The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton by Tiffany Jo Werth argues that the mineral (clay, rocks, stones, bezoars, iron) offers an unsettling touchstone for rethinking Renaissance humanism and literary creation. 

Her research interests include Renaissance literature (particularly in its nondramatic forms), Reformation history, print culture, posthumanism, and the long history of environmental narratives. She is currently at work on two new related research projects. The first is a topic of a UCLA Clark Library conference on Energy Transitions in Long Modernity and the second explores early modern cosmology through the lens of cosmocriticism. Her work on the thorny relationship of romance to the long English Reformation has appeared in article form in the Shakespearean International Yearbook  and English Literary Renaissance and as her first monograph The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Johns Hopkins University Press). Her current book entitled The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton (Oxford University Press) argues that the mineral (clay, rocks, stones, bezoars, iron) offers an unsettling touchstone for rethinking Renaissance humanism and literary creation.

She has published on the more-than-human world as editor of a special issue of The Shakespearean International Yearbook and in articles in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, Literature Compass Online, Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, and a special issue of Spenser Studies on "Spenser and the Human."

Access the book at The Oxford University Press