Introduction

Summary

The Elizabethan ‘Botanical Renaissance’ was a movement that touched every sphere of life: the domestic and public; the theological, political and aesthetic; the literary and proto-scientific; and the mercantile, maritime and proto-colonialist. It was embraced by members of every social sphere and took place within changing definitions of the urban and the rural, thereby encompassing people who lived in each of these settings and those who – like Shakespeare himself – lived in both. That is a big claim to make for the role of the humble plant in social and literary history, but it is the claim I will be making in this book and other scholars have begun to offer similar observations.