Generalizing the notion of placing rooks on a Ferrers board leads to a new class of combinatorial models and a new class of rook polynomials. Connections are established with absolute Stirling numbers and permutations, Bessel polynomials, matchings, multiset permutations, hypergeometric functions, Abel polynomials and forests, and polynomial sequences of binomial type. Factorization and reciprocity theorems are proved and a q-analogue is given.