, and the increasingly learned realm of medical authority.
"I’ve been working for years on Shakespeare’s plants and the disappearing medieval world that so many of the plays seek to recover," said Dr Lander Johnson.
"These two academic books bring a lot of my research into the world. But I still have questions remaining – about how we became modern, how we lost the lives we once knew in the agricultural landscape. Now I’m exploring those questions in a series of books for a general readership, which means I can incorporate nature writing and first-person narrative in the historical story."
Published 5 February 2025