vivency

Knight's "Orpheus and the Poetic Animation of the Natural World," perhaps the strongest essay in the collection, brings together an impressive array of Elizabethan poems, rhetorical handbooks, and scientific (especially botanical) texts as it explores early modern representations of the Orphic animation of the landscape in light of contemporary beliefs about the vivency and mobility of plants.

It might also have been nice to include more scholarship by scholars working in other disciplines, particularly the history of art, a field likewise currently preoccupied with questions of lifelikeness, vivency, artifice, and verisimilitude.