Current PhD Student

Francis Taylor

Thesis Title:

Noxious Plants and the Early Modern Bible

Supervisors:

Professor Mark Jenner & Professor Kevin Killeen

Description:

Tangled thorns strewn across vineyards, poisonous tares growing up among healthy wheat, indelibly bitter plants falling from the heavens. The Bible is full of 'plants in the wrong place'.

My research considers the identification and interpretation of Biblical weeds in the long seventeenth century (ca. 1570 - 1700), and explores how concepts such as toxicity, over-fecundity, and invasivity, as well as the very definition of a 'weed', were as much theological as they were botanical in the period.

Reading understudied encyclopaedias of scriptural plants, such as Levinus Lemnius' Herbarum atque arborum quae in Bibliis passim obviae sunt explicatio (1566) and William Westmacott's Historia Vegetabilium Sacra (1695), alongside vernacular Bible translations and sermons in print and manuscript, I explore how a variety of writers discerned and commented on the Bible's thistles and thorns. I also place these materials in conversation with more ostensibly 'secular' texts, such as agricultural manuals, works of natural philosophy, and floral compendia from across the globe, to reveal how theories about the growth and spread of weeds, and proposals for their management, were shaped by biblical language.

My project sits at the intersection of early modern literary studies, and environmental and religious history, and I'm interested, more broadly, in critical interdisciplinary histories of 'vermin' and 'pollution' in the period.

I came to my doctorate having read a BA in History at the University of Oxford, and an MA with distinction in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York.

My research is funded by a a Wolfson Foundation Postgraduate Scholarship.