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.
