The Key of Green – Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture

“[A] wide-ranging, in places brilliant, study of the color green in the Renaissance…Essential.”–Choice— “Choice”

“I am grateful for Smith’s speculative and groundbreaking exploration of the way philosophical and literary texts, paintings, works of plastic art . . . can be understood to collude with written texts. . . . An exploration of how nonverbal evanescent communications of sensation and emotion can become part of our historical undestanding.”–Ellen Spolsky “American Historical Review”

An extraordinarily informative, insightful, and provocative work of scholarship. [Smith’s] proposal merits trial by every English renaissance literary scholar and consideration by literary critics of all persuasions.”–Ira Clark “Seventeenth-Century News”

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title– “Choice”

“The Key of Green provides a rich introduction to the extra-literary contexts of the early modern written word….It is indeed a book to wander through and contemplate as though at an art gallery.”–Peter Auger, Early Modern Literary Studies

–Peter Auger “Early Modern Literary Studies”

“This is a beautifully written book about what might be called greening power. Ambitiously, it takes on the embodied discourse of color from Aristotle to Shakespeare, Donne, and Spenser. In this major contribution to the new interdiscipline of Ambient Studies, Bruce Smith explores all manner of wonderful ‘green stuff, ‘ locating its enduring draw within a broad spectrum of Renaissance and Baroque concerns, ranging from physics to metaphysics and all things psychological in between.”

–Barbara Maria Stafford, author of Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images

“This is, quite simply, a brilliant and groundbreaking book. The Key of Green is immensely readable, fluent, quirky, and passionate, and always simultaneously intellectually rigorous and deeply learned.”

–Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Toronto