Green: The History of a Color

Michel Pastoureau's Green, The History of a Color, published by Princeton University Press in 2014, is a scholarly cultural history of the color green in Western tradition, tracing its long ambivalence, associated at different times with both fertility and poison, hazard and toxic pigments among the causes of the latter association. As with Pastoureau's companion volume on blue, its authority rests on standard university press peer review and the author's standing as a leading historian of color and symbol. It covers Western cultural meaning specifically, not the color's significance in non-Western traditions, which need their own sourcing.