ABSTRACT
The location of the question mark in my titular phrase is intended to operate something like an uncertain, perhaps slightly smeared, colon: the symbolic marker in a ratio, such that the whole phrase might in turn act in shorthand as an interrogatory summary of the ways of reading green in early modern England. The studies in the preceding chapters suggest that one among the few available ways to make existence more bearable in that culture (for humans, at least) was through an imaginative and just as often imaginary uptake, intake, and manipulation of green: by seeing it and breathing it, whether in natural or artificial forms, as well as moving it, writing it, and healing it, and with it, in the variety of ways and manifestations explored here. In the course of seeing green and breathing it in, early modern people sought—and, at least in placebo form, frequently seemed to find—ways of pleasing themselves and easing their circumstances, whether through the amelioration of their eyesight or the prevention of airborne disease. In their appropriations of Orphic ideas about the possibility of animating their green surroundings, as well as their impositions upon and transformations of the very flesh of trees as graphic media, early moderns once again eased and pleased themselves—notably, never at their own expense. Green eased being, although human beings have not generally in their turn been easy on green.
