Armstrong Rebecca. Vergil's Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine

Oxford University Press, 2019. — 352 p.- Provides an in-depth study of plants in Vergil's poetry, offering a far more thorough and nuanced account of Vergilian flora than previously available in English-language scholarship
- Draws on a wide range of fields in a truly interdisciplinary approach, from detailed literary criticism to ancient religion, ancient botany, and natural philosophy
- Contributes to the newly emerging category of environmentally-engaged literary criticism, bringing the natural world to the foreground and illustrating how reality, imagination, and cultural assumptions combine
- Includes English translations of all ancient Greek and Latin quotations, ensuring accessibility to all readers, regardless of language familiarityThe Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid abound with plants, yet much Vergilian criticism underestimates their significance beyond attractive background detail or the occasional symbolic set-piece. This volume joins the growing field of nature-centred studies of literature, looking head-on at Vergil's plants and trees to reveal how fundamental they are to an understanding of the poet's outlook on religion, culture, and mankind's place within the world.Divided into two parts, the first explores the religious and more diffusely numinous aspects of Vergil's plants, from awe-inspiring sacred groves to divinely promoted fields of corn, and shows how both cultivated and uncultivated plants fit within and help to shape the complex landscape of Vergilian (and, more broadly, Roman) religious thought. In the second half of the book, the focus shifts towards human interactions with plants from the perspectives of both cultivation and relaxation, exploring the love-hate relationship with vegetation which sometimes supports and sometimes contests the human self-image as the world's dominant species. Combining a series of close readings of a wide range of passages with the identification of broader patterns of association, Vergil's Green Thoughts appositely reveals and celebrates the complexity and variety of Vergilian flora.Rebecca Armstrong is Associate Professor in Classical Languages and Literature at the Faculty of Classics of the University of Oxford, and Mary Bennett Fellow and Tutor in Classics at St Hilda's College. She grew up in rural north Devon before coming to Oxford to study, and took up her current posts in 2004. She now lives in rural north Oxfordshire.