In Roses in Winter Rebecca Laroche moves beyond recent readings of recipes, distillation and the procreation sonnets. Focusing closely on how one recipe book treats roses and various rose products, Laroche returns to the sonnets with a new appreciation of how roses in these poems are not merely distilled, but rather they grow. What is more, rose water and oil are not everlasting; they, too, fade, and, in their use, they must be replenished. This close, archivally-driven reading recognizes that the different moments of distillation function variously in the sonnets, as a recipe on distilling rose oil differs from a recipe for damask water and both differ from a recipe that has a water or an oil as an ingredient. The lecture as a whole makes a strong argument for more archival work with manuscripts from the early modern era.

REBECCA LAROCHE is Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Her publications include Medical Authority and and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550-1650 (Ashgate, 2010) and Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity (Palgrave, 2011), co-edited with Jennifer Munroe.