To reveal the sophisticated and nuanced calculus of English stationers, this chapter explores the recursive relationship between readers’ responses to printed herbals and the activities of the publishers who catered to them, as well as the shifting regulatory mechanisms that enabled stationers to navigate the amount of financial risk that herbal publication increasingly asked of them.

John Gerard’s Herball of 1597 was remarkably successful: it was twice reprinted, and it remained an authoritative botanical textbook through the eighteenth century. Copies of the book were regularly bequeathed by name in wills, and as we have seen, poets such as John Milton profitably mined its descriptions for details about plants and their uses. Yet, despite the evidence of Gerard’s wide renown among his contemporaries, his reputation as a herbalist has suffered from accusations of plagiarism that have plagued discussions of his work since the publication of the book’s revised second edition in 1633. This chapter explains how this narrative about Gerard’s 1597 Herball came about, paying close attention to the perspectives of the volume’s publishers to reveal that the logic of the traditional account of Gerard as a plagiarist makes little sense in the context of early modern herbal publication.

Shakespeare’s plays suggest not so much a preoccupation with war as his recognition of its inescapability. He seems never to have experienced warfare firsthand, but no doubt had spoken to people who had. But most of what Shakespeare knew came from books. Chief among these were the chronicles he depended upon for his histories, primarily the group project we refer to as “Holinshed.” What he found was that warfare is more or less indistinguishable over time, a fact revealed in the tedious repetition of battle accounts, further blurred by the echoing of aristocratic family names over generations – and, in the often-overlooked source of the 1577 Holinshed, in which the recycling of a limited number of woodcuts to illustrate events separated by hundreds of years reveals the dispiriting reality. Ironically, it is in Henry V, Shakespeare’s seemingly most triumphal presentation of English military heroism, in which “the question of these wars” finds an answer.