The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture

The index directs readers from this image to the book's last sentence ('we must first of all unlock the black-and-white doors that for too long have kept us out' (258)), and it is no coincidence that matching monochrome is found on the back cover too. [...]The Key of Green is only indirectly linked with green studies and ecocriticism; it contributes more to the burgeoning field of 'ambient poetics'. The book has two intertwined strands: it offers a history of embodied knowledge through seventeenth-century writers who thought 'with their bodies as well as their brains and are not afraid to say so' (106), and it provides concrete examples of material objects and environments (books, rooms, tapestries, curtains etc.) that mediate reading experiences.