Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Danielle Sands and Daniel Whistler, eds., Images of the Plant Humanities: Theory, Art, and the Botanic Gaze (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-1350502611, $120. Also available as an ebook.

Exploring the words and images used to represent plants, this interdisciplinary book examines how vegetal life has been theorised both in the contemporary plant humanities, a developing field of research which aims to rectify the traditional neglect of plants as a model for thinking, and in Western modernity more generally.

Focusing on the varied ways that the vegetal has been represented, misrepresented, or even hidden, during modernity, it studies how philosophical, scientific and environmental theories, as well as colonial histories, have determined these representations, as well as how these representations have themselves influenced theory. Bringing aesthetic depictions of plant life into conversation with philosophical, cultural, literary, and scientific thinking, it looks to return our attention to vegetal life, and to challenge traditional assumptions regarding plant intelligence, agency, and communication.

Danielle Sands is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Daniel Whistler is Professor of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London. He is author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity (2013) and co-author of The Right to Wear Religious Symbols (2013).

c o n t e n t s

Part One | Understanding Plant Monsters
1  ‘What a Strange Prodigy’: The Welwitschia mirabilis — Katherine Arnold (University of Liverpool)
2  No Monsters Here: Vegetable Teratology and Plant Horror — Stella Sandford (Manchester Metropolitan University)
3  Abnormal Plants and Anomalous Arts: Troubling the Non/Human Norm — Aliya Say (Independent scholar)
4  The ‘Plant Horror’ of Turpin’s Urpflanze and Hooker’s Welwitschia: Narratives of Monstrous Proliferation and Grotesque Hybridity — Caroline Harris (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Part Two | Narrating Plant Desires
5  Thinking Sex with Plants: The Speculative Sexualities of Enlightenment Botany — Natania Meeker (University of Southern California)
6  Fern Tongues: A Pteridomaniac’s Imagination of Vegetal Time and Desire — Solvejg Nitzke (Ruhr-University Bochum)
7  Dragon Arum: A Phytopoetic Gaze on Vegetal Violence and Eroticism — Joela Jacobs (University of Arizona)
8  The Quest for the Blue Flower: The Legacy of German Romanticism in Three Contemporary Novels — Isabel Kranz (University for Applied Arts, Vienna)

Part Three | Rediscovering Plant Agency
9  The Temporality of Titan Arum — John C. Ryan (University of Notre Dame, Australia)
10  Prickly-Pairs: On Humans, Plants, and Technicity — Ed Thornton (Independent Researcher)
11  Extending the Botanical: Agency, Abstraction, and Contemporary Plant Drawing — Danielle Sands (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Part Four | Resituating Plants Ecologically
12  Undoing the Hollow Space of Representation: Margaret Mee’s Plant Portraits in the Kew Collection — Yota Batsaki (Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University)
13  Papa and Kuka: A Biocultural Exploration of Two Andean Crops — Nataly Allasi Canales (University of Copenhagen, Denmark/Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) and Kim Walker (Royal Holloway, University of London/Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
14  Lacebark and the Interior Décor of the Jamaican Slave Cottage — Steeve Buckridge (Grand Valley State University)
15  Humboldt and Bonpland’s Essay on the Geography of Plants: The Other Side of the Physical Tableau of the Andes — Quentin Hiernaux (Université libre de Bruxelles)

Part Five | Redrawing Plant Boundaries
16  ‘Here Nature stopped half-way’: Waterlilies and the Foliar Theory of the Flower — Ulrich Stegmann (University of Aberdeen)
17  The Place of Algae in Experimental Natural Histories — Joan Steigerwald (University of York)
18  A ‘Funeral Oration’ for Lichenology? — Lydia Azadpour (University of Nottingham)

Part Six | Representing Plants Otherwise
19  This Is Not a Brugmansia — Giovanni Aloi (Independent Researcher)
20  Ginkgo and Dark Botany — Prudence Gibson (University of New South Wales, Sydney) and Maya Martin-Westheimer (University of New South Wales)
21  Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes: Gestures for Hands Driven by Sunlight — Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London)
22  The Ecology of Plant Iconography — Laurence Hill (Independent Artist)

Part Seven | Reimagining Plant Forms
23  Blue So Deep — Ben Woodard (Independent Researcher)
24  Containing Nature in the Leaves of a Book: Botany, Bibliography, and the Embodiment of Thought — Thomas Moynihan (University of Cambridge)
25  Drawing the Urpflanze: Goethe, Arber, Grothendieck — Sophie Gerber (University of Bordeaux)

Afterword: The Library and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Julia Buckley (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)

From Bloomsbury (with 20% off for a limited time with discount code GLR BD8) . . .

Jonathan Conlin, D’Eon: The Wonder of Her Sex (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), 256 pages, ISBN: 979-8216493648 (hardback), $175 / ISBN: 979-8216493655 (paperback), $44. Also available as an ebook.

Jonathan Conlin, “States of Transition: The Chevalière d’Eon and Her Portrait Prints, 1764–91,” Eighteenth Century Studies 59.4 (2026). Open-access for a limited time only, via this link.

Author, envoy, soldier, spy, the Chevalière d’Eon (1728–1810) crossed boundaries of sex and nation, moving between Britain and France, presenting as a man and as a woman. For fifty years, in peace and in war, the Chevalière served the French crown as secret agent, censor, dragoon officer and diplomat. She spent the following thirty years as a celebrity, famed for giving virtuoso displays of swordswomanship wearing her signature black dress.

D’Eon presented as a woman forced by her parents and Louis XV to adopt male costume. After her transition contemporaries hailed d’Eon as “the wonder of her sex”, impressed by her achievements on the battlefield and in the chancelleries of Europe. As Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges both noted, d’Eon showed what emancipated women could do. Within weeks of d’Eon’s death, however, curious Londoners could buy coloured stipple engravings of her genitalia. For many observers, then and since, d’Eon’s identity was reduced to this post-mortem encounter with her anatomy. The mystery of her sex (now “solved”) replaced the wonder of her sex.

D’Eon was the subject of many prints during her lifetime. Until recently it was assumed that she was the passive victim of these representations. As Conlin reveals in a new article in the journal Eighteenth Century Studies, however, d’Eon had a hand in the production of several of these mezzotints and engravings. His article explores how d’Eon used prints to experiment with new female avatars (including that of a latter-day Pallas emerging bare-breasted from her tent), several years before d’Eon wore female-coded costume in public, at her 1777 presentation to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.

D’Eon was just as eager to shape how she was presented in text, feeding articles to the press and pursuing public querelles with Beaumarchais and others. A prolific author, she sold her life story to two publishers, yet failed to submit a manuscript. This was not for want of effort: D’Eon wrote her life story, over and over, in a variety of genres: as Rousseau-style confession, as dialogue, as epistolary exchange and as galanterie. Her story is a picaresque masquerade of the ancien régime. It is a Christian conversion narrative. It is a chapter in a new history of femmes fortes and trans saints. Aware of the tensions between these stories, unable or unwilling to let one version define her, d’Eon spent thirty years in a labyrinth of her own construction. No trans woman has left us such a large archive of life writings, or lived her life on such an epic scale.

Professor of History at the University of Southampton, Jonathan Conlin began working on the Chevalier d’Eon in 2001, exploring the analogies between d’Eon and the English journalist and radical, John Wilkes. He co-edited The Chevalier d’Eon and His Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2010) with Simon Burrows, Valerie Mainz and Russell Goulbourne. More recent books include the authorized bicentenary history of the National Gallery (London) and The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People (Columbia University Press, 2025). He is currently organizing a play, exhibition, and digitisation project intended to commemorate d’Eon’s tercentenary in 2028.

From Reaktion Books, with distribution in the US by The University of Chicago Press:

Helen Pierce, The Profaned Pencil: A History of British Political Caricature, 1600–1860 (London: Reaktion Books, 2026), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1836392859, £29 / $42.

The first comprehensive survey of the rise of political caricature in the United Kingdom.

The Profaned Pencil surveys the vivid and unruly world of British political caricature between 1600 and 1860. It follows the rise of graphic satire from polemical seventeenth-century broadsides to the exuberant prints of the Georgian era and the mass-market illustrated press of Victorian Britain. Caricature lay at the intersection of politics, art, and the commercial print trade, with satirical images functioning as both entertainment and political commentary. From attacks on monarchs and ministers to reflections on class, gender, and war, caricatures became a powerful and popular means of informing public debate. Illuminating the artists, technologies, and markets that propelled this artform’s spread, Helen Pierce provides new insights into how caricature mediated authority, dissent, and identity over two and a half transformative centuries.

From Yale UP:

Joanna Stalnaker, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0300181340, $35. The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History.

A moving, intimate portrait of the Enlightenment philosophers as they faced the end of their lives and their historical moment.

Shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize, sponsored by The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University.

What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors’ lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors’ own lives and works. Stalnaker shows that the beauty of these works stems from their authors’ efforts to give literary form to the materiality and fragility of their dying bodies. As they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed the silence and nothingness of death into their last works.

Stalnaker’s book unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and doubt, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them.

Joanna Stalnaker is professor of French at Columbia University. She is the author of a prizewinning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. She lives in New York City.

Distributed by Liverpool University Press:

Brent Elliott and Roger Bowdler, The British Cemetery: Architecture, Landscape, Sculpture (London: Historic England, 2026), 544 pages, ISBN: 978-1836245964, £50 / $85.

Covering 1700–2020, this book is the first major study of the British cemetery, tracing the rise of these new landscapes of remembrance from early modern times to the present. Victorian cemeteries drew on the Georgian churchyard tradition and a long-established interest in the burial customs of antiquity. New commercial opportunities were seized as church controls ended, with fast-growing urban populations demanding space for their dead. The results were magnificent: new combinations of layout, planting and myriad memorials arose, reflecting the eclectic taste and religious mood of the times. Virgin land on the edge of towns was adapted to receive mass burials, and the mason’s trade expanded rapidly to supply the growing market for family memorials. Chapters based on new research look at the evolution of buildings, planting, and tombs. Contemporary comments are extensively cited, and a picture emerges of these complex places, seething with family loss and communal memory. From grand mausoleum to humble burial plot, this survey casts light on all varieties of grave, and brings the story up to the present day.

Brent Elliott, formerly Librarian at the Royal Horticultural Society, member of the Victorian Society’s Buildings Committee, has been a committee member or trustee for Kensal Green, West Norwood, and Highgate Cemeteries.
Roger Bowdler worked at English Heritage/Historic England from 1989 to 2018 as a historian and Director of Listing. A specialist in commemorative art, he has written on church monuments, churchyards, mausolea, and war memorials.