Leah Knight argues that the early modern cultures and cultivation of plants and books depended on each other in historically specific ways. Knight's in-depth readings of sixteenth-century herbals are incorporated in a narrative which establishes the broader context for the interpenetration of plants and writing in the period's cultural practices to illuminate a complex interplay between materials and discourses rarely considered in tandem today.

“Succeeds beautifully in discovering and entwining an entire tradition of speculative botany that will reshape plant studies and posthumanist theory.” —Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times Science Fiction & Technoculture Studies Book Prize Winner Radical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants’ liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art. Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity. The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism’s manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction. A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos.

Vols. 1-4 include section called Record of current literature.

Brings together the diverse research trends in the field of medicinal botany. Beginning with the core study of distribution patterns of medicinal plants, it covers the wide range of chemical evaluation of their therapeutic properties, unravels the impact of environmental stresses, and highlights the modern research at molecular authentication and quality assessment of medicinal plants.