Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture

By Frances E. Dolan

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297218

Book preview

Digging the Past

Digging the Past

How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture

Frances E. Dolan

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

HANEY FOUNDATION SERIES

A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dolan, Frances E. (Frances Elizabeth), 1960– author.

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

Other titles: Haney Foundation series.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: Haney Foundation series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019046235 | ISBN 9780812252330 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: 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.

Classification: LCC PR428.P36 D65 2020 | DDC 820.9/321734—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046235

Frontispiece: Title page of John Worlidge, Systema Agriculturae (1668). Reproduced by permission of the University of California, Davis, Special Collections Library.

Contents

Note on the Text

Introduction

Chapter 1. Feeding the Hungry Earth: Figuration, Composition, and Compost

Chapter 2. Knowing Your Food: Turnips, Titus, and the Local

Chapter 3. Saving Wine: Terroir and the Quest for Natural Wine

Chapter 4. Weaving Hedges

Epilogue. Visiting Jamestown

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Note on the Text

In this book, I have chosen to modernize spelling and punctuation in all quotations and titles. This is true of quotations from both older and more recent works. For example, I spell plow consistently across quotations, even when quoting from British scholars who originally wrote plough. In verse passages, I use my judgment, leaving tumbleth rather than changing it to tumbles if rhyme and rhythm require. Although I modernize titles in the body of the text, in the notes titles appear as spelled in the Early English Books Online and the English Short Title Catalogue, so as to facilitate searching. As a consequence, the title of a work may look a little different in the text from the way it looks in a note. Searching for a model of modernizing in a work that also attends to history, I returned to Richard Helgerson’s practice in Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). I have also attempted to limit notes to one per paragraph although I have left a note at the end or near the end of any block quotations.

References to the OED are to the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. All parenthetical citations of Shakespeare plays are from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), unless otherwise indicated. In Chapter 2, for example, I rely on the newest Arden edition of Titus Andronicus in my extended discussion of that play. I use The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), and all scriptural citations refer to The Bible: Authorized King James Version, with an introduction and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Pricket (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). In modernized quotations, I have retained the spelling divers to signal the distinctly early modern meaning of several different or many.

Introduction

Critics of the global farming and food systems contend that we need to change how we produce and distribute food. If we don’t, we will not be able to keep up with a warming planet and a growing population. If we do, we might be able to address pressing environmental issues, such as erosion, pollution, and climate change, as well as urgent social justice issues, including global food safety and security. Proposals to radically change farming in the industrial world are variously called regenerative or conservation agriculture or agroecology. Reformers’ motto might be Same Farms No Future, on the model of No Farms No Food, the slogan of the American Farmland Trust, which works to preserve farmland from development. Farming has to change, they argue, and change dramatically, if we are to have a future at all. But what is the role of the past in these fights for farming’s future?

That question might seem irrelevant. The practical problems are so urgent that it might seem a waste of precious time to look backward; ignorance and disregard for history are so pervasive that it can seem hopeless to convince anyone to care about what has already happened. In her magisterial history Alternative Agriculture from the Black Death to the Present Day, first published in 1997, Joan Thirsk laments that, unfortunately, the decision-makers hoping to solve present-day problems generally have little or no historical parallels with which to set the present picture in perspective. Decades later, the problems are more pressing and those historical parallels more remote. And yet, many farmers, cooks, artisanal producers, and activists themselves evoke the past as a source of wisdom and inspiration. Often, they tell a story of decline in which our ancestors knew everything that mattered and now we must rediscover and reclaim what Darina Allen calls forgotten skills and Alexander Langlands calls lost knowledge. As Nina Planck puts it in Real Food: What to Eat and Why, real foods are old—they are foods humans have been eating for thousands of years—and they are traditional because they have been produced and prepared the old fashioned way, not out of mere nostalgia but because they are more flavorful and more nutritious than industrial or fake foods. If your grandmother ate it, then it must be real. Perhaps the most extreme, and currently the most popular, version of this logic is the paleo diet, with its attempts to recapture ancestral health. The great thing about this way of eating is that it tends to involve a lot of fat. But it is worth questioning so simple a reversal, by which regress becomes progress. As Raymond Williams argues, such accounts of the past often sentimentalize or even invent it. Williams finds in depictions of the golden age in Renaissance literature a myth functioning as a memory. Writers conjure up a happier past, Williams contends, in order to justify and authorize their vision of a better future. The happier past was almost desperately insisted upon, but as an impulse to change rather than to ratify the actual inheritance.¹

When a fiction about the past functions as a memory, it can be hard to pin down chronology. When and where can we locate the past to which we are supposed to turn for inspiration? As I explore in greater depth in Chapter 3, grandmothers, medieval peasant farmers, and cavemen all seem to run together into one undifferentiated old-timer. Langlands, for instance, laments that we have forgotten how to think like the generations before the Industrial Revolution, as if the preindustrial is one homogeneous wonderland of forgotten skills, lost arts, and real food.² At first, such reverence for the past, however vaguely imagined, seems to call simply for an about-face. But it is always in the service of the future. Therefore, it requires that we hold different time frames in tension and face in multiple directions, moving forward in part by turning back.

The artisan baker Lionel Poilane refers to this Janus-faced relation to time as retro innovation, combining the best of the old and the new. In this spirit, the website for Ridge Vineyards claims that: in a synthesis of past and present, we have taken the pre-industrial techniques and applied them in conjunction with the best, least intrusive modern equipment. A brochure promoting the Grgich Hills Estate winery promises that it uses Old World methods to create new, world-class wines thus entering into the circle of life, whereby what’s once been ‘old’ becomes new again. There are many practices, particularly in agriculture, that have been cast aside in the relentless, breathtaking search for modernity (read ‘efficiency’ and ‘speed’); many of these practices are now being reincorporated into our farming communities like long-lost friends … because they make more sense in the long term. What might first appear to be ‘new’ frameworks for viticulture are instead, this brochure states, the recreation of more human-sized technologies that our grandparents could easily have vouched for. The Demeter Association, which certifies farms as biodynamic, describes biodynamic agriculture as sustainable farming that maximizes conservation by fusing ancient wisdom with modern methods. In his proposals to regenerate the earth’s soil, David Montgomery proposes a new philosophy of farming that merges ancient wisdom and modern science, as we will see in Chapter 1.³ Such approaches refuse sharp oppositions between old and new, past and future, asserting that we have much to learn from both. Yet they, too, can be fuzzy about what past and whose lost wisdom we are talking about. They also obscure how we got here from there—wherever there is. In mergers of the ancient and modern, for example, the long period in between disappears from view.

In this book, I focus on one very particular patch of that in-between, the long seventeenth century in England and colonial Virginia, capaciously understood as stretching from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. The seventeenth century claims our attention as, to use its own terms, a hodgepodge or mingle-mangle. Belief systems now popularly identified as premodern and modern overlapped and competed. Magical beliefs and scientific experimentation coexisted, often in the mind of a single person. Arcane research informed hands-on experience; practical problems motivated recourse to dusty tomes.⁴ Reading mingled promiscuously with doing. Agricultural innovation was a research project, a trial, a venture, an experiment, and a hands-on practice; it competed for space at multiuse sites such as the notebook, the library, the garden plot or field, and the compost pile. No coherent agricultural ideology emerged; instead, debates and even riots broke out over agriculture.

Most agreed that, whatever else might change, farming was fundamental. Writing in 1613, Gervase Markham asserted that husbandry is the great nerve and sinew which holds together all the joints of a monarchy but also that the husbandman creates the fruitfulness whereby all commonwealths are maintained and upheld. Gabriel Plattes repeats the reference to the joints of a monarchy in 1639; Walter Blith, too, casts husbandry as the sinew or marrow holding together the joints of monarchy—in the Epistle to the Ingenious Reader in his 1649 English Improver, dedicated to members of the houses of Parliament and detailing six pieces of improvement that would maximize yields by floating, draining, plowing, enclosing, and fertilizing land. That same year, the king lost his head. Although the head was gone, the sinews and marrow carried on. As a consequence, when Blith revised and expanded his work as The English Improver Improved in 1652, he dedicated it to Oliver Cromwell, and silently made a telling change to the metaphor: Good husbandry is as the sinews and marrow that hold together the joints of common good.⁵ Commonwealths may replace monarchies, the body politic might change its shape, but husbandry remains the life force and the principle of connection.

Whereas Plattes and Blith reached for a corporeal metaphor to explain how important husbandry was to any political system or body, agriculture in turn provided metaphors to describe the fundamentals of human health, sexual reproduction, and social relations. Plowing, as we will see in Chapter 1, was usually understood as a man’s activity that linked mastering the earth with sexual penetration and violence. Planting was the standard word for establishing colonies or plantations, transplanting people so that they in turn could plant crops, as we will consider in the epilogue. Tilling and cultivation provided models for understanding and describing many forms of cultivation. As but one example, Lucy Hutchinson, in a poem addressed to Owthorpe, her family’s manor house in Nottinghamshire, makes explicit the relationship between a husband and husbandry, comparing how her husband restored and dressed the house and grounds after the ravages of the English civil wars to how he improved and uplifted her.

He that impaled you from the common ground,

Who all thy walls with shining fruit trees crowned,

Me also above vulgar girls did raise

And planted in me all that yielded praise.

Since even noblest plant / Degenerates if it usual culture want, she and the garden have degenerated into being wild and rude since her husband’s death, choked with spreading weeds that were once quelled simply by his watchful eyes. Even manuring, a commonly used verb for cultivating a garden, both by fertilizing and by more generally tending it, was used to describe other forms of fruitful labor. Abraham Cowley, for example, praises Katharine Philips for not allowing her spirit to lie unmanured and barren (Thou industriously hast sowed and tilled / The fair and fruitful field), thus producing the strange increase of her immortal progeny, poems. Farming provided, then, a vocabulary for sexual and social reproduction, for establishing colonies, imposing order and dominion, submitting to and profiting from another’s cultivation, or tending oneself and writing. This is why I attend throughout to gender, sexuality, and race, although they are not my main focus. They inflect how farming could be imagined; farming provided a vocabulary for conceiving and describing human bodies and relationships. Understood to enjoy scriptural sanction as the replenishing, subduing, and dominating of creation God had imposed on humans in Genesis 1:28, husbandry provided a rich, adaptable, and widely used language for human efforts to shape the world.⁶

The favorite seventeenth-century word for what such shaping achieved was improvement. For example, we have just seen that Walter Blith grew The English Improver, or a New Survey of Husbandry into The English Improver Improved or the Survey of Husbandry Surveyed at almost twice the length. While Blith, who bills himself as a lover of ingenuity, uses versions of the word improve almost obsessively, and proposes to open for his reader the mystery of improvement, the word is not unique to him. It is a key word in acts of Parliament, pitches for products, and treatises that rival Blith’s. In The Invention of Improvement, the historian Paul Slack emphasizes that the English word improvement has no equivalent in other languages and so is very difficult to translate. He argues that the emphasis on improvement in seventeenth-century England is unique. He also assigns agency to this word, claiming that it sustained a story about England’s progress and helped to bring it into being; it crystallized a particularly powerful and coherent narrative about the country’s betterment and how it could be prolonged.⁷ To imagine and name improvement created the conditions under which it could happen. Slack is not critical of that process, although others are. Accepting the provocation historians such as Slack offer when they grant historical agency to words, I dig more deeply to assess precisely how and with what effects key terms, figurations, and stories galvanized early modern imaginations and reappear today, often unrecognized, on the websites and in the tour scripts of farms and vineyards.

Both scarcity and opportunity drove the quest for improvement in seventeenth-century England. On the one hand, food shortages, climate change, controversial policies such as enclosing common lands, and dwindling supplies of timber had produced a sense that the current farming system was unsustainable and inadequate for maintaining the growing population—and the expanding empire.⁸ On the other, colonial expansion and experimental science exposed the English to crops, methods, and testing grounds that were new to them. Eager amateurs across the country, and in its first colonies, experimented with amending soil, redirecting water away from wetlands and into irrigation channels, making wine and cider, tending bees and silkworms, importing seeds and plant starts, naturalizing those plants by outwitting the climate (with warmed walls and glass houses), and proposing ingenious engines to assist in all these enterprises.

Men and women, rich and poor, wrote about their experiments, leaving behind a wealth of print and manuscript accounts, as writers worked to disseminate what Milton called this flowery crop of knowledge.⁹ This flowery crop grew out of reading and writing, generated texts, engaged readers, and lives on in the stories we tell about an alternative agriculture. Less decisive than a revolution, the eruption on which I focus repurposed found ideas, stories, and figurations; it continues to ripple through our own thought and speech.

The visionary zeal that guided the quest for improvement suggested that England could itself become a new world. Adam Moore warns his readers against that epidemical error of seeking the key still afar off, when it hangs at our girdle, and trampling the present sure means in travel and search after remote uncertainties. Samuel Hartlib writes: Our native country, hath in its bowels an (even almost) infinite, and inexhaustible treasure; much of which hath long lain hid, and is but new begun to be discovered. It may seem a large boast or mere hyperbole to say, we enjoy not, know not, use not, the one tenth part of that plenty or wealth & happiness that our Earth can, and (ingenuity and industry well encouraged) will (by God’s blessing) yield. By amending their soil at home, Moore writes, the English have discovered a new plantation in our own continent. In a fictional dialogue attributed to Gabriel Plattes, one speaker claims that if a kingdom may be improved to maintain twice as many people as it did before, it is as good as the conquest of another kingdom, as great, if not better; Adolphus Speed concurs that, as a result, we need not go to Jamaica for new plantations. This fantasy of making the old world new included violent imaginings of how to wring more out of the earth at home as well as rapacious appropriation of plants and methods from elsewhere. As we will see in Chapter 2, many insisted that any plant could become endenizened in England, improved by industry and home-helps and contrivances. The dream of turning England into its own new plantation included imported plants showing that this fantasy did not prevent exploration and exploitation of other lands. Rather, agricultural improvement proceeded at home even as lovers of ingenuity sought out new frontiers, expropriated resources, and established the plantation monocultures that would soon yield profits at devastating human and environmental costs.¹⁰

While historians disagree about the causes and effects of the changes in English agriculture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they agree that agriculture did change, and change dramatically. Mark Overton, for example, argues for two related transformations: one was a shift from small farms to larger ones, which was well underway by the mid-seventeenth century; the other focused on increasing output to meet and then keep pace with the growing population and demand, which he argues happened largely after 1700. According to Overton, in the early sixteenth century, around 80 per cent of farmers were only growing enough food for the needs of their family household. By 1850, the majority of farmers produced much more than they needed for themselves, and were businessmen farming for the market. Markets and marketing had been revolutionized; private property rights were universal, and farming was dominated by the tripartite class structure of landlord, tenant farmer and laborer. Whenever we date these dramatic changes in farming, we cannot separate them from other massive changes under way in this period. Focusing on fossil capital and the global climate change to which it has led, Andreas Malm, for instance, asserts: The origins of our predicament must be located on British soil. Britain is the one incontestable birthplace of the fossil economy, he claims. Jason Moore agrees, specifying that the birth pangs began long before the steam engines and coal pits on which Malm focuses: The origins of a new pattern of environment-making began in the Atlantic world during the long sixteenth century.¹¹ Farming was a crucial contributor to these massive processes of remaking the environment. Aggregating small farms into larger ones and focusing on higher yields laid the groundwork for our world of factory farms, monocultures, and genetically modified crops and for our reliance on irrigation, heavy machinery, migrant labor, fossil fuels, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. In these accounts, the seventeenth century is not, then, the lost preindustrial garden but the beginning of the fall.

Even in the seventeenth century, some writers had reservations about the philosophy of improvement that rationalized massive changes in land use and tenures. The bold suggestion that fallen humans might rebuild their own paradise and improve upon nature provoked anxious theological debates. Weren’t there limits to human dominion? Radical groups like the Diggers and Levelers drew attention to those who were excluded or exploited by improvement.¹² Despite these reservations, in prospect and in retrospect, the seventeenth century was a watershed moment in the history of an alternative agriculture, as Joan Thirsk documents, even as it also led toward the industrialization of agriculture.¹³ Is it possible to approach the seventeenth century, in its failed proposals and successful ventures, as a resource for imagining future agriculture in fruitful ways? To find out, I offer here a fine-grained case study that proposes to enrich our understanding of the value of the past. I have organized my inquiry around projects heralded as innovations in the seventeenth century and today: composting and soil amendment, local food, natural wine, and hedgerows.

A Bon Appetit article on California wine includes a box headed: We Dig the Old-School Vibes: To look forward, winemakers are looking back: traditional processes, century-old vines, forgotten grapes. In this book, I dig the past both in terms of excavating knowledge we have lost track of or misremembered and in terms of digging the old school vibe as Bon Appetit puts it, or appreciating the past without homogenizing and idealizing its preindustrial generations and lost wisdom. Throughout this book, I dig into exactly what relation this particular past might have to our own struggles to reinvent and sustain agriculture. As Rita Felski argues, Far from being a record of superseded errors and obsolete traditions to be heedlessly abandoned as we forge into the future, the past serves as a graphic reminder of the tortuous path of our own becoming, of the many ways in which the ‘before’ continues to bear down on and mold the ‘after.’ In addition to correcting and complicating our understanding of the period, each chapter also digs up the complex entanglements between now and then. Rooted in the seventeenth century, then, the project attends throughout to how contemporary discussions of alternative agriculture remember seventeenth-century England. Like many others engaged in the difficult task of thinking about the relations between the past and present, I practice what Wai Chee Dimock calls a diachronic historicism that aims to denaturalize present arrangements by uncovering their roots in the past.¹⁴ I use present participles in all my chapter titles, and in the title of the book itself, to capture the fact that the processes I examine are open-ended and ongoing.

In this book, I build on and connect different bodies of scholarship about the seventeenth century: natural history and histories of food, work, and agriculture; literary criticism of pastoral, georgic, polemic, didactic treatises, travel narratives, recipe books, and drama, all forms associated with agriculture on which I draw here; histories of science, especially those uncovering the broad participation in experimental science and the fuzzy distinctions between lab and kitchen, elite and vernacular science; and histories of the book, language, and reading and writing practices.

Many changes occurred in the course of the period, including the embrace as new of the very practices now advocated as a return to premodern wisdom, such as amending soil and rotating crops. Such practices were not givens or conventional wisdom. Instead, writers had to discover and defend them; practitioners had to learn about them, more often than not, from books. These books did not emerge from nowhere at the start of the seventeenth century. John Fitzherbert first published The Book of Husbandry in the 1530s. Thomas Tusser first published A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry in 1570; it expanded to five hundred handy tips and went through many editions over the decades. Seventeenth-century writers built on their predecessors’ work and on books and ideas from the Continent. Walter Blith complains that in the translation of the French treatise Maison Rustique (as The Country Farm), I can find but little edification or addition to our own English experiences; what other men can find out of them I know not, but leave to thee to discover. Yet Richard Surflet’s English translation of The Country Farm was reprinted several times and widely cited and copied. Even the skeptical Blith leaves it to his readers to learn what they can from it.¹⁵ He also looks beyond our own English experiences, paying particular attention to the Netherlands, as did many of his contemporaries.

Writers like Blith, and their readers, also looked farther afield and further back. Pliny, Columella, and Virgil were as inspiring for many of the investigators I consider here as were their own experiments or their reading of contemporaries’ discoveries. This rediscovery of lost learning gives the Renaissance its name. Indeed, Joan Thirsk casts the printing press and newly printed old books as agents of transformation, joining with population growth, climate, war, and economic change to transform agriculture. In particular, Thirsk argues that reading the works of ancient writers led the landowning gentry in the sixteenth century to find fresh enthusiasm for farming: They had lost interest in their home farms in the fifteenth century, and had frequently leased them to others. But the coming of the printing press placed the classical authors in their hands, and with fresh eyes they read Xenophon, Cato, Varro, and Columella. Many gentry were thus persuaded anew of the intellectual satisfaction of farming. Sometimes readers found wholly new ideas in these books and sometimes, as Thirsk suggests, they found new ways of thinking about and valuing what they already knew. As David Rollison puts it: The classics confirmed what people already thought, and gave it prestige.¹⁶

So when we look back to the seventeenth century, we find that those invested in agricultural change were looking backward so as to move forward. Then as now, the apparently new turns out to recover, repurpose, or reinvent the past. One text assembled and published by Samuel Hartlib, a tireless collector and disseminator of information, advises readers that they should try growing new crops because there is a vicissitude in all things, and as many things are lost, which were known to our forefathers … so many things are found out by us, altogether unknown to them, and some things will be left for our posterities …. For the Ancients used divers plants which we know not … so on the contrary, infinite are the plants which we have, and they knew not; as well appears by their small and our large Herbals: and daily new plants are discovered, useful for husbandry. While Hartlib begins by saying that knowledge is always in flux, and that we lose even as we gain, he finally comes out on the side of progress, pointing to the obvious expansion of knowledge manifested in the huge seventeenth-century compendia of botanical knowledge that dwarf surviving treatises from antiquity. True, the ancients knew things we have forgotten, but we still know more overall. The best route to innovation, then, is combining old knowledge with new. That new knowledge might come from examining plants in ditches and hedges at home and abroad, from planting something you are not yet sure will thrive, or from yet other books.¹⁷

My largest body of evidence is the stories seventeenth-century writers told one another—in their letters, diaries, and notebooks; in those huge botanicals and flimsy pamphlets; in plays, poems, and how-to guides; and in adages and epics. These stories survive as evidence not of what was actually done, which can be hard to determine, but of what writers thought might be and should be and why. They also inform descriptions of alternative agriculture now, which I find in practical advice and puff pieces, on winery and farm websites, in the fine print on product labels, in promotional materials from trade organizations and fact sheets produced by nonprofit organizations, and in manifestos, memoirs, and mottoes.

Drawing all these narratives together, I analyze how practical programs and resonant imagery intertwine, and explore the persistence of certain plots and figurations across time and place. For example, building on Joan Thirsk’s claim that the seventeenth-century interest in soil amendment and composting emerged from one pregnant sentence in Columella’s first-century treatise De re rustica, I argue that the impact of Columella’s text depends even more specifically on one pregnant figuration, his depiction of depleted soil as hungry rather than old, and thus capable of being replenished.¹⁸ As another example, proponents of biodynamic viticulture envision a farm as a single organism and closed circle, with no external inputs and limited outputs (wine). I analyze this recursive trajectory as a plot, and link it to ancient myths and fairy tales about cannibalism, to Shakespeare’s plays and Virginia Company propaganda.

The tenacious ways of imagining and describing agriculture that persist from the seventeenth century both fertilize and limit our ability to envision a future for alternative agriculture. Appearing as timeless common sense, the time-traveling aphorisms, figurations, and plots I consider obscure the very histories from which they emerge. I follow the paths of resonant figurations across genres as well as time and space, engaging in what Carla Freccero calls figural historiography, which tracks the promiscuous and errant movement of figures across times and places.¹⁹ I attend particularly to the dialogues that open up around these figurations and the continuities and changes they render visible. In the process, I advance my ongoing critique of a sharp distinction between literary texts and historical contexts and build on the work of other scholars who have trained nuanced critical attention on husbandry manuals.²⁰

Some foundational texts in what is sometimes called environmental humanities, or more narrowly, ecocriticism, focus on the persistence of outdated narratives and metaphors, as well as their power to shape how we evaluate the past, ameliorate the present, and predict the future. Daniel Botkin, for example, exposes the idea of a divinely ordered universe that is perfectly structured for life as an ironic connection between ancient beliefs and twentieth-century ecological assertions. Humans often work hard to create the symmetry and order they then value as nature, Botkin argues. In The Moon in a Nautilus Shell, Botkin revisits his influential but, he feels, misunderstood book, Discordant Harmonies (1981), in order to reiterate his argument that nature is neither stable nor orderly. Botkin blames ruinously inaccurate explanations of how nature works and should be managed on the inadvertent use of imagery, metaphor, and analogy. Despite widely used imagery, Nature, he maintains, is not a living creature with a life course, or a machine. It is, instead, a system—dynamic, imperfect, powerful, and unpredictable. To move forward in addressing urgent environmental issues, he contends, we need not only new knowledge but also new metaphors.²¹ I share Botkin’s sense that the past is installed in tenacious old metaphors and that figures of speech have material effects. My goal, then, is to create new knowledge about persistent metaphors, their inherent contradictions, and the unpredictable cultural work they continue to do.

In my first chapter, I offer a history of what is now a daily practice for many: