Professor Werth Publishes "The Lithic Imagination"
Professor Tiffany Jo Werth’s newest book, The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton, was recently published by Oxford University Press. The work explores the cultural, religious, and literary significance of “stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm” in shaping human identity in the early-modern period.
Her book, initially conceptualized as an examination of the ungodly in early modern England, took an unexpected turn. She had sworn off writing about religion, as her previous book examined post-Reformation English authors seeking to control the genre of romance’s appeal by adapting it and removing its perceived Catholic influences. Yet, as she began her research, she noticed something curious: repeated references in early modern English texts equating atheists with stones.
“Atheists and stones are both “called ‘dull,’” Werth observed. “The ungodly are often described as being ‘as hard as stones.’ … What is this correlation that I keep coming across? What is the ontology behind that analogy? I then became interested in how stoniness was seemingly an antithesis of the human…. But when I started going back and really looking into “stoniness” in the early modern period, I began to see something quite different. In fact, there were all these fascinating ways that human life was completely bound up with stoniness and the mineral.”
This line of questioning drew her into an exploration of how stones and human life are deeply intertwined: from creation myths, such as those found in Genesis and Ovid -- where humans are created out of clay or emerge from stone -- to anatomical metaphors, ideas of reproduction, and fantasies of the afterlife.
“I realized that the book was actually about a human life cycle and all of the ways that stoniness in fact is not simply antithetical to the human, but in sympathy with us, so that it infiltrates everything from our origin stories to our sexuality,” she said. “I became fascinated by how stoniness permeates the language of sex and desire. It even figures in our language of male anatomy: so that the testes are popularly referred to as ‘the stones.’”
After a year-long fellowship as a Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library in Southern California, where she sourced many of the images in her book, Werth continued her research at UC Davis. Here, she discovered an incredible hub of pre-modern and early modern scholars, partially attributing the completion of her book to the support from English faculty. Fran Dolan and Gina Bloom were interlocutors in early-modern studies while ecocritics Tobias Menely, Mike Ziser, and Liz Miller shaped Werth’s thinking about the human, non-human, and more-than-human. Graduate students too were sources of companionship and conversation, including Sawyer Kemp, Courtney Callahan, and Kirsten Schuhmacher.
“[It’s] really important when you’re doing a long project to have community,” she said. She briefly recalled what it is like for graduate students to write a dissertation and the kind of support system in place (fellow students, an advisor, the department, etc.) that can be more difficult to come across later in a scholar’s career. UC Davis offered that supportive community. “You go out, you get a job, you have a tenure clock. And then… all of a sudden, your support network, the people that used to be your reading community, are gone or too busy elsewhere… When I moved to Davis, it was critical to find that kind of intellectual community with colleagues to push me to finish the book.” Werth described her book as having “sedimented” for over a decade. The combination of moving to Davis and having the time to explore the archives were pivotal to its final shape.
As a self-proclaimed proponent of emplaced learning, she found intriguing connections between her place of teaching at Davis, Silicon Valley near where she lives in the Bay Area, and stories of the New Jerusalem. The book culminates in an exploration of Silicon Valley’s “digital afterlife” narratives, linking contemporary technological aspirations to the stoniness of Silicon—a mineral-based substance central to modern computing. These digital afterlives in the “cloud” recall narratives of the New Jerusalem from Revelations. As a “desired endpoint” for many Christian faiths, the “New Jerusalem” allegedly exists in an immaterial heaven, but, nonetheless, relies on a persistent imagined stony architecture available only to an elite community of believers.
“It is this bizarre contradiction that you find such an incredibly material city in an immaterial afterlife of heaven… In popular media outlets, such as The New Yorker, you find articles about silicon afterlives and digital uploads, a digital version of a silicon heaven or a New Jerusalem. The Lithic Imagination ends with these narratives of human futurity, and endurance, in silicon, a mineral-based substance. So that even in our “immaterial” digital age, we paradoxically find reliance on very material processes and substances.”
Werth acknowledges that the book’s final chapter may surprise some readers: for a journey that begins with the Book of Genesis to conclude among the tech elite of Silicon Valley. But a short drive from Davis, Silicon Valley shadows Werth’s conclusion, indicating stoniness as an ongoing touchstone of debate about human lifespans, material infrastructures, and humanity’s futures.