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.
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