Title Digging the past : how and why to imagine seventeenth-century agriculture / Frances E. Dolan

Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] ©2020

Click on the following:
ProQuest Ebook Central

Copies

Description 1 online resource (238 pages) : illustrations Series Haney Foundation series Haney Foundation series. Contents Feeding the hungry Earth: figuration, composition, and compost -- Knowing your food: turnips, Titus, and the local -- Saving wine: terroir and the quest for natural wine -- Weaving hedges Summary A detailed study of seventeenth century farming practices and their relevance for today. We are today grappling with the consequences of disastrous changes in our farming and food systems. While the problems we face have reached a crisis point, their roots are deep. Even in the seventeenth century, Frances E. Dolan contends, some writers and thinkers voiced their reservations, both moral and environmental, about a philosophy of improvement that rationalized massive changes in land use, farming methods, and food production. Despite these reservations, the seventeenth century was a watershed in the formation of practices that would lead toward the industrialization of agriculture. But it was also a period of robust and inventive experimentation in what we now think of as alternative agriculture. This book approaches the seventeenth century, in its failed proposals and successful ventures, as a resource for imagining the future of agriculture in fruitful ways. It invites both specialists and non-specialists to see and appreciate the period from the ground up. Building on and connecting histories of food and work, literary criticism of the pastoral and georgic, histories of elite and vernacular science, and histories of reading and writing practices, among other areas of inquiry, Digging the Past offers fine-grained case studies of projects heralded as innovations both in the seventeenth century and in our own time: composting and soil amendment, local food, natural wine, and hedgerows. Dolan analyzes the stories seventeenth-century writers told one another in letters, diaries, and notebooks, in huge botanical catalogs and flimsy pamphlets, in plays, poems, and how-to guides, in adages and epics. She digs deeply to assess precisely how and with what effect key terms, figurations, and stories galvanized early modern imaginations and reappear, often unrecognized, on the websites and in the tour scripts of farms and vineyards today Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on print version record Subject Pastoral literature, English -- History and criticism Agriculture in literature. English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism Agriculture -- England -- History -- 17th century Agricultural innovations -- History -- 17th century LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Agricultural innovations Agriculture Agriculture in literature English literature -- Early modern Pastoral literature, English England Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780812297218 0812297210

  Permalink