# Tiffany Jo Werth, "The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-british-studies-6600/tiffany-jo-werth-the-lithic-imagination-from-more-to-milton-oxford-up-2024
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-british-studies-6600/tiffany-jo-werth-the-lithic-imagination-from-more-to-milton-oxford-up-2024.md
Podcast: [New Books in British Studies](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-british-studies-6600)
Published: 2026-04-25T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9866691535.mp3?updated=1776967112
Audio file: https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9866691535.mp3?updated=1776967112
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Duration seconds: 2783

## Resource

The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tiffany Jo Werth explores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in early modern England's religious and cultural systems, a role that, in turn, informs the period's poetic and visual imagination. The scale of the human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England's long Reformation provide a conceptual framework for the various stony textual and visual archives this book studies. The texts and images participate in specifically English histories (literary, artistic, political, religious) although Continental influences are frequently in dialogue. The religious orbit encompasses the Christian rivalry with Jewish culture, touches on Christianity's tension with Islam, but most intently centers on the antagonism between Catholic and variants of Protestant and Reformed belief.The volume features canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton and Pulter, but puts them in company with lesser-known religious polemicists, alchemists, anatomists, painters, mothers and stonemasons. Accordingly, the multimedia archive includes drama, lyric and prose as well as biblical illustrations, tapestries, church furniture, paintings, anatomical drawings and statues. The lithic too is capaciously construed as a continuum of rocky as well as mineral forms ranging from bodily encrustations like the kidney and bezoar stone, to salt, iron, limestone, marble, flint and silicon. The assemblage of materials bears witness to aspirational imperial fantasies and looming colonial conquests; it engages in both syncretism and supersession; upholds and subverts gender hierarchies; limns the race-making category of hue with desire; and supports, and sometimes thwarts,…

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