Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture 9780812297218

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Digging the Past

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

Frances E. Dolan

U n i v e r s i t y of Pe n ns y lva n i a Pr e s s P h i l a de l p h i a

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

vii 1

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

14

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

45

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

81

Chapter 4. Weaving Hedges

122

Epilogue. Visiting Jamestown

162

Notes

179

Index

223

Acknowledgments

235

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

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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

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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,

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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

Introduction

5

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.

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Introduction

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

Introduction

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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.

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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.

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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 . . .

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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

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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: composting. Inspired by the description of the earth as hungry, composting itself provides a generative figuration for the relationship of past and present. As promoted in practical treatises both in the early modern period and today, the compost pile assembles and ripens the past’s leftovers in the service of some future enrichment. A noun and a verb, a thing and a process, compost offers a model for my method in this book: trawling far and wide for materials, mixing things up, and digging down past the most recent layer to find and use the rich muck beneath. My fragments of evidence gain

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significance through their participation in my assembly. The mixture of materials is simultaneously archive, method, and argument. In the second chapter, I focus on local food, beginning with recent proposals that consumers must learn to eat what soils crave, thus creating a market for the nitrogen-fixing crops farmers need to grow for their soil’s health, and tracking the image of the earth as a mouth from Columella and Pliny, through fairy tales and agricultural treatises, to cannibalism during the “starving times” in Jamestown, to a sustained discussion of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and its infamous cannibal mother, Tamora. The chapter turns pieties about the local and knowing our food into questions. What does it mean to know our food? I turn to fairy tales in several chapters, particularly those on local food and on hedges, because they continue to haunt our imaginations even though the tales’ precise origins or dates are hard to pin down. They persist through time but also interfere with our attempts to place them in a chronology. J. R. R. Tolkien compares collections of fairy tales to “attics and lumber-rooms” because “their contents are disordered, and often battered, a jumble of different dates, purposes, and tastes; but among them may occasionally be found a thing of permanent virtue: an old work of art, not too much damaged, that only stupidity would ever have stuffed away.” Marina Warner argues that fairy tales resemble “an archaeological site that has been plundered by tomb robbers, who have turned the strata upside down and inside out and thrown it all back again in any old order.”22 Like the compost heap or the stewpot—Tolkien also refers to the “cauldron of story”––fairytales gather together found materials, inspire ingenious combinations, and feed the future. In Chapter 3, I consider the idealization of wine as a human-adjacent beverage, tracing the relationships between humans and wine from the Old Testament description of wine as “the blood of the grape” to the early modern privileging of wine as a beverage because of its resemblance to bodily fluids (especially blood), to the seventeenth-century dream of growing grapes and making English wine in England and Virginia, to advocates of natural or authentic wine and biodynamic viticulture today. The persistent association of wine with blood mystifies the high level of human intervention between grape and glass—and obscures the ways that climate change impinges on the winegrower’s ability to control the vineyard and the wine. While attempts to grow grapes and make wine in England and Virginia largely failed in the seventeenth century, the dream persists and can be conjured up to burnish new ventures with the patina of legacy.

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In the final chapter, I focus on the changing meanings and investments in hedges, as problems and solutions, material features of the landscape, and persistent tropes. Today, a hedgerow most often means a band of native plantings used to break up monocultures, promote biodiversity, protect against soil erosion, and attract native pollinators. Various initiatives encourage planting hedgerows as a perceived return to older practices as well as an investment in the future of agriculture. In the seventeenth century, hedges were the target of violent resistance to change because they sequestered as private property what had once been shared. As a result, one of the most frequent forms of protest was tearing down those hedges. At first glance, then, what might appear to be a shared concern turns out to mask very different investments in the hedge or hedgerow. Yet, the words are often used interchangeably. What’s more, in the seventeenth century, we find writers already trying to imagine the hedge as a hedgerow, that is, as an opportunity to solve social as well as agricultural problems by making the hedge itself a kind of common, planted with fruitbearing trees from which anyone might harvest. Digging up the contradictory meanings of the hedge, and contestations over its placement and function, I consider seventeenth-century agricultural manuals that promoted enclosure or that trumpeted their ability to replant paradise, proverbs, the trope of the thorny hedge in fairy tales, Shakespeare’s histories, Richard Brome’s comedy A Jovial Crew, the ornaments on the margins of printed pages, and defenses of hedgerows today. Connecting imaginary to material, fence to common, and past to present (even as it also separates them), the hedge serves as the perfect figure with which to conclude the book––precisely because it is an ongoing collaborative process masquerading as a firm boundary. In the epilogue, I visit Jamestown, Virginia, to explore how archaeologists at Historic Jamestowne work to dig up the past, unearthing new evidence that challenges assumptions about the colony founded there in 1607, as well as how the reenactments at Jamestown Settlement, the living history museum, try to help visitors appreciate the past by encouraging them to inhabit it imaginatively. What is the role of agriculture in the stories both sites tell, what can we learn about it on and in the ground, and what’s missing?

Chapter 1

Feeding the Hungry Earth Figuration, Composition, and Compost

Often disparaged as worthless and unclean, soil is the “the foundation of our food web.” Soil filters and holds water, stores carbon, and remediates wastes and pollutants. Soil health appears to be directly related to the nutrient content of foods; and microbial diversity in the soil fosters microbial diversity in the human microbiome. While that insight is relatively recent, the connection between humans and humus is older than Adam, whose name in Hebrew is a wordplay on “ground” (adam/adamah). Some translations of Genesis aim to evoke the first human’s “connectedness to the earth” and reproduce the wordplay by calling him earthling, groundling––or human. The humus-human connection can counter human exceptionalism and ground hubris. As Shakespeare’s Beatrice remarks, we are all Adam’s brethren and so “pieces of valiant dust” and “clods of wayward marl” (or clay). How can one clod dare to overmaster another? As Serpil Oppermann puts it: “Even imagining ourselves as humus is a humbling experience.”1 Or at least it could be. The humus/human connection can be mobilized to enjoin humans to cherish humus as an extension and constituent of our own flesh and to feed the soil that feeds us. Soil needs our cultivation because, while it is a powerful agent, acting on and interacting with other life forms, soil is also vulnerable. Agricultural practices can build up biodiversity and microbial activity, or kill them off; they can retard erosion or accelerate it. As one farmer writes, “Caring for the soil is the farmer’s number one task; if the soil is healthy, the crops will look after themselves.” Increasingly, proposals to feed a growing population, improve human health, and address drought and climate change focus on improving

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soil health and redressing erosion. For example, David Montgomery, a geologist whose work on the history of soil erosion and the future of farming informs my discussion here, promotes “conservation agriculture” defined not as organic, although it might be, but as soil enhancing. This is also sometimes called “agroecology,” “conservation” or “regenerative” agriculture, or the “brown revolution.” It entails (1) keeping disturbance of the soil to a minimum (ditching the plow or embracing no-till cultivation); (2) growing cover crops and retaining crop residue on the ground surface instead of plowing it under so that it acts as a kind of mulch and soil is always covered; and (3) rotating and interplanting a diverse array of crops.2 Montgomery’s proposal for “bringing soil back to life” tackles soil not as a given but as an urgent work in progress, a spur to and beneficiary of creativity, not a thing as much as a system or a community. Proposals to revive soil depend on both compelling histories and vivid descriptions. Montgomery, for instance, warns that “because we do not fully recognize the value of what’s beneath our feet, we risk repeating ancient mistakes on a global scale.” In addition to recounting and assessing those ancient mistakes, he leads his readers to see and value what is beneath our feet in part through his powers of description. He brazenly names his subject “dirt,” to activate the associations of treating something like dirt. He describes dirt as “like a bank account from which one spends and spends, but never deposits.” Calling it the skin of the earth in order to heighten the violence of mistreating it, he warns that we are skinning our planet. Humanizing humus in this way participates in a long tradition. Sir Alfred Howard, an important early figure in soil science, called by some “the father of compost,” describes healthy soil as “land in good heart,” while depleted soil is “impoverished” or “murdered.” The seventeenth-century writers on whom I will focus here describe rich soil as “gallant,” while depleted soils “want heart” or “languish” and so need “comfort” and “fattening.”3 More complicated than simply anthropomorphizing the earth, these figurations call humans into relationship with humus, reminding us of our own resemblance to, dependence on, and responsibility for it. In this chapter, I will consider seventeenth-century writings about soil as resources for understanding one important chapter in soil’s history and as a rich compost heap of fertile stories about and images for soil. For early modern writers, generative figurations encouraged experimentation, spurring them to write and disseminate their proposals to enrich and improve the ground, starting with the practice of collecting and ripening compost. Promoting soil amendment in texts that were themselves assembled and ripened, the early modern

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writers on whom I focus participated robustly in an early modern culture of recycling, in which textual compiling took its place beside other kinds of repurposing and recombining. For them, figural and material, theoretical and practical, past and present intertwine. Their ways of imagining soil continue to fertilize and to muck up how we think and speak about our relationship to soil and, as a consequence, how we husband it.

A Soil Renaissance Trying to recount soil’s history begins with acknowledging that soil is alive, changing, and not only in time (rather than timeless) but a way of measuring time. Narrating soil’s history also recasts human history as, among other things, a process of depending on and mismanaging soil but also of attending to soil only as it suits us, in the short or long term. Although a brown revolution proposes to change how we manage soil, it still does so in the service of human interests: producing food for a growing population and redressing climate change. Refusing what he sees as a false choice between past and future, Montgomery contends that we have to understand the history of humans and soil in order to “grow a revolution” in agriculture. This is his version of that story. The earliest farmers understood soil fertility as a gift from the gods rather than a product of their own efforts. Then, in a long period stretching from antiquity into the eighteenth century, with many interruptions along the way, the dominant view was that humus or organic soil matter nourished plants directly. Experiments in soil amendment flourished. Montgomery traces the practices he advocates to the Renaissance, when soil “offered a decipherable mystery that could be understood through the application of reason.” Solving the mystery meant viewing rich soil as the rational farmer’s achievement rather than the gods’ gift. While the practices he promotes “were widely described in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treatises on soil husbandry,” they were subsequently “cast aside when cheap fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers ushered in agriculture’s third revolution of mechanization and industrialization.” Two crucial discoveries—phytosynthesis and the insoluble nature of humus, which plants do not consume directly—changed how scientists and farmers viewed the soil. Reimagining the soil as “a chemical reservoir from which plants drew sustenance,” a reservoir they could top up, licensed dependence on chemical fertilizers. If the key to enriching soil is building organic matter, then reconceptualizing soil yet again as a hungry mortal community rather than a chemical

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reservoir will be crucial to that process of agricultural transformation. As a consequence, Montgomery links description and conceptualization to the profound changes he proposes: “Oddly enough, the potential to restore life to soil comes down to how we view dead stuff and invisible things—organic matter and microbes.” As a consequence, “the foundation for the next agricultural revolution will be rooted in how we think about soil”; reimagining soil will require “dramatic shifts in perspective” and “a fundamental change in thinking.”4 Montgomery links this imaginative leap to a return, in part, to what he identifies as a Renaissance moment of transforming what had been a mystery into a program of change. In recruiting what we might call the long Renaissance in this way, Montgomery draws attention to a period whose contribution to understandings of soil health has often been misunderstood. The seventeenth century is most often associated with an exploitative domination of nature and a destructive “improvement.” For example, the chef Dan Barber traces problems in the food system today to “the mechanized farming that took root during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, led by people like Sir Francis Bacon, who believed you could bend nature to your will.” According to Barber, “most of agriculture is still mired in seventeenthcentury ideology.” For many proponents of oldfangled farming and food production, pursuing an alternative agriculture requires escaping Bacon’s influence in order to recapture the world that, they think, he helped destroy.5 Why is the reductive story that Bacon initiated the fall into factory farming so appealing? To begin with, it is partially true. Condensing compelling critiques of industrial agriculture as unsustainable, it also dovetails with scholarly critiques of Francis Bacon, not only for advocating human dominion over nature but for figuring that process as rape. This story also seems to promise that we can reclaim a premodern paradise, since lost. But Bacon’s high profile in popular memories of the seventeenth century both inflates his significance as an individual and underestimates the positive contributions of experimental science. The seventeenth century is, indeed, a crucial chapter in the history of alternative agriculture, as Joan Thirsk documents in her book of that name. But it contributes more to that history than a wrong turn. The ideas blamed on Bacon weren’t entirely his, weren’t entirely new, aren’t wholly bad, and aren’t really past. What’s more, when it comes to soil husbandry, the seventeenth century offers conceptualizations, practices, and figurations we can use. We need not choose to ally ourselves with the past or the future. As Montgomery puts it: “We don’t have to revert to pre-industrial practices. We don’t have to choose between sustainable agriculture and feeding the world.

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In many cases crop yields from so-called alternative agriculture can match the output of what we now call conventional agriculture.”6 We need not repudiate agriculture altogether, for instance, in trying to imagine a return to a moment before that fall. Nor do we have to turn back to the seventeenth century, or the sixteenth. But we have something to learn from looking at the seventeenth century rather than using Francis Bacon as shorthand for dismissing it. Composting was not a practice lodged in the collective memory or bodily habits of early modern people; it had to be justified and advocated—that is why so many people wrote about it, leaving their reflections for our contemplation. In those textual traces, we can spot a persistence from the Romans to the early moderns to us that is generative and workable, a memory and a discovery, an idea and a practice. Seventeenth-century writers and experimenters depicted soil amendment as a topic about which they needed to learn and then to teach. For example, Gervase Markham’s The Enrichment of the Weald of Kent (1649), a guide to “the true ordering, manuring, & enriching of all the grounds not only in Kent but in all of England,” which went through numerous editions, states that soil amendment using marl (or clay rich in calcium carbonate or lime) is “not now newly discovered, but was the ancient practice of our forefathers many years ago.” Nevertheless, the practice had fallen into disuse by the time that Markham wrote and so needed to be “newly born and revived, rather than restored,” in part through treatises on composting and soil amendment like his own. Such treatises proliferated in the seventeenth century.7 These practical treatises advocate for compost pits or piles, also called “muckheaps” and “dunghills,” in order to assemble and ripen the past’s leftovers in the service of some future enrichment. I take these assemblages of organic matter as models for my own process and for thinking about how the present relates to the past. The muckheap persists across time, looking, one imagines, pretty much the same in different locales and eras. Yet it is a site and engine of decay as well as persistence. Whether in a static pile or a turning barrel, the compost heap mucks up layers; in time, its striations are no longer discernible. Time will erase the origins of the constituent parts, breaking them down so that they are unrecognizable, so that the assembled fragments constitute a distinctive whole. Yet the forms and functions of compost can also be culturally specific. In the seventeenth century, the muckheap—as resource for agriculture, storehouse of wealth, and model of other kinds of recycling––rose to prominence as various writers explained both how to construct and maintain one and why one should. In my view, this construction—call it compost bin, muckheap, or dunghill––deserves a place among influential figurations for

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temporality, which have recently moved from the timeline, measuring tape, or yardstick to images such as waves, spirals, and loops to describe the way time doesn’t march on as much as it loiters and doubles back. Theorists who have influenced how early modernists think about the relationship between past and present rely heavily on metaphors to capture different models of that relationship, including the rhizome, the ghost, the time-knot, a crumpled handkerchief, a palimpsest, a shipwreck, and leftovers.8 What all these inventive proposals have in common is a commitment to describing time as nonlinear as well as a dependence on vivid images of copresence. I am especially interested in images that draw decay and rot into our conceptualizations of temporality. Julia Lupton chooses “afterlife,” meaning both “the half-life of radioactive decay, [and] the bacterial decomposition of dead matter” to describe how “one layer [of sedimented time] can contaminate, wrinkle, or undermine a contiguous one. One era can obdurately survive into the period that has supposedly surpassed it.” Donna Haraway proposes “material-semiotic composting, as theory in the mud, as muddle” and “humusities instead of humanities”; she suggests that we, “chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.”9 It is in this spirit that I wish to explore seventeenth-century soil amendment and composting here, as a first venture in linking present and past, arguing for the value of considering the past’s fecund remains and how they fertilize and contaminate our possibilities.

Generative Figurations; Or, Ditching the Plow The most dramatic change agroecologists advocate is a rupture with the past: “ditching the plow.” That phrase has become shorthand for building soil through a no-till, high-compost practice. It challenges the assumptions even of home gardeners today that soil building takes human effort; that responsible cultivators should be turning soil over and busily working soil amendments into the ground. From one perspective, the plow, especially as pulled by draft animals or, later, mechanized, was a labor saver, facilitating the cultivation of larger and larger fields. But it often saved a master’s labor by shifting it to the backs of animals and slaves. What’s more, the injunction to ditch the plow and abandon tilling offers the ultimate labor saver: benign neglect. Our attachment to the plow suggests that we rely on both labor and aggressive intervention to assert mastery over soil. We can understand that

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reliance, and the impediment it poses to ditching the plow, by considering the meanings the seventeenth century assigned to plows and tillage. As we will see, these meanings are generative, in the literal sense that they were often used to describe human sexuality and reproduction, and in the more general sense that they were powerful engines of cultural production. The plow participates in and stands for many of the cumulative domestications that, for James C. Scott, link grain agriculture and state formation—beginning with harnessing fire and then moving to the domestication of plants, livestock, slaves, and women in the patriarchal family.10 The many meanings assigned to the plow help explain why it might be so hard to let it go. The plow was so well-established a part of farming equipment for early modern people that it came to sum up the whole agricultural enterprise. The first settlers in Virginia in the early seventeenth century found it almost impossible to farm without draft animals, since that meant they had to pull their plows themselves. While the plow was the sine qua non of English farming, it was also constantly being retooled; writers on agriculture often promote new and improved plows. Gervase Markham and Walter Blith, for instance, include drawings of different kinds of plows as well as instructions on how best to use them (Figure 1). The prayer “God speed the plow” pithily condensed the fervent wish for God’s assistance in the risky business of agriculture. It appears in a Middle English lyric, in ballads from 1500 through the seventeenth century, and as a conventional wish repeated in many texts. The prayer was so pervasive that Andrew McRae chose it as the title of his study of sixteenthand seventeenth-century English representations of husbandry. McRae argues that “the plow was upheld, throughout the early modern period, as a central symbol of agricultural activity and rural life,” serving as both “an emblem of traditional structures of rural society, in a stream of complaint decrying the effects of depopulating enclosure” and as a symbol of “the expansive energies of a farmer improving his land” in part by means of those very enclosures. The plow was, as McRae points out, simultaneously tool and trope. To plow was to master the earth––and its inhabitants. Francis Bacon advises rulers in his essay “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates” “to keep the plow in the hands of the owners, and not mere hirelings.”11 If the plow distinguished owners from tenants, it also distinguished male workers from female, since women agricultural workers used hoes instead. It also, of course, depended on human dominion over the animals who pulled it. Because of these associations, the plow, when used as a trope, carried the potential for violence with it. The analogy between plowing and intercourse

Figure 1. Plows from Walter Blith’s The English Improver Improved. Reproduced by permission of the University of California, Davis, Special Collections Library.

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is familiar, extending from Agrippa’s description of Caesar and Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (“He plowed her, and she cropped”), to Dryden’s famous put-down of the infertile Mary of Modena as “a soil ungrateful to the tiller’s care,” to the continued use of “plow” as a verb for male penetration. This analogy depends not just on associations between penis and plow, vagina and furrow but also on the fact that plowing was predominantly men’s work. Even Jane Sharp’s guide for midwives claims that “Man in the act of procreation is the agent and tiller and sower of the ground, Woman is the patient or ground to be tilled.” Using agriculture to figure sex and reproduction worked because, as Mary Fissell writes, “while the exact process by which a seed became a plant was mysterious, plowing and sowing seed [were] familiar to almost every man and woman in early modern England, a profoundly rural society in this period.”12 This familiarity both naturalized plowing and imported its association with dominion and force into understandings of sexual intercourse. It was precisely because the plow was associated with masculinity, landowning, and mastery that it could figure both reproduction and rape. We find acknowledgments of the plow’s violence in surprising places. Many influential early modern accounts of a golden age place paradise before the plow. In George Sandys’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, in the golden age “The yet-free Earth did of her own accord / (Untorn with plows) all sorts of fruit afford.” Sandys’s Ovid calls this fruit “un-enforced food” which the Earth “unmanured, bears.” Here, as throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, manuring not only means adding manure but also any form of cultivating, tilling, or fertilizing. In the golden age, it is not necessary. By Ovid’s account, the Iron Age is the age of wounding the earth: “Nor with rich Earth’s just nourishments content, / For treasure they her secret entrails rent.”13 The plow, then, ushers in or follows from a kind of fall. Land that has not been plowed or manured remains paradisal and, paradoxically, ripe for exploitation. In the famous passage in which Sir Walter Ralegh describes Guiana as a country that “hath yet her maidenhead,” he also elaborates that it has never been “sacked, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance.” Ralegh’s description of the land as virgin, ripe for defloration, has been much discussed. I want to emphasize how Ralegh links rape and tillage, denigrating tillage as tearing and spending the soil rather than producing crops or ameliorating soil. To till is to rape, to spoil, to fall from golden age to iron. It is destructive more than generative. This is the plow some proponents of regenerative agriculture want

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to ditch––the plow as invader, penetrator, and destroyer. As Ralegh’s words show, the plow could already be seen this way in the early modern period, in part because intercourse and rape, mastery and violence, were so closely intertwined conceptually and in social practice. England will till Guiana but it wants to be the first to do so. As part of his agenda to promote soil amendment, Sir Hugh Plat invites sympathy for a feminized earth: “For what eye doth not pity to see the great weakness and decay of our ancient and common mother the Earth, which now is grown so aged and stricken in years, and so wounded at the heart with the plowman’s goad, that she begins to faint under the husbandman’s hand, and groans at the decay of her natural Balsamum,” that is, her natural capacity for self-healing and rejuvenation.14 For Ralegh, the untilled earth is an invitation to plunder the virgin land; for Plat, the overtilled earth provokes attempts to assist the decayed mother. For both, the earth is feminized and tillage is an assault. The redress for this kind of tillage is “manurance.” Whereas the plow is the engine of plunder as it tears and turns, “manurance” becomes a word for care in early modern England. Manurance is both a consequence of and a solution to plowing. Plowing depletes and dries out soil, fostering erosion, so if you plow you have to manure, which means broadly amend or fertilize the soil. Thus, if the plow was an improvement that initiated one early agricultural revolution, soil amendment was an improvement that was then required to counter its negative consequences. For gardeners and farmers hoping to increase their yields in a fallen world, the project of soil amendment necessarily favors art over nature, process over place. Those who write early modern how-to guides assume that soil can be ameliorated, and they set out to instruct their readers on how to do so. Gervase Markham, for instance, insists that whatever kind of soil the reader has, he or she can amend it so that more “fruitful[ly] placed neighbors” will not “exceed [the gardener] in anything, more than in a little ease.”15 In other words, labor (as opposed to ease) is a fundamental ingredient in soil.

The Farmer’s Footsteps Writing in 1690, John Locke famously avers that “the earth, and all inferior creatures” are “common to all men,” yet “every man has a property in his own person” and his own work. When, through labor, a person removes something from its natural state or changes it, then he has “mixed his labor with, and

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joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.” Locke describes this mixing not as a rape but as a joining, a kind of coupling through which farmer and land are both changed. Locke concedes a limit on this process of claiming by joining, suggesting that it cannot be challenged, “at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.” Nevertheless, mixing one’s labor with the soil, and refusing to recognize natives’ labor, were both crucial to colonial projects of appropriating land. Indeed, Barbara Arneil argues that Locke developed a theory of agrarian labor that would “specifically exclude the Amerindian from claiming land.” The kind of labor that, of itself, could conceptually and effectively “enclose land from the common,” as Locke claims, was also crucial to processes of improving agricultural land at home. Such improvement—associated with depopulation and enclosure—has been much maligned. We will discuss enclosure further in Chapter 4. Yet the relationship improvers proposed between farmers and their land mingled dominion and exploitation with intimacy and affection, as did descriptions of marriage in the period. For example, a treatise on “ordering fruit-trees” that John Evelyn translated from the French explains that neither soil quality nor site nor “the quantity of dung” makes trees grow well, “but it is the affection of the master which animates them, and renders them strong and vigorous.” Without this affection, trees “languish and become unfruitful.” Expelled from paradise, men cannot eat without labor; “they must till the ground, they must cultivate the trees, if they will gather the fruit of them.” But more than that, “Nature no longer yields anything of her own accord; she must be wooed and flattered, if we would obtain what we desire at her hands; we must love Her, if we would be loved by Her.”16 In a fallen world, the husbandman’s affection is his most effective tactic. The labor of cultivation is a manifestation of that love. Proposals for agricultural reform now return to this notion of claiming land by joining with it, mixing oneself with it through labor and love and substituting reparative care for violent tillage. As a consequence, proposals for soil enrichment often focus on land tenures, making farmers owners of small holds rather than renters or tenants so that they have the incentive to engage in soil-building activities. According to Wendell Berry, “Kindly use depends upon intimate knowledge, the most sensitive responsiveness and responsibility.” This intimate knowledge “can only be accumulated, tested, preserved, handed down in settled households, friendships, and communities that are deliberately and carefully native to their own ground, in which the past has prepared the present and the present safeguards the future.” Berry’s notion of

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settling insists on the positive valences of a word that is most often associated with settlers, settlements, and dispossession. It might also be seen as a strategic and reparative anthropocentrism. As Emma Maris puts it: “We’ve forever altered the Earth, and so now we cannot abandon it to its random fate. It is our duty to manage it.”17 And, we might add, love it. (As we will see in Chapter 3, many winegrowers link their practices to a strong identification with and ownership of their own vineyards.) For many farmers, soil amendment is a crucial part of this process of claiming land by tending it, thereby revealing place to be an ongoing collaboration between humans and humus. We can see both continuity and transformation in an ancient and familiar adage that celebrates the farmer’s intimate knowledge of his land achieved through presence and labor. It appears now as “the best fertilizer is the farmer’s footsteps” on a winery website and in a discussion of biodynamic viticulture.18 This axiom can be found as early as Aristotle and Xenophon. Xenophon, explaining to Socrates that landowners must carefully supervise work, rewarding what has been well done and “punishing carelessness,” reaches for an exemplary story “attributed to the barbarian.” The king, you know, had acquired a good horse, and wanted to fatten him up as quickly as possible. So he asked one who was considered good with horses what was the quickest way of fattening a horse. “The master’s eye,” replied the man, and I think we may apply the answer generally, Socrates, and say that it’s mainly the master’s eye that does the fine and worthy work.19 Aristotle, or his student Theophrastus, elaborates on this in Economics: The Persian system was that everything should be organized and that the master should superintend everything personally, as Dio said of Dionysius; for no one looks after the property of others as well as he looks after his own, so that, as far as possible, a man ought to attend to everything himself. The sayings of the Persian and Libyan may not come amiss; the former of whom, when asked what was the best thing to fatten a horse, replied, “His master’s eye,” while the Libyan, when asked what was the best manure, answered “the master’s foot-prints.”20 Pliny cites “on a farm the best fertilizer is the owner’s eye” as the wisdom of “our forefathers” and as evidence that “the fact is that husbandry depends on

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expenditure of labor.”21 Tracing it back to Xenophon and Aristotle, we can see how the source of the wisdom perpetually recedes—it is from someone and someplace else, not very clearly identified. The emphasis on the master’s eye is a reminder that the master will attend to his own more scrupulously than any hired overseer will. The master’s eye oversees the work of others, performing the supervisory and proprietary labor that, mixed with the soil, claims it as property. The axiom, then and now, draws attention to labor even as it disappears some of the laborers, the laborers who, like the land, are mastered. The early modern appearances of this phrase focus on mastery and management. In the opening dialogue in Barnaby Googe’s translation of Conrad Heresbach’s Four Books of Husbandry, Cono, a figure for Heresbach, includes this adage as part of his defense of a country life. Although he has a steward, “if the weather and time serve, I play the work master myself. And though I have a bailiff as skillful as may be, yet remembering the old saying, that the best dung for the field is the master’s foot, and the best provender for the horse the master’s eye, I play the overseer myself.” Robert Herrick repeats it in his poem “The Country Life” (1648): “the best compost for the lands / Is the wise master’s feet and hands.”22 This couplet follows a contrast between someone who “plow’st the ocean’s foam / To seek and bring rough pepper home” and those who plow their land. The “dear bounds” of the homely farmer are better than “larger grounds” because he knows them so intimately, practicing a form of management by walking around. His dear bounds are “well soiled” yet require the composting of his presence. This aphorism about grounding oneself in place is itself unstuck, circulating as common wisdom across time and space. It also has crumbs of earlier locales clinging to it, just as plant starts carried their native soil around their roots (often packed in hollowed-out onions so they might survive ship voyages and transplantation). It endures without necessarily alerting those who use or hear it to its pedigree; its provenance no longer visible, the aphorism, composted by time, proves fecund across changing terrains and conditions. Every version of this axiom emphasizes human occupation of and intervention in land.

Early Modern Compost In choosing the word “compost” instead of “dung” or “manure,” Herrick draws attention to the relationship between noun and verb, a substance to be added to soil to enhance its fertility and a process or series of actions.23

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In its meaning of “a mixture of various ingredients for fertilizing or enriching land,” “compost” shares its emphasis on collecting and combining ingredients with literary compendia and compositions, compounded rather than simple drugs, and compotes or stews. While the word was sometimes used interchangeably with “dung” or “manure” to describe any soil amendment, when compost is the focus of husbandry advice it describes in its fullest manifestation the assiduous and inventive collection of ingredients, careful storage, patient ripening, and judicious application. In seventeenth-century England, amending soil and writing about it may have been as indebted to classical authorities as to personal observation and daily practice. Columella’s first-century treatise De re rustica (On Agriculture) advises that even in places “in which neither cattle nor fowls can be kept . . . it is the mark of a slothful husbandman to be destitute of fertilizer.” The husbandman who aspires to be industrious can address this lack by making his own. Joan Thirsk argues that the “one pregnant sentence” that follows next in Columella inspired early modern English composters: “For he may store up any sort of leaves; he may gather any accumulated matter from bramble patches and from highways and byways; he may cut down his neighbor’s fern brakes without doing him harm, or even as a favor, and mix them with the cleanings from his enclosure; he may sink a trench . . . for the storage of manure, and may heap together in one pile his ashes, sewer filth, straw and other dirt that is swept out.”24 Columella assumes that effort can counteract lack—of fertile land in the first place, then of farm animals and their droppings—and turn waste into resource. The word “fertilizer” here (in Latin sterco-stercoris, dung, muck, or manure) shifts from meaning manure or dung, which not everyone has, to a compost anyone can make. In this translation, the verbs describing what the industrious rather than slothful husbandman will do include “store up,” “gather,” “mix,” and “heap together.” I want to emphasize that Columella provided early modern composters not just with a pregnant sentence but with a pregnant figuration, which served as the conceptual foundation for projects of soil amendment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Columella disputes the assumption that soil that has lost its fertility is spent with age (2.1.3–4), and, like a mortal woman past her fertility, permanently barren. Renewed attention to Columella did not wholly replace this way of imagining soil. In Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, for example, Lady Haughty explains that her Lady Collegiates use “excellent receipts” “to keep [themselves] from bearing of children” in order to maintain their “youth and beauty.” “Many births of a woman make her old, as many crops

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make the earth barren.”25 While Lady Haughty’s solution is to avoid or limit births and crops, proponents of soil amendment promised to revive the barren earth so it might produce more. Columella helped contribute to a solution by conceptualizing the “lean” earth as overworked and underfed. He repeatedly calls soil hungry, starved, or fasting (jejuna). This shift in how we think about lean earth underpins a plan of action. “It is not, therefore, because of weariness, as very many have believed, nor because of old age, but manifestly because of our own lack of energy that our cultivated lands yield us a less generous return. For we may reap greater harvests if the earth is quickened again by frequent, timely, and moderate manuring.” The reference to quickening in this translation suggests that manuring impregnates the earth as well as feeding it, but the Latin verb is refoveo (warm up, revive, refresh). Soil that has been exhausted by certain crops needs to be restored with compost as a form of pabulum (food, nourishment, sustenance). Columella ultimately advises the gardener to “Feed to the full the hungry fasting ground” and “to present / As food to weary fallow ground, whate’er / The privy vomit from its dirty sinks.”26 Columella’s provocative list of possible contributions to the compost heap—leaves, ferns, sweepings, sewage, ashes, and straw—would generate ever more detailed lists of possibilities. Early modern composting began with what might at first appear to be the indiscriminate collection of materials. Gervase Markham’s Farewell to Husbandry; or, The Enriching of All Sorts of Barren and Sterile Grounds in our Kingdom, to be as fruitful . . . as the best grounds whatsoever, lists not only rotting vegetable matter but also animal hair, entrails and offal; malt-dust, “and other excrements of the malt”; soap suds; what is swept or shoveled up from house and yard, “highways, back-lanes, and other such places”; rotten fish; and even human and animal blood, urine, and feces. Markham disregards the logic that sometimes governs what goes in a compost heap today—of separating animal waste from vegetable waste. He recommends that the reader seek out the by-products of various forms of manufacture, such as the hair scraped from animal hides “which for the most part tanners and glovers do cast away” and “waste shavings” of horn from tanners and lantern makers. “Now if of these you cannot get sufficient to trim all your ground, you shall then deal with butchers, souse women [who pickle or preserve meat], slaughter-men, scullions, and the like; and from these you shall get all the hooves you can, either of ox, cow, bull, calf, sheep, lambs, deer, goats, or anything that chews the cud, and which indeed, if not for this use, are otherwise utterly cast away to the dunghill and despised.” The most

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determined soil amender, then, had to “deal with” tradespeople, who might include tailors and “botchers,” that is, those who repaired clothes or shoes. Markham also recommends hiring “any poor people that will deserve a penny” to “gather up, get or buy all the rags, shreds, and base pieces of woolen cloth whatsoever, which are only cast out, and fit for nothing but the dunghill,” perhaps in part because wool was not used in the papermaking process as linen was. While many of his contemporaries use the word “dunghill” to describe a compost heap or pit, Markham uses it here to mean what we might call a dump—the end point or final destiny of garbage. (In either case, the dunghill contains considerably more than dung.) He advocates diverting the materials he lists from the dunghill directly onto the surface of the soil itself. In the soil amendment economy, there is little waste because even what seems useless can “wonderfully enrich and fatten all manner of barren grounds.”27 The ongoing, wide-ranging, and open-minded process of collecting and contributing that Markham describes is inventive but not indiscriminate. Many other writers join Markham in listing possibilities for soil amendment with Jonsonian relish, adding ash, soot, spent grains from brewing and wine lees, among other things, to Markham’s lists. Adolphus Speed concludes with the encouragement to throw in “whatsoever you shall think in your own judgement to be helpful and advantageous thereunto.”28 Individual judgment and creativity govern what one might spread on the ground or lay up, meaning simultaneously collect, keep, and place in layers. What exactly is happening as this compendium becomes compost? Here is how we now understand the process. Above all, there is mixture, which does not require human turning and stirring, although those actions can speed up the process. Mixture happens with time, microbial action, and decay. As Sir Albert Howard says of the natural composting processes in a forest, wastes “mingle as they fall”; “moreover, vegetable mingles with animal” with the result that everything is “completely mingled.” Then a process of aerobic and “frenetic” microbial growth produces heat that kills weed seeds, pathogenic bacteria, and pests, and makes the process move more quickly. Those microbes, which Montgomery describes as “an invisible herd of microscopic livestock,” do the same work an animal’s digestion does, supplementing or standing in for livestock who digest waste, turning it into manure. Microbes in the compost pile, like those engaged in other fermentation processes, are cannibals, eating what they produce. Their making depends on unmaking; compost is the fruit of decompositions. If compost gets too hot, it will “go anaerobic” and will start to ferment. This can produce stench and toxic organisms (including

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alcohol), and can kill worms, those crucial denizens and laborers. To avoid this and keep compost aerobic, one must stir and turn it.29 Early modern advocates of composting understood the benefits of mixture and time, moisture and heat. They did not grasp that worms were productive workers, describing earthworms as eating the earth but not as helping create it. Nor did they understand microorganisms. That would not happen until the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin argued for the role of worms in making and moving soil and Louis Pasteur identified bacteria and their role in decomposition and fermentation. But early moderns seem to have grasped the parallel between the compost pile and the stomach. Just as getting animals to forage and then excrete in fields transforms cover crops such as clover or turnips into manure that will return nitrogen to the soil—which was central to the emerging practice of crop rotation—the compost pit breaks down its components, making their nutrients more available and prohibiting seed germination. John Parkinson, for example, explains that watering a plant with wine will not change its color or scent because the liquid will be transformed in the ground: “The earth like unto the stomach doth soon alter them.” The result of the earth’s stomach-like transformation is “well-digested compost,” which John Evelyn describes as “without any mixture of garbage, odious carrion, and other filthy ordure, not half consumed and ventilated.” In his view, this is the only kind of compost that should be used to “impregnate and enrich” what he calls “natural mold,” that is, the upper layer of rich soil.30 The earth or the compost pile can only mimic digestion under certain circumstances. Here again, an analogy could suggest a plan of action––cover the compost container. Contained or covered compost is hotter and wetter; it breaks down or transforms more quickly. This insight did not make creating dunghills, muckheaps, and pits the invariable early modern practice. As we have seen, some farmers simply spread the materials they collected onto their ground or plowed them in. After instructing his reader to collect bits of woolen cloth, Gervase Markham, for example, explains how to use them: “These shreds and rags (torn small) thou shalt thinly spread over the land before fallowing time, then coming to fallow, plow them all into the ground, and be sure to cover them, then give your land the rest of its ardors.” Walter Blith, similarly, in his popular and compendious The English Improver Improved, concludes several chapters on soil amendments with the advisory that “also fern, or rushes, thistles, or any coarse straw, or trash whatever, flung, or cast into the fotheringyards [foddering or feeding yards], among your cribs under your cattle, will be both good litter to lay your cattle dry and warm, and will make very good

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soil, as all good husbands know.”31 These materials would decay eventually but would be left to do so on the ground, rather than being composted first. Many proposals for composting, from Columella on, emphasize not flinging or casting but gathering and layering in muckheaps and dunghills that are not dumps but mindfully curated reservoirs of future fertility. This kind of muckheap must be constructed and maintained. What is more, as Plat tartly remarks, only “simple sots” “leave their muckheaps abroad and subject to the weather,” where the rain can deplete and erode them; “muckheaps ought to be covered.” But even if the compost heap is covered, it is not closed. True, composting operates by what Albert Howard calls “the law of return,” or “the faithful return to the soil of all available vegetable, animal, and human wastes.”32 Today, this is sometimes touted as a closed system with “no external inputs.” In the next chapter, I will link this vision of a closed system to cannibalism plots, which also explore the possibility of limiting or shutting out external inputs. Here, I want to emphasize that compost is not a closed system even when it is in a closed container. Compost receives from the air and rain. Whereas Columella first defends compost as a substitute for manure, compost claims pride of place for those who are squeamish about the connection between food and excrement. As Evelyn explains, everyone prefers food raised on “sweet soil and amendments, before that which is produced from the dunghill only.” In John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola’s attempt to reveal the Duchess’s pregnancy depends both on the widespread use of manure and just such squeamishness about it. Bosola presents the Duchess with “the first [apricots] our spring yields,” and takes her greedy consumption of them as evidence that she is pregnant. After she has gobbled up the apricots, he expresses his regret that she did not peel them first because “the knave gardener, / Only to raise his profit by them the sooner, / Did ripen them in horsedung.”33 The Duchess then goes into labor. Interestingly, she does not refer to the horse dung as her cover story but, rather, claims that the fruit was underripe. My point here is that Webster’s scenario reminds us of the practice of using dung to achieve results that could be questioned as somehow unnatural or dishonest (“knavish”), and capitalizes on mixed feelings about that practice. Composting addressed such unease by offering an alternative to manure, what Evelyn might have called a “sweet amendment,” and by obscuring its origins. While various writers’ lists of potential ingredients for the compost pile are capacious and informative, designed to open up rather than close down possibilities, they should not suggest that soil amendment was simply a matter of indiscriminate collecting and waiting. Instead, most writers depict the

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process of composing soil as considerably more mindful and creative than that. Writers such as Markham and Evelyn elevate composting and soil amendment from collection to composition by adding artful human intervention to the sovereign effects of time and decay. Markham praises his reader as “thou whom it hath pleased God to place upon a barren and hard soil, whose bread must evermore be grounded with sweat and labor, that may nobly and victoriously boast the conquest of the Earth, having conquered Nature by altering Nature, and yet made Nature better than she was before.” Like many others who make this argument, Markham genders Nature as feminine in order to justify taking her in hand and improving upon her. As William Lawson asks in his guide to “the best way . . . to make any ground good, for a rich orchard,” “What is Art more than a provident and skillful correctrix of the faults of Nature in particular works, apprehended by the senses?” The idea that “nature is made better by no mean / But nature makes that mean,” as Polixenes puts it in The Winter’s Tale (4.4.89–90), is, of course, a familiar one, rehearsed in defenses of rhetoric, cosmetics, grafting, and a host of other disputed improvements of nature.34 What is interesting to me about this particular site for this oftrehearsed argument is how fundamental the question is: whether the ground beneath our feet is a matter of nature or art; whether soil is a given or a work. Pitches for compost showcase the role of human skill in composing fertile earth. Evelyn, for instance, claims that he seeks “to incite the curious to essay artificial compositions in defect of the natural soil; to make new confections of earths and molds.”35 Evelyn’s emphasis on compositions and confections suggests how writers’ descriptions of soil amendment as artful collection and assembly parallel their own composition processes. For early modern writers, generative figurations encourage experimentation, spurring them to write and disseminate their proposals to enrich and improve the ground, starting with the practice of collecting and ripening compost. Promoting composting in texts that were themselves assembled and ripened, the early modern writers on whom I focus participated robustly in an early modern culture of recycling, in which textual compiling took its place beside other kinds of repurposing and recombining.

Mixing and Mingling Although the English translation of Pliny advised against the “mingle mangle of ground,” early modern soil amendment more generally, and composting in particular, depended on the mixture of the local and what Evelyn calls

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“things promiscuous”—amendments to the soil brought in from elsewhere. Londoners were the most likely to be able to access all the forms of waste that appear in the remarkable lists of ingredients for the composter’s stew. What were called “foreign” composts were used infrequently not because of their foreignness but because it was expensive to transport them. But all composters were mixers, “since all fertility is the result of mixture contrary in quality.” As Blith explains, “In all soils and sorts of earth, there is a combustible and incombustible nature, each wrestling with [the] other; and the more you can occasion quarrels and contention by these, that is, the more you add to that which is predominant, and so allay the distemper in the end, the more gains the Earth thereby. For I suppose there is a kind of contrariety in Nature; it was ever so from the Fall, and ever will till all be swallowed up again in one.” The improving composter, then, must bring contraries together to promote productive contention. “Mingling of grounds is exceedingly advantageous,” as Adolphus Speed advises in Adam Out of Eden. This follows an almost Galenic practice of balancing opposites, although at least one writer warned that “they are to blame who think to medicine the earth as physicians do the body,” simply dosing “our old Grandame the Earth,” with different fertilizers.36 Compost coaches like Evelyn and Speed insist that discord is fruitful. Similarly, Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes creation as emerging out of a productive contention of opposites: For though that fire with water ay [always] debateth, Yet moisture mixed with equal heat all living things createth. And so those discords in their kind, one striving with the other, In generation do agree and make one perfect mother.37 While some creation accounts, such as Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, emphasize that creation involves separating unlike and contentious forces, and “unlike natures” produce “perpetual war,” Ovid, in this popular translation, argues the opposite.38 Discord is here the mother of creation. Mixture is fecund. We are familiar with the early modern suspicion of matching persons and substances of “several complexions,” because it was so often reiterated. As one anti-Catholic polemicist darkly warned, “Beware of mixture.” Let me turn to two examples from the drama because the stage simultaneously depended on and disparaged mixture. While Sir Philip Sidney famously condemns “mingling kings and clowns” in plays, the stage offered hybrid genres,

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collaborations, multiple plots, and tonal dissonance to its heterogeneous audiences. The patchworks it purveyed registered both the inevitability of mixtures and the discomfort they conventionally occasioned, especially when it came to marriage. For example, in Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s play Eastward Ho (1605), Mildred, the goldsmith Touchstone’s daughter, disdains her sister’s aspiration to marry a lord and herself ultimately weds her father’s apprentice: “I judge them truly mad that yoke citizens and courtiers, tradesmen and soldiers, a goldsmith’s daughter and a knight,” she asserts. “I had rather make up the garment of my affections in some of the same piece, than, like a fool, wear gowns of two colors, or mix sackcloth with satin.”39 The patching together Mildred so conventionally rejects resembles the composter’s matchmaking Evelyn extols (and, perhaps, the collaboration of three writers on the play itself ). In Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625), Lord Lovell chooses a wealthy widow, Lady Allworth, rather than the young daughter of the grasping Sir Giles Overreach, explaining I would not so adulterate my blood By marrying Margaret, and so leave my issue Made up of several pieces, one part scarlet, And the other London blue.40 London blue was the color of servants’ liveries. Such passages document one of the things we think we know about early modern culture: sexual and social mixtures were routinely denigrated. Expressions of discomfort about mixture extended far beyond the drama. Patricia Parker points out that, in a wide range of early modern texts, “the language . . . of contaminating, sullying, or mixing is part of a series of distinctions already in place before miscegenation (literally ‘mixing’) became the historically later term for the adulterating or sullying of ‘white.’ ” Adulteration, mixture, and bastardization also provided the figural vocabulary for disparaging mixtures and contamination of various kinds, including that of wine, as I explore in Chapter 3. Beverages that mixed different kinds of wine or combined wine with sweeteners and other ingredients were routinely belittled as “bastard,” a widely used term for a popular sweetened or mixed wine, and “balderdash.” Both terms signal something spurious or deceptive in these mixtures, which were, regardless, widely consumed.41 Disgust at mixture is not the whole story. In the two examples I have just cited, a goldsmith’s daughter and a lord uphold an ideal of the unmixed marriage. Yet, as Laurie Shannon points out,

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heterosexual marriage is itself a mixture of “disparate, incommensurate kinds” that, however normative, “contradicts the likeness topos at the center of positive ideas about union” in the period. That likeness topos assumes that like yearns toward and belongs with like. It also informs reservations about grafting. Ralph Austen, exploring “similitudes” between marriage and grafting, explains that “likeness is both the cause, and the bond of Love” and that “grafts and stocks joined together of contrary, or much different natures, will not grow nor thrive together.” He imagines that marriages and grafts should proceed but that they will only thrive when between like natures. The increasingly widespread practice of grafting, even if it was sometimes distrusted, could, then, become a conceptual resource. Jean E. Feerick argues that “the logic of the graft, with its principle of mixing kinds to form superior compounds” provided “one discursive matrix that Renaissance writers drew on for the rich, subtle, and nuanced vocabulary it provided in describing the benefits of conjoining unlike bodies.” In turn, the shifting and contradictory assumptions about marriage—installed at the center of culture as the conjunction of the unlike––could provide a vocabulary for understanding agricultural practice. Just as Austen considered marriage as a graft and grafting as a marriage, John Evelyn depicts soil amendment as a kind of matchmaking. As he explains, “Earths should be married together like male and female, as if they had sexes; for being of so many several complexions, they should be well considered and matched accordingly.” The best match, by his logic, is that of complementary or corrective opposites.42 He finds his mixture topos in marriage, using it to authorize his proposal for marrying earths. In his book Exquisite Mixture, Wolfram Schmidgen contends that “across different fields of inquiry and political persuasions, early eighteenth-century Englishmen were increasingly assertive about mixture as the source of their nation’s perfections, as the cause of its unity, power, and civility.” For Schmidgen, this positive valuation of mixture made it possible to imagine and embrace mixed government. While Schmidgen does not include agricultural treatises on his “semantic map of mixture in seventeenth-century culture,” the compost pile was one early site at which the English explored the generative potential of mixture.43 When we include didactic or how-to texts and the practical arts in our accounts of intellectual history, the imaginative and discursive possibilities open up. The two stage characters I mentioned earlier, Mildred and Lord Lovell, draw their metaphors from the world of clothes making, assuming a decorum in which sackcloth and satin, blue and scarlet, do not mix. Yet the practical

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arts provide numerous examples of combining apparently disparate materials into valued assemblages. While the word “motley” was associated with fools, as Mildred suggests, fashionable people routinely pinned and laced together their clothes and could recombine the parts in fresh ways. The process of assembling a costume, for the stage or the street, was so complicated that one might have required assistance. Indeed, as Natasha Korda demonstrates, the work of seamstresses and tirewomen (that is, those who tended to attire) was essential to theatrical performance. Like players, everyone assembled their ensembles out of disparate pieces. While some of these might be new, others might well be old or used. As is now well known, early modern England had a culture of recycling, with flourishing markets in secondhand clothes, metals, ritual objects, building materials, architectural ornaments, and even “broken victuals” or leftover foodstuffs. Contemporaries themselves recognized the similarities between different ways of assembling novel compositions out of existing fragments, as we have seen in the metaphors of mixed marriages as piece- or patchwork. Robert Burton, for example, describes “compound, artificial, made dishes, of which our cooks afford us a great variety, as tailors do fashions in our apparel.”44 While Burton warns that such dishes “engender gross humors,” compounding was central to cooking. There were numerous words for culinary mixtures: hash, pottage, ragout, gallimaufry, and stew, among others. Such words sometimes accrued negative connotations over time, but at root they simply described the combination of preexisting ingredients into a composite dish. The word “hash,” for example, descends originally from the French word hacher, “to chop.” The OED gives the earliest definition of the word “hash” as “something cut up into small pieces.” “Gallimaufry,” which seems to have come into use in the sixteenth century, describes “a dish made by hashing up odds and ends of food; a hodge-podge, a ragout” and then, by extension, “a heterogeneous mixture, a confused jumble, a ridiculous medley.” “Mess” moves from meaning a serving of food to, in the nineteenth century, “an unappetizing, unpalatable, or disgusting dish or concoction; an ill-assorted mixture of any kind, a hotchpotch.” While negative associations were available in the early modern period, they appear to have become more established later. My point here is that the most basic operations of feeding and dressing oneself often required mixture and that this mixture was both inventive and productive, on the one hand, and a source of unease, on the other. The composition always threatened to become a hodgepodge, jumble, or mess. Yet there was no way out of the jumble. England itself was a hodgepodge and its

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language a mingle-mangle.45 I call on the compost pile, with its unflattering early modern names (“muckheap” or “dunghill”), not just as a destination of rags and scraps but as a model for creative processes of assemblage—laying up, laying in store, and layering. This was a process of creative assembly that extended from farming to food preparation, from the library to the garden to the kitchen to the plate to the privy and back around again.

Compost Commonplacing We might think of book history and agriculture as distinctly different realms. But both were hands-on material crafts. And they were both part of a recycling economy. Early modern writers advocated for composting in texts that were themselves, in a way, composted. The fact that Markham’s treatise on soil amendment was itself “painfully gathered” out of preexisting materials and then “revised, enlarged, and corrected” through collaboration suggests the parallel between composting and composition. Jeffrey Knight points out that “one of the most common ways for a publisher to market a work in the period was to claim on its title page that it had been ‘enlarged’ or ‘augmented,’ ‘annexed’ to another text, or otherwise reconfigured.”46 Writers of practical advice were particularly unabashed augmenters and annexers. Many texts, manuscript and print, resembled a cauldron or compost pit. Francis Bacon planned to approach his notebook “like a merchant’s wastebook where to enter all manner of remembrance of matter, form, business, study, touching myself, service, others, either sparsim or in schedules, without any matter of restraint.” This “waste-book” resembles a kind of receptacle, even a dustbin or dunghill. Wendy Wall suggests the parallel between early modern dishes and the books, often the work of different hands over time, that taught readers how to prepare them. She calls printed books “closets without walls” and manuscript recipe compilations “storage sites.” Adam Smyth considers how almanacs created spaces for life-writing, in the margins, in the blank pages facing the calendar for each month, and in spaces book owners hacked out for themselves by creating pockets at the back for loose notes or by pinning in scraps of paper. Smyth asks: “Are these almanacs still books, or have they become some other object: a depository, a cabinet, a little room?”47 I wish to add a compost heap to Smyth’s list. We might then think of commonplace books as containers of a sort, in which readers recorded or pasted pieces of preexisting texts, so as to constitute a new text and to inspire or generate future

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texts and actions. For if they are containers, they are not sealed. If they are sites, they do not contain information as much as they ground and provoke ongoing processes of learning and knowing. Influential work on notebooks and commonplace books has stressed their role as memory aids. Many early modern people relied on the process of writing or pasting things into notebooks or commonplace books to fix them in memory and later returned to these sites to prompt their remembrance. Just as some medieval and early modern people seem to have organized their memories spatially, such books organized material under common places—which were also called “nests” in the period, that is, headings, topics, or keywords— rather than by source or in chronological order. Some readers purchased books with printed headings at the top of blank pages to receive their notes and clippings. Others compiled fragments without regard to predetermined categories. For example, Thomas Harrison’s indexing system, discussed by Noel Malcolm and Richard Yeo, was a cabinet or “Arca Studiorum” in which loose slips of paper were hung on hooks.48 While the arc or cabinet bears a clear resemblance to the compost pit, the analogy between composting and commonplacing breaks down at retrieval, I confess, since the goal of composting is for each scrap to dissolve and become unrecognizable. But some readers assembled notes and clippings not to prompt memory as much as to submerge collected fragments into their own compositions. While commonplacing is now well known and much discussed, the particular subset of commonplacing that relied on decomposition in the service of recomposition has only recently been drawn to our attention by historians of the book who are interested in a productive form of consumption they identify as recycling. According to William Sherman, the commonplace book was one of the early modern reader’s “most powerful and pervasive tools” in the project of “textual recycling.” Jeffrey Knight and Adam Smyth similarly refer to commonplacing as a form of recycling, emphasizing readers’ active, even violent chopping up of texts into fragments and then the creative organization of those pieces into unique assemblages. Knight refers to early modern England as a “compiling culture” in which “ ‘compiling,’ in fact, was production, strictly speaking, in the semantics of Renaissance literary activities. In early usage, the verb ‘to compile’ could mean ‘to compose,’ to produce an ‘original work.’ ” Smyth extends this idea of a compiling culture to the formation of an aggregative identity, patched together from scraps and fragments, and affiliated with rather than distinguished from others. Like Knight and Sherman, Smyth emphasizes commonplacing as “process as much as product,”

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an ongoing, collaborative, and unfinishable process extending across time and focused on usefulness, by which writing emerged out of reading, collecting, and mixing. This kind of commonplacing was less about retrieval than about creative assembly. That assembly might never end. Smyth describes commonplace books as “always unfinished, indeed unfinishable, texts—as manuscripts forever in the process of being made,” inviting a reader, whenever she encounters the text, to join the process of making.49 This notion of text as process extends beyond the commonplace book to print and manuscript how-to texts, including those on cooking and soil amendment, with their direct address to the reader—take this, do that—perpetually enjoining him or her to put these suggestions into practice and perhaps to annotate or contribute to the text. If Roland Barthes proposes that we think of authors as “scriptors” and a text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture,” that is, as a register or container of scraps from elsewhere, commonplace books and recipe manuscripts expose the seams of that patchwork tissue and the role of the commonplacer or “notebooker” not as a channel for voices but rather as a self-aware and active mixologist. Deborah Harkness uses distillation as a figure for how notebooking worked in Elizabethan experimental science to promote “a cycle of collecting, copying, clarifying, and comparing” by which knowledge could be kept “in a constant state of circulation through the page and within [the] community,” and by which “circulation and recirculation of matter led to the production of a new substance,” but only very gradually.50 Composting, I propose, might be another such figure that, like distillation, is not an “empty metaphor” but a reminder of the close connection between the material processes (in this case, of decomposition) being described, the practical proposals being promoted (systematically collecting, ripening, and using compost), and the creation of texts to disseminate that advice. The good housewife was one figure for the compiling composer. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton describes composition not only as theft (from others’ dunghills) but also as recombination—“we can say nothing but what hath been said, the composition and method is ours only”—and compares a writer to “a good housewife” who “out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of cloth,” and to “apothecaries” who “make new mixtures every day.” Texts in praise of exemplary women, which were often riddled with contradictions and undermined by ambivalence, also describe their subjects’ creativity as depending on a distinctly housewifely mode of compilation. Margaret Cavendish, using a simile informed by agricultural experiments, famously insisted on her own self-sufficiency: “Yet I must say this in the behalf of my thoughts,

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that I never found them idle; for if the senses bring no work in, they will work of themselves, like silk-worms that spin out of their own bowels.” Yet one of her contemporaries, Walter Charleton, recasts her proprietary singularity as a matter of skillful combination: “I find nothing which is not entirely your own. Like good housewives in the country, you make a feast wholly of your own provisions: yea, even the dressing, sauces, and garniture of the dishes are your own.”51 Charleton’s praise not only domesticates and feminizes what Cavendish casts as fantastical and autochthonous but also raises the question of her “provisions.” The housewife, making her feast, assembles it out of raw materials, leftovers, and other domestic products (sauces, garnishes, cheeses, preserves), some of which she made and some of which she purchased. The work Charleton praises is Cavendish’s The World’s Olio. Olio is another word for a culinary mixture or stew; it was also used to describe a literary miscellany. Cavendish’s Olio is her own because of the skillful way she has selected and organized various parts into an original composition. Thus, even Cavendish, who might seem to offer a model opposed to the composting form of composition, is praised for creating her own out of what has already been provided, what is stocked up and on hand. Similarly, a funeral sermon praises Lady Anne Clifford not as an author but as a collector or compiler who worked her chamber as a walk-in commonplace book, which Heidi Brayman calls her “commonplace-book bedroom”: She was not ignorant of knowledge in any kind, which might make her conversation not only useful and grave, but also pleasant and delightful; which that she might better do, she would frequently bring out of the rich storehouse of her memory things new and old, sentences or sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of authors, and with these her walls, her bed, her hangings, and furniture must be adorned; causing her servants to write them in papers, and her maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in the time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make their descants on them. So that, though she had not many books in her chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a library.52 The “Great Picture” Lady Clifford commissioned, which has been much discussed, displays her erudition and supports her claim to her contested inheritance by placing her in relation to books. Yet her eulogist here, Edward, Lord Bishop of Carlisle, insists that she “had not many” books in her chamber.

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Although he emphasizes her achievements as a builder—constructing six great houses—he draws our attention not to the monuments she left behind but to a process that endures only in his account of it. Clifford did not use fragments of text to help her remember. Instead, she began with a well-stocked memory. Then she off-loaded the demands of memory onto the built environment. According to this eulogy, she first broke down what she read into “sentences or sayings of remark,” then preserved them in her storehouse, then selected particular flowers from this storehouse, and finally dictated them to others (servants) to write out and yet others (maids) to pin up around their living space. The servants’ task of writing them out or pinning them up might have fixed these posies in their own memories. The process is hierarchical—a mistress and her servants—yet it is also collaborative. Clifford’s memories are common—to be shared—and firmly grounded in the place of her chamber. But they are also mobile as memory circulates among the female inhabitants of that chamber, who recycle what Clifford remembers, help produce the flowers of her library out of a process of decomposition and distribution, and descant or elaborate on it—going off their texts. Their descants engage the flowers not as summations but as provocations. When we consider the compost pile and Clifford’s storehouse of memory and dressed-up chamber as parallel sites of memory, we notice a temporal element to which Clifford’s eulogizer does not attend: the collected fragments would ripen and wither with time, some falling off or ceasing to attract the eye as they grew familiar, others replacing them. Describing them as flowers is thus particularly apt.53 As a collaborative installation, Clifford’s chamber, as remembered after her death, is also ephemeral, surviving as a memory of her virtue. Clifford’s practice is one not of fixing but of fragmenting, mixing, scattering, and sharing. In her chamber, she is the origin of all the wisdom on display. The sources of her flowers seem irrelevant. In a 1697 funeral sermon for a less famous woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Dunton, the author, Timothy Rogers, draws attention to his own role in assembling and combining materials, again described as plants, to compose a vivid picture of the deceased: “I might, I say, have brought in a world of authors to speak for the women, but in this case I reckon ’tis with books as with a dinner; If I give my friend a salad, ’tis not needful to tell him every plant, or out of what garden it came, if it be well mingled, and help his stomach, ’tis enough. Whenever in the following discourse I have occasion to speak in another man’s words, I always usher it in thus: as one says, or observes. And this is all the mark I give my reader to know a stranger by when he meets with him.”54 Rogers’s explanation of his method is typical of the commonplacer, neither emphasizing debts

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nor pretending not to have them. Rogers both acknowledges interest in what menus today call sourcing—of plants or quotations—and dismisses the idea that anyone really cares who grew her lettuce and where. In Rogers’s example, the salad stands as the kind of dish I have already mentioned, defined by the skillful combination of ingredients into a well-mingled whole. Just a few years later, John Evelyn published his Acetaria: A Discourse of Salads, elevating this particular mixture to a composition: “We have said how necessary it is, that in the composure of a salad, every plant should come in to bear its part, without being overpowered by some herb of a stronger taste, so as to endanger the native sapor [taste or savor] and virtue of the rest; but fall into their places, like the notes in music, in which there should be nothing harsh or grating. And though admitting some discords (to distinguish and illustrate the rest) striking in the more sprightly, and sometimes gentler notes, reconcile all dissonances, and melt them into an agreeable composition.” Evelyn’s reference to “native sapor” picks up a phrase that Columella used to describe the best wine, wine whose naturalis sapor has not required or received mixture or amendment. This is a phrase to which proponents of natural wine still recur, as we will see in Chapter 3. William Cavendish similarly links wine and salads as mixtures that subsume their ingredients to the union they form and so can metaphorize “love’s transmigration”: “Or sweeter grapes, whose squeezed juice is divine / Mingling ourselves, making but one pure wine. / Or wholesome salads mingled to our wish, / Thus may be joined both, in one salad dish.” Focusing on the salad maker’s artistry, Evelyn quotes Milton’s description of Eve’s skill in knowing what to choose—from a paradisal array of plants more varied than any garden would ever yield after the Fall—and how to combine them so as “not to mix / Tastes not well joined, inelegant.”55 Like Milton’s narrator, Evelyn praises, then, a mixture that does not seem mixed up. Composting was not just metaphorically connected to this kind of compiling. Like assembling a hash or salad, lacing new sleeves onto a bodice, or cutting up and reassembling parts of different texts, composting was another cultural site of creative breakdown and reassembly. The compost pile can function simultaneously as a figuration and a material site that, in Pierre Nora’s terms, “administer[s] the presence of the past within the present.” The compost pile welds together symbolic and functional, practical and ritual; it is rooted in a concrete space and dynamic. Like other sites of memory Nora discusses, this one has “a capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of [its own] meaning and unpredictable proliferation of [its] ramifications.” But rather than trying to stop time, as some sites of

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memory do, it works time. Like many trending farming practices, composting poses a challenge to Nora’s insistence on a rupture between premodern and modern, in particular “the irrevocable break marked by the disappearance of peasant culture, that quintessential repository of collective memory.” As a daily practice, composting also challenges Nora’s distinction between history and memory. It is both “a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present” and “a representation of the past.”56 Thinking about compost and its relation to composition encourages us to smell the whiff of decomposition lingering around our compositions. Bruno Latour attributes that decomposition to the work of “invisible agents,” like the “invisible herds” of microbes in the soil or compost pile. These invisible agents are the forces of time, working unpredictably as well as invisibly. But in linking decomposition to the reading practices of some early modern people, I have also hoped to render visible the human agencies that make decomposition productive and the active curations that create compost piles and compositions. Compost does not just exist. It has to be gathered, layered, and ripened. It has to be composed. Rita Felski argues that “context stinks” because of a critical practice that constructs historical context as if it were a fixed box confining and limiting meaning. But what if we thought about the historical webs I am weaving here as compost bins or piles, covered but not contained, with open sides or perforations for airflow? There is still a stink here, but it is the stench of generative decay. For in mixing recent proposals for soil cultivation with Columella and seventeenth-century agricultural treatises, I operate on the assumption that the past and the present are cocreated.57 Compost is particularly powerful as a model of the dirty work of transformation. In the early modern period and today, composting is, of necessity, associated with garbage, filth, and excrement, with that which is, proverbially, as plain as dirt and as poor as muck. Yet composting also partakes of magical transformation. One of the most rapturous descriptions of soil can be found in Wendell Berry’s iconic text, The Unsettling of America: The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. . . . It is alive itself. It is a grave, too, of course. Or a healthy soil is. It is full of dead animals and plants, bodies that have passed through other bodies. . . . But no matter how finely the dead are broken down, or how many times they are eaten, they yet give into other life. If healthy soil is full of death it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds, for which, as for us humans, the

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dead bodies of the once living are a feast. Eventually this dead matter becomes soluble, available as food for plants, and life begins to rise up again, out of the soil into the light. Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long. Within this powerful economy, it seems that death occurs only for the good of life. And having followed the cycle around, we see that we have not only a description of the fundamental biological process, but also a metaphor of great beauty and power.58 Berry’s rapture is not a digression. As he concludes, you have to observe and find words for fundamental processes in order to understand and value them. Metaphors, especially those “of great beauty and power,” can get things done. In the seventeenth century, in Samuel Hartlib’s papers, we find a secret for the ultimate “universal compost” confided on a deathbed as well as ideas for “quintessencing or exalting of ordinary compost.” Even in its unexalted state, the compost heap can resemble the witches’ cauldron; its transformations are almost supernatural. Oppermann describes “an irreversible labyrinth of endings and beginnings, a cauldron of biotransformations for the earth’s miniscule beings.” And the language that advocates of composting still reach for today to describe composting would have been familiar to medieval and early modern people. “A heat-generating aerobic compost pile is a miraculous thing to behold,” writes Sandor Katz; “The heat is a product of an alchemical mixing of the elements, and fills me with awe.” The compost pile is, then, enchanted, another reminder that no clean break ever occurred to separate magic from the modern.59 Agriculture and magic are more connected imaginatively, then and now, than we might expect and that magic does not end with the alchemy of the compost pile. We will find cannibal mothers, buried talismans, transubstantiations, and holy thorns playing important roles in upcoming chapters on local food, wine, and hedges. The most tranformative magic is that of the metaphor and the compelling story. As one young farmer told me: “Everyone I know in alternative agriculture is here because, at some point, something captured her imagination.”

Chapter 2

Knowing Your Food Turnips, Titus, and the Local

In proposals to revive soil and combat erosion, what farmers plant is as important as whether they till or whether they use chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Soil conservation demands that farmers plant a broad array of crops and include among them plants that will enrich the soil. Cover crops are often called “green manure” because they are planted to protect the soil and then to fertilize it. They are a kind of compost that happens out in the open fields rather than inside compost piles or barrels. While the standard practice in the last century has been to plow cover crops back into the soil, proponents of conservation or regenerative agriculture often advocate simply letting crops or their residue decay on the ground surface. If, as we have seen, compost abides by a law of return, green manure is a particularly closed circle by which crops emerge from and return to the earth without ever leaving it. Green manure is planted as food for the soil rather than for other consumers, animal or human. David Montgomery, for example, describes this approach as “feeding the soil so that the soil can feed the crop” and the crop can in turn feed humans.1 To sustain green manure at the level depleted soils require, farmers need markets for the crops their soil wants to eat. Those crops include deep-rooted vegetables like radishes and turnips and soil-building legumes like lentils. That means consumers need to eat them, too. That is, the circle needs to expand to include humans. Chefs and farmers are working to build appetites for these soil-enhancing crops and to find innovative ways of using them. In his book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, the chef Dan Barber asserts that we need to “cook with [and for] the whole farm” and “eat the diversity” of

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polyculture, particularly those crops that farmers need to grow to aerate their soils and fix nitrogen in them, thereby “feeding the soil that feeds us.” As Liz Carlisle puts it in Lentil Underground: “Ask not what your soil can do for you, but what you can do for your soil.”2 We have just seen that figuring the soil as hungry, starting as early as the Roman writer Columella, helped motivate soil amendment before chemical fertilizers and is being revived to promote soil amendment as an alternative to them. Proposals to create markets for green manure add an additional twist to this figuration, linking consumers and the soil as fellow eaters. The histories subtending these figurations can be unsettling as well as inspiring. The earth and humans, while linked, are not exactly on a par as eaters; the hungry earth will, eventually, consume us as well. A long history of associations around some of the crops the earth craves might discourage consuming them, as does the neologism “green manure.” But the history that poses a challenge can also be a resource. In this chapter, I will open to question some of the most basic terms we use to talk about our food system by using the historical both to estrange and to inform. After tracking one early modern cover crop, the turnip, I will then turn to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in order to explore the ways in which the play, like the turnip, casts doubt on the connection between sustenance and place, on what it means to know your food, and whether it would be a good thing if you did. If, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Antony is admired for his willingness and ability to eat “strange flesh,” Titus is about the horrors of familiar flesh, flesh whose provenance one knows too well.

Turnips Let us start with the turnip, which, as we will see, has a role to play in the history of farming for the soil. My story begins in the index to J. S. Cockburn’s Calendar of Assize Records from Kent in the mid-seventeenth century, where I noticed, in a list of weapons used in assaults and murders, “turnip.” In a November 1651 coroner’s inquisition held at Eltham, a suburb south of London, a jury found that on the afternoon of November 15, Robert Bushier was passing through Eltham churchyard on his way home from a nearby field carrying some turnips in his hat, one of which he threw over the churchyard wall. The turnip landed on Henry Cooper Junior, an infant in the arms of a young servant boy who was sitting on Henry Cooper Senior’s doorstep. The turnip struck little Henry in the neck, near his right ear, inflicting injuries

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from which he languished for several days and then died. Like so many assize court records, this one raises as many questions as it answers. The inquest suggests that Robert Bushier was required to “present a pardon.” Since he caused the death “by misfortune,” it was not murder. But it was certainly what might be called a “food event.” Bushier’s fatal toss is not the only violence I have found related to turnips––the Proceedings of the Old Bailey record the trial of a man who seems to have murdered his wife at the prospect of turnips for dinner—but it is the only one I have found in which the turnip is so directly the cause of death.3 What is arresting in the case of young Robert Bushier, the turnip, and baby Henry, of course, is the casual toss of the vegetable and its fatal effect. This is a slow-food scenario with a fast-food finish. If, as Fredric Jameson argues, history is what hurts, then the turnip hurtling over the wall can seem at first to be the hurtfully historical. But it is no less elusive for that. The turnip, in this instance, serves as a reminder that the local may be not only what comes from the earth beneath our feet but also what comes barreling down on us unexpectedly. It retains the capacity to surprise and even injure. Often, the local turns out to be from somewhere else. As Bruno Latour argues, “any given interaction seems to overflow with elements which are already in the situation coming from some other time, some other place, and generated by some other agency.”4 Furthermore, food sometimes partakes of the risky, and not just when it has been poisoned or bewitched, contaminated or modified. It has not been rendered dangerous only by industrialized farming, although that has, indeed, introduced new harms and intensified old ones. Knowledge can be unsettling as well as reassuring, and intimacy, with one’s food as with other partners, can exacerbate risk as well as ensure safety. What is a turnip? Columella and Pliny, the first-century Roman writers who figure importantly in early modern English discussions of the turnip, called it the “napus,” which entered English as the “navew” or the Old English “neep” both words one finds in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century herbals. The word “turnip” combines “neep” with what might be the French “tour” or the English “turn” indicating the round shape of this vegetable, as if it had been turned on a potter’s wheel. The word “turnip” can refer to rutabagas or swedes as well. If we focus on the word “turnip,” with its various spellings, we find, moving across time and space, that the same term, “turnip,” means rather different things: grotesquely, even fatally huge or tiny, earthy or delicately sweet, stringy or tender, white or purple; animal fodder, cover crop, food of last resort for the starving, or delicacy for gentlemen’s tables. Today,

Figure 2. Turnips from Gerard’s Herbal. Reproduced by permission of the University of California, Davis, Special Collections Library.

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it figures as both the overabundant and not-all-that-welcome mainstay of the winter vegetable box and as green manure promoted as a soil savior. Since the turnip alternates with the stone in the proverb “There is no blood to be got out of a turnip” (or stone), it would seem to affirm the subject/ object boundary. As Titus Andronicus says of his preference for pouring out his grief to stones rather than tribunes, “A stone is silent and offendeth not” (3.1.46). This is also the turnip’s virtue and limit. But just as recent studies of stones and minerals have uncovered their agencies, the record of the coroner’s inquest with which I started might alert us that the turnip, too, could achieve a kind of agency.5 I chose turnips as my focus for this inquiry somewhat by chance. The leek, for instance, might seem a more Shakespearean vegetable.6 But once I went looking for turnips, I found them everywhere. I have stuck with the turnip as my entry point into seventeenth-century agricultural debates about the local not just because it reminds us that the local is from elsewhere, in transit, and under construction but also because it is associated with two crucial concerns in seventeenth-century agriculture: (1) soil amendment, which we discussed in the first chapter; and (2) endenizening, or acclimating transplants. These concerns reappear in recent endorsements of composting and native plants. I examine the seventeenth-century debates about these topics as a way into the questions that have always dogged conceptions of the local and local knowledge. One might expect to find the turnip in treatises on gardening and farming, as indeed one does. But it also appears where one might not expect it. According to one fifteenth-century life of Saint Hilarion, for instance, he made turnips central to his penitential regime, eating as many as thirty a day. Turnips appear in coats of arms. There are two Erasmian colloquies about turnips, as well as various popular jests, revolving around their fluctuating value and prodigious size. In an Erasmian colloquy called “The Profane Banquet,” one interlocutor states that he would prefer a turnip to “Roman dainties” such as “thistles [or artichokes], cockles, tortoises, conger-eels, mushrooms, truffles, &c.” Another colloquy, “The Fabulous Banquet,” includes the story of a “country farmer” who gives a king a large turnip, which he receives with enthusiasm, paying the farmer 1,000 crowns and laying “it up very carefully among his greatest rarities,” which turns out to be “in his bedchamber . . . choicely wrapped up in silk.” This story then reappears as a jest about King James: “A Scotchman having found an extraordinary large turnip in his garden, which is a root that Scotchmen love very well” presented it to King James “who being pleased with the humor of the man, gave him a hundred pounds.”

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A courtier thinks to himself that “if the King regards a turnip so much, and rewards the giver of it so nobly, how much more nobly will he reward me for a greater present?” He gives the king a race horse and the king recompenses him with the turnip, which, in both versions, he presumes to be worth what he has paid for it.7 As these stories of extraordinarily large turnips suggest, the turnip was proverbial for growing to an enormous size and for its wide range of uses. A thirteenth-century folktale called “The Turnip Tale” focuses on a turnip of remarkable size. Agricultural treatises, too, comment on this feature of the turnip. The much-quoted and frequently reprinted English translation of Maison Rustique, or The Country Farm states that “it is one of the wonders of nature, that of so small a seed there should grow so great a fruit, as should sometimes weigh thirty or forty pounds.” While the early botanist John Parkinson questions hyperbolic accounts of turnip size, he concedes that “the kind is greatly given to grow, and in warm countries they may so thrive, that the bulk or bigness of the root may so far pass the growth of our country, as that it may rise to” fifty or even one hundred pounds. In his commentary “On the Beauty and Fertility of America” in 1687, focusing particularly on Virginia, Durand de Dauphiné includes in his list of common crops “turnips, which grow to a monstrous size & are good to eat.” Enormous size is not necessarily a culinary benefit, of course. While in his Natural History—translated in 1601 and often cited throughout the early modern period—Pliny contends that “when they are faded, flaggy [flaccid], and dead in the barn, they are esteemed better, than being fresh and green,” the author of the popular seventeenth-century cookbook The French Cook maintains that “the lesser are the best, and most agreeable to the taste, the other being soft, flashy [watery and tasteless], and insipid.”8 As medicine, turnips were used to increase breast milk, provoke urine, and “prick forward to Venus.” They were expected to suppress “noisome and troublesome dreams,” quell a cough and hoarseness, break up congestion, cure scurvy, treat gouty or frostbitten feet, and temper steel. Various herbals advise that the turnip is “sovereign,” that is, an effective or potent remedy, for eyes and bees and an antidote for poison.9 The turnip was valued above all as an easy crop to grow. Authors as early as Pliny praised the turnip for not being “choice and dainty, of the ground where it will grow: for lightly it will prosper where nothing else can be sowed”; for liking the cold and becoming better and sweeter in the winter; and for growing “on the meanest ground with little labor, & without muck.” Francis Bacon

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includes turnips in his list of those “victual or esculent [edible] things . . . which grow speedily and within the year” and should therefore figure among the first crops sowed on a plantation.10 It is not clear where the turnip originated. The Romans grew turnips largely for animal fodder, although even in the first century Pliny insisted that “they grow not only for beasts of the earth and the fowls of the air, but also for men.” Pliny’s assertion did not resolve the question of whether the turnip is fit for human consumption, which remained in contention as the turnip traveled. The Romans may have brought the first turnips to England, but early modern accounts of the turnip do not emphasize this. References to turnips in English gardens began to appear only in the late sixteenth century. William Turner’s 1568 herbal, often heralded as the first attempt to systematically describe British botany, depicts the turnip as plentiful in Germany and around London. The herbalist John Gerard seems to have made one of the earliest references to turnips growing in England when he praised them in 1597 as a locally grown food crop brought to market by women: “The small turnip grows by a village near London (called Hackney), in a sandy ground, and brought to the Cross in Cheapside by the women of that village to be sold, and are the best that ever I tasted.” By English accounts, the turnip is not a Roman legacy, nor is it from the Americas; they trace it, instead, to that proximate other that Marjorie Rubright has shown to be so central to English identity formation, the Netherlands, frequently the source of agricultural innovation and competition in the early modern period: “Some old men in Surrey, where it flourishes very much at present, report that they knew the first gardeners that came into those parts, . . . to sow turnips . . . which at that time were great rarities, we having few, or none in England, but what came from Holland and Flanders.”11 Printed in 1651, and attributed to Richard Weston, in a text that helped enshrine Weston as the godfather of turnip cultivation in England, this statement casts the arrival of turnips as a distant memory. If the turnip had once been a parvenu, how did it become so central to English agriculture? Joan Thirsk argues that turnips entered the English “farming scene” as a livestock fodder and then came to the table in the sixteenth century because immigrants ate them and because it quickly became apparent that they were easy to grow. As new and more palatable varieties were developed, the English overcame their prejudices toward them. Malcolm Thick argues that the first English references to turnips (those before the 1630s) focus on human consumption and that the story begins with immigrants who planted and ate them. Mark Overton concurs that turnips first appeared in

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immigrant gardens in the 1590s. In Thick’s view, food scarcity in the 1590s encouraged English gardeners to plant this reliable vegetable, which they had seen recent immigrants grow and eat. This dearth led “many poor Londoners to substitute roots and other garden vegetables for grain in their diets.” They ate turnips as bread, cider, and oil, and in pickles and soups. But the Londoners’ dependence on roots such as turnips did not necessarily raise them in their consumers’ esteem. While their narratives differ, Thirsk, Thick, and Overton suggest that the turnip was persistently associated with low-status consumers: immigrants, animals, and the poor.12 While the turnip thus rivals the apple and the potato in its status as a homely food that turns out to be well traveled, a reliable foodstuff that is easy to grow and stores well, and both a staple and a spur to and target of innovation, it has never secured as central and revered a place on the table. Nor has it solicited the same sustained scholarly attention. Arnold Crosby, in his study of the fruits of what he calls the “Columbian exchange,” dismisses the turnip as having a story that is not worth telling. “We cannot take all the migrant species into consideration,” he writes, “and the spread overseas of such Old World crops as wheat and turnips, for instance, is the obvious and uninformative concomitant of the spread of European farmers.”13 Nothing is to be learned, he suggests, by focusing on the turnip. Whereas Crosby is confident that he knows the turnip’s pedestrian story, what is fascinating about the turnip in the early modern period is that no one can agree on its status. In his Description of England (1587), William Harrison identifies a cycle of food fashion in which turnips were one of the foods that moved in and out of demand. Turnips and other plants grown from seed, he explains, were once popular “but in the process of time they grew also to be neglected,” so that from Henry IV until the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign, “there was little or no use of them in England, but they remained either unknown or supposed as food more meet for hogs and savage beasts to feed upon than mankind.” In his own time, in contrast, Harrison writes that “their use is not only resumed among the poor commons––I mean of melons, pompions [pumpkin], gourds, cucumbers, radishes, skirrets [water parsnips], parsnips, carrots, cabbages, navews, turnips, and all kinds of salad herbs––but also fed upon as dainty dishes at the tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen, and the nobility, who make their provision yearly for new seeds out of strange countries, from whence they have them abundantly.”14 In this complicated passage, Harrison syntactically links the “poor commons” who return to forgotten vegetables with those very vegetables: “the poor commons—I mean

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of melons . . . turnips.” Grouping the turnip with other vegetables, as well as the poor commons, Harrison suggests that their collective story is fraught with incident: they fall into neglect to such an extent that they are forgotten or supposed “more meet for hogs and savage beasts,” are then “resumed” by the “poor commons,” and finally make it to the tables of “delicate merchants, gentlemen, and the nobility.” Here again, they mirror their eaters––dainty for the delicate, as they have been common for the commons. But they are translated from low to high by means of re-alienation: “new seeds out of strange countries.” Years later, John Parkinson claimed that English turnip seeds are superior to those from “beyond the seas” and simultaneously acknowledged the turnip’s fluctuating social status and tried to manipulate it, defending the turnip as worthy of esteem. “Being boiled in salt broth, they all of them eat most kindly, and by reason of their sweetness are much esteemed, and often seen as a dish at good men’s tables: but the greater quantity of them are spent in poor men’s feasts.” Just as turnips had to appeal to rich and poor alike as fit for human consumption, animals had to be wooed to eat the turnip. According to Walter Blith: “Yea, as Sir Richard Weston affirmed to myself, he did feed his swine with them, though all men hold the contrary, that swine will not eat a turnip, (so I say too) no more than a Scot will swine’s flesh, yet the boiling them at first, and giving them to his hogs in good wash, and afterward all boiled, that at the end they came to eat them raw, and would run after the carts, and pull them forth as they gathered them.”15 Coaxing his pigs to become turnip-eating fiends, which he appears to have done in the 1640s, helped Sir Richard Weston secure a place in English agricultural history. But his recipe for turnip hogwash also suggests that turnips were an acquired taste, even for pigs. Ultimately, the turnip’s status in agricultural treatises stems not from its use as a food or medicine for humans but as food for livestock and the soil. Turnips, it turns out, began to play a new role right around the time Robert Bushier pilfered and then threw some in 1651. According to historians of agriculture, around 1650, almost a century after the turnip’s introduction from Flanders, English farmers began to plant turnips systematically, especially in Norfolk and Suffolk. This cold-tolerant crop may have been especially attractive at a time of record-low temperatures. In his manuscript compilation Ephemerides, Samuel Hartlib recorded in late 1653: “The husbandry of turnips comes more and more in request to fatten and feed cattle all the winter long, so that they have always something given to eat. Not only leaves but also the roots being mashed become excellent food which the cattle love far better than

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grass. They grow exceeding fat by it, and they love it exceedingly. The remainder of the turnips are turned in and become a rare compost for the ground.” Turnips quickly became a crucial plank in what is now known as “the famous Norfolk four-course rotation,” which boosted the yields of grain crops by helping recycle nitrogen back into the soil. As part of this rotation, fallow fields were planted with turnips. The turnips crowded out and smothered weeds, added nutrients to the soil as they rotted in it, redistributed nutrients by drawing them up to the topsoil, and provided fodder for animals, whose manure was then ploughed back into the soil to enrich it further. One historian, Robert Sheil, suggests that crop rotation resulted in “a near-doubling of output compared with mixed farming based on permanent arable and permanent grass.” While there is some debate regarding how early turnips had an impact on agricultural productivity, it is clear that whenever they took root, so to speak, turnips were cultivated foremost as food for livestock and soil. Interestingly, that did not mean that humans stopped eating them.16 As we look back on 1651, then, we might see the turnip as a harbinger of change, whether that change occurred immediately or gradually. Like so much in the history of agriculture, the turnip was both new and old, reviving principles known to the ancient Romans but on a larger scale. As a result, turnips could later be used as shorthand for instrumentalization of the landscape and factory farming. In Nature’s Economy, Donald Worster describes the commercialization of farming in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in terms of “extensive heaths, moors, and commons . . . laid out in small, regular plots and planted to turnips or grazed with sheep.” By the start of the nineteenth century, “about six and a half million acres of English landscape were transformed into a rationally planned checkerboard of squarish fields enclosed by hedgerows of hawthorn and ash.”17 We will talk about those enclosing hedgerows in Chapter 4. Here, I want to point out that turnips feature prominently in the transformed agricultural landscape. Those enclosed fields are “planted to turnips” to enrich the soil before the advent of chemical fertilizers. The turnip, used to figure the prosaic and rational reconfiguration of the landscape, was there to feed the earth.

Soil Amendment and Endenization Since turnips were cultivated in part as soil enhancers, whether as fodder that returned to the soil in manure or as green manure that could be “turned in”

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to the soil as a “rare compost,” it is hard to separate them from an obsession with soil amendment in early modern agricultural treatises. As we saw in Chapter 1, these treatises, which proliferated in the seventeenth century, depict the soil as a work in progress, needing to be comforted, fattened, and encouraged. They often figure the soil as a living, eating being. Many hearken back to Columella’s contention, in the first-century treatise De re rustica, that soil which had lost its fertility was not spent with age but rather starved of nutrients. With timely intervention, farmers might address this starvation by feeding their soil’s hungry mouth. If the earth is a mother, then, she is a hungry omnivore. Perhaps this is all the more so after the Fall. In Genesis, God explains the curse of Cain as having opened the earth’s “mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand” (Genesis 4:11–12). Descriptions of what the soil might be fed—blood, urine, feces, bonemeal, fish heads, and offal, the by-products (such as lint) of early forms of manufacture, as well as every kind of decaying organic matter—depict the earth herself as a kind of cannibal, reclaiming what she has produced and growing fat on her offspring. The local is, then, not simply a matter of place. It is a process of making and remaking, depending on the knowledge and industry of those who feed the land, and the wealth of soil amendments on which they can draw. Barnaby Googe—in his epistle to the reader of his English translation and enlargement of Conrad Heresbach’s Four Books of Husbandry—predicts that, although Heresbach includes a discussion of many plants “that are yet strangers, and unknown to us,” nevertheless “with good diligence and husbandry, they may in short time so be denizened and made acquainted with our soil, as they will prosper as well as old inhabitants.” After all, it was not so long ago that familiar plants including the peach, walnut, almond, cherry, fig, apricot, and musk rose, as well as many others, “some Persians, some Scythians, some Armenians, some Italians, some French, all strangers and aliens, were brought in as novelties amongst us [and] do now most of them as well, yea, and some of them better, being planted amongst us in England, than if they were at home.”18 Recognizing that novelties, strangers, and aliens such as peaches and roses have become old inhabitants, Googe suggests that no matter where they came from originally, plants that flourish in England become English. The local is achieved through a human process of coming-to-know what is as yet “unknown to us.” Googe calls this process of acclimating plants “denizening.” The denizen’s status is in between and in process. According to Deborah Harkness, denizens were “immigrants granted the status of semicitizen, with slightly reduced taxes and slightly more privileges. To be made denizen was

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to begin the process of cultural assimilation, blending into English society until, in a few generations, none of your neighbors was likely to know that your family had once been Strangers.” Marjorie Rubright concurs that the denizen is “a figure of alterity in process of transition.” But the word could register the conditional nature of the denizen’s status. According to Harkness, the herbalist John Gerard “reserved the status of denizen for plants that neither propagated recklessly nor perished quickly, but (under his firm guidance) predictably, and safely, grew.”19 These plants had earned their very special status as denizens, but they also had to be carefully watched. Contemporaries recognized that there were limits to endenizening and borrowed a proverbial phrase to capture that limit: Non omnia fert omnia tellus—Every soil cannot bear everything. In Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, he imagines a golden age when “the earth untilled will pour forth its first pretty gifts” and omnis fert omnia tellus, or “every land will bear all fruits.” The repetition of “omnia” renders the vision sweeping. But possibilities are not endless in a fallen world. In Eclogue 8, Virgil adds the negative and uses the phrase with a broader meaning, so that it might be translated as “We cannot all do all things.” Early modern writers tend to use the negative formulation with specific reference to soil and plants. Gabriel Plattes quotes this “old saying” as he reminds his readers that some soils in which one kind of plant flourishes cannot support another.20 Samuel Hartlib places the Latin phrase in the margin of this verse: Each land the like alike will never yield, Clime alters much in garden, orchard, field, Leave France to French, and Spain to Spanish sun; What England may is best to think upon.21 But these reminders of the limits of human agricultural ingenuity usually appear in passing as writers experiment with planting pretty much everything. Hartlib and his circle of correspondents, for example, were busily working to expand “what England may.” Their efforts included experimenting with plants from France, Spain, and farther afield. The key to success was the soil. To endenizen a plant, Sir Hugh Plat argues that one must, at first, recreate the plant’s native circumstances: “Let every outlandish plant be set in such soil as comes nearest in kind to that soil wherein it did naturally grow beyond the seas; or if you can, bring over sufficient of the same earth wherein it grew.” Since transplanting the soil as well as the plant is a daunting undertaking, other writers focus on doctoring soil so that it will help plants

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transition to a new environment. According to John Evelyn, since the soil can utterly change a plant, making it languish or luxuriate, the “curious” should attempt “to make new confections of earths and molds [soils] for the entertaining of the most generous and profitable plants, as well as curious; and why not for other fruits (strangers yet amongst us) as for oranges, lemons, . . . and other precious trees, which of late are become almost endenizened amongst us, and grow every generation more reconcilable to the climate?” We discussed Evelyn’s proposals for “compositions” and “confections” of earth in the first chapter. Here, I want to emphasize how he links soil amendment and endenizening. Although Evelyn voices his own version of “Non omnia fert omnia tellus,” “all Plants do not easily become denizens in all places,” he also insists that many can “begin to wax so well acquainted with our soils that we may almost account of them as parcel of our own commodities.”22 By this logic, all alien plants are potential denizens. Almost. John Bonoeil, a Frenchman commissioned by James I to promote the cultivation of silkworms and grapevines in Virginia, adopts the voice of Nature to remind his readers that, according to Pliny, transplanting can domesticate wild plants: “This removing and transplanting of wild plants, doth wonderfully mitigate and engentle them, whether it bee (says he) because that the nature of plants, as of men, is desirous of novelty and peregrination, or because that at their parting (from the former grounds) they leave there that rank wildness, virulence, and ill quality that is in them, and as wild beasts, so they become gentle by handling.”23 For Bonoeil, plants must be the objects of strenuous effort—handling, removing, domesticating—even as they are themselves agents, desiring novelty and submitting to taming. Who, then, is the tamer? Often it is imagined to be the soil itself. Timothy Bright argues that medicinal plants grown in England “receive, as it were, a taming, and are broken unto us by our own soil.” In Bright’s view, this taming can even make the dangerous safe, at least for those who share the new soil. But popular narratives about the most familiar forms of taming, of animals and women, suggest that this process might be more challenging and less permanent than Bright promises. Bright concedes that taming takes time, but expresses the hope that perilous medicines “might be planted in our natural country” so that “the familiarity of our soil” might adapt them to their consumers. This process “cannot alter their nature being impossible to be done by change of place,” yet it might “purge away that evil quality which annoys us.” Bright’s apparent contradiction (that a change of place cannot alter a plant’s nature and that it can) seems to mean simply that transplantation will

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leave a plant’s nature—that is, its medicinal property—intact, while removing noisome qualities that attend that medicinal value. There are plants “which in other places are poison, and kill with the very shadow, yet brought into England & planted with us, clean change that venomous quality.”24 The English might choose plants from anywhere, make them flourish in England and its colonies, and render them safe and wholesome. The prospect that local soil might tame plants to suit local bodies raised urgent questions in a colonial context: Could persons, like plants, be transplanted successfully? Could they thrive in different soils? Herbals and agricultural treatises articulate contradictory views, often within a single text. Advocating the capacious possibilities for taming and endenizening plants displaced the possibility that English bodies themselves might be tamed and endenizened. By transforming plants, the English could make them English, gathering in the fruits of colonialism while staying at home, and, if compelled to travel, remaining English anywhere. Thus, the project of endenizening plants offered the bounty of empire without the risk of change. Or so some of the authors of these texts imagine. This optimism coexists with an assumption that only the known, however it came to be so, is wholesome. That second proposition corresponds to the distrust of unfamiliar plants and their effects and the fear of colonists going native that we find in widely disparate texts. The distrust of the invasive and foreign plant persists today in the veneration of the native plant and in the description of reclaiming such plants and foodstuffs as “repatriation.” In the early modern period, fear of the consequences of leaving one’s place of birth and changing one’s diet haunted the colonial enterprise. Arguing that the diet that suits a people is the one to which it has become accustomed, Robert Burton, for example, both accepts dietary variety and suggests that each individual and group should “continue as they began.” Although various early modern writers similarly maintained that the place of one’s birth is the best location for one’s health, others, Andrew Wear contends, when faced with the prospect of foreign travel and settlement, had to figure out how to theorize and rationalize transplantation. One approach was finding a climate like that at home (or even better) and becoming acclimated. For colonists, this process was often called “seasoning.”25 Historians of food and medicine have argued for a backlash in the early modern period, in the wake of increasing travel and conquest, in favor of local herbs rather than imported spices and drugs. The turn toward the local was not necessarily either a persistence or a return as much as it was a new fashion, a

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response to changing trends and influences and the needs of a growing population. According to Alix Cooper, herbals increasingly became divided into native vs. outlandish, so that the indigenous emerged “as one half of a matching pair, through which European natural objects were directly linked to and contrasted with those elsewhere.” As we have seen, the native was sometimes acknowledged as the denizen—defined not by its source or lineage but by its history and location. Even if the category was more compromised than it might at first appear, it predictably tends to be valued above its supposed contrary, the outlandish, as better because better known. What unites the various positions in these debates is an emphasis on knowledge. The healthiest diet is one in which one knows one’s food. The same Timothy Bright we just saw claiming that plants can be “tamed” and defanged also insists that the best plants to ingest are those “we know both in the blade and in the seed, in the root, and in the fruit, and know the air, the hill, the valley, the meadow where they grow.” A much-quoted passage from Markham’s The English Housewife similarly urges that the housewife’s diet should “proceed more from the provision of her own yard, than the furniture of the markets, and let it be rather esteemed for the familiar acquaintance she hath with it, than for the strangeness and rarity it brings from other countries.” But for how long must one know one’s food and by what means? Despite his emphasis on the homely, Markham also calls for imported ingredients. The English garden and the English diet were changing dramatically in this period, transforming imports into domestic staples.26 When endenizening works, transplantation establishes a new story of origin and overwrites whatever history precedes it. If what counts as both local and wholesome is the known, then it is not fixed. One can learn to know the once unknown. In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, to which we will turn next, Titus associates the familiar and the salubrious when he praises Rome as a resting place for his sons, asserting that “Here grow no damned drugs” or poisons (1.1.157). This idealization of the known not only ignores how strange the domestic world of food production was, but also ignores the ways in which not-knowing can be sovereign. Sometimes, the moment you know your food is the moment you heave your gorge.

Titus Andronicus Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus might seem to be a poor partner for the humble turnip, since it is notoriously gruesome, even unseemly, with its violent

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rape, multiple dismemberments, and cannibalism. But its roots are entangled with debates about local food that are contemporary with it and will intensify in the following century. The three versions in which Titus’s story survives are all early modern: Shakespeare’s play, first performed in 1594, a 1594 ballad, and a prose narrative that survives in a chapbook from the mid-eighteenth century. Critics debate the authorship of these texts and which came first. I will not attempt to resolve these disputes here. Rather, I am interested in the uncertainty the play churns up about origins. Like the turnip, this play is hard to pin down. It announces its debt to Ovid’s account of Procne, Philomel, and Tereus and even, rather literal-mindedly, hauls the book on stage to have Lavinia “turn” its leaves with her stumps. It gestures, too, toward Seneca’s Thyestean banquet. It seems like a Roman play. But it doesn’t have the same provenance the other Roman plays do. Plutarch does not stand behind it; if anyone, perhaps it is Pliny, with his encyclopedic interest in natural history. As has been much discussed, the play both depends upon and undermines a boundary between Roman and Goth, civilized and barbarian. Other critics have related Titus Andronicus to discussions of medicine, food, cannibalism, and botany.27 What interests me is how the play’s insistent attention to the complex interrelations of soil, food, bodies, and knowledge casts the earth itself as both a mother and a mouth, suggesting that eating one’s own is not an aberration as much as a limit case in knowing your food. The rites with which the play begins focus on a kind of ritualized soil amendment, by which sacrifice fattens the earth, the fire, and the air. In Titus’s view, Rome, as his home, demands to be fed, and it is particular about its victuals. Rome exhibits not only agency but appetite throughout the play. Critics have emphasized the analogy between the topography of the woods in Titus and the vagina or womb. Quintus, for example, calls the “loathsome pit” and “subtle hole” in which he and Martius end up trapped a “swallowing womb” (2.2.193, 198, 239). But it is also a swallowing maw, like the earth itself, and is repeatedly referred to as being a “mouth” (2.2.199, 273). Martius, for instance, calls it “this fell devouring receptacle, / As hateful as Cocytus’ misty mouth” (2.2.235–36). Sacrificial blood feeds this earth, as do salty tears, corpses, and ash. Lavinia welcomes her father by saying “At thy feet I kneel with tears of joy / Shed on this earth for thy return to Rome” (1.1.164–65).28 Several acts later, Titus, after discovering Lavinia’s injuries and his sons’ arrest for murder, lies on the ground so that he can write with his tears “in the dust” as Lavinia will later write, hoping to “staunch the earth’s dry appetite” so that it will turn from the offering of his sons’ “sweet blood.” At this moment, he apostrophizes the earth.

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O earth, I will befriend thee more with rain That shall distil from these two ancient ruins Than youthful April shall with all his showers. In summer’s drought I’ll drop upon thee still; In winter with warm tears I’ll melt the snow And keep eternal springtime on thy face, So thou refuse to drink my dear sons’ blood. (3.1.16–22)29 He also compares himself to one stranded on a rock watching the ocean’s rising tide, expecting that at any moment the sea “Will in his brinish bowels swallow him” (3.1.94–98). Later in this same scene, after he has surrendered his hand but just before his sons’ heads and his own hand are returned to him, Titus responds to Marcus’s suggestion that he rein in his expressions of emotion by describing himself as both a stormy sea and a flooded earth: I am the sea. Hark, how her sighs do blow. She is the weeping welkin, I the earth. Then must my sea be moved with her sighs, Then must my earth with her continual tears Become a deluge overflowed and drowned, For why my bowels cannot hide her woes, But like a drunkard must I vomit them. Then give me leave, for losers will have leave To ease their stomachs with their bitter tongues. (3.1.222–34) For Titus, to be the earth is to be a receptacle, overflowed and drowned, but one that gives back as well, vomiting up what it has taken in. For all the play’s references to stopping mouths (2.2.184; 5.1.151; 5.2.161, 164, 167), it consistently presents the earth’s mouth as open. Titus’s identification with the earth loosens its gendering as feminine even as it attaches some feminine qualities to Titus. To be the earth is to be in a feminized position of absorbing and then vomiting. As Lavinia’s only parent, he contemplates hiding her in his bowels— reclaiming the maternal privilege of enclosing his child within him—but immediately asserts that he would have to vomit her and her woes forth again. He would not be able to stomach her. As we will see, this is what the fathers who eat their children, however inadvertently, do in stories by Seneca and Ovid. It is also what Titus forces Tamora to do.

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In Titus, a mother feeds as well as eats. Aaron insists that sharing a mother’s blood is enough to affiliate his son to Chiron and Demetrius. He is your brother, lords, sensibly fed Of that self blood that first gave life to you. (4.2.124–29) Earlier Lavinia, pleading for mercy, advises Chiron and Demetrius that they have some choice in what they take from their mother. O, do not learn her wrath: she taught it thee. The milk thou suckst from her did turn to marble; Even at thy teat thou hadst thy tyranny. (2.2.143–45) Both passages depict the mother as the source of nutrition who defines her children’s character, for good or ill. As has been much discussed, early modern defenses of maternal breastfeeding emphasized the property of mother’s milk Lavinia challenges, that is, its ability to transfer the mother’s disposition to her child. They also stressed maternal breast milk’s value as a local, known food; the maternal blood that fed the fetus in the womb was thought to be repurposed into food for the newborn. As in the cycle of composting and soil amendment, what might have been waste in the form of menstrual blood became a particularly valued form of nourishment. According to Ambroise Paré, for example: “The mother’s milk is far more familiar nourishment for the infant than that of any other nurse: for it is nothing else but the same blood made white in the dugs, wherewith before it was nourished in the womb.” William Gouge similarly argues that “that woman’s milk is fittest for the child, out of whose womb the child came.” This correspondence of womb and breast, place of origin and source of nutrition, is, Gouge maintains, only natural. “Other things are nourished by the same that they are bred. The earth out of which plants grow, ministers nourishment to the said plants: trees that bring forth fruit yield sap to that fruit, whereby it grows to ripeness.” Gouge depends on interlocking analogies between humans and trees, earth and parents (whether trees or mothers), blood and milk on the one hand, and sap on the other. These analogies also inform the image of the pelican as the ideal, self-sacrificing mother, feeding her offspring with her own blood. Based on those analogies, Gouge insists that the parent is the best source of nourishment for the child. He makes the connection between mothers and plants, soil and bodies, but he does not press those analogies to their extremes. We might see those extremes in Thomas Moffett’s

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Health’s Improvement, in which he describes old women as antimothers who drink children’s blood. Because “old women-witches” know that human “blood hath been a very ancient nourishment” and a reliable “restorative,” they “get young children unto them, and prick or wound them, and suck their blood to preserve their own health and life.”30 These analogies also underpinned proposals for soil amendment and linked them to defenses, like Gouge’s, of breastfeeding. As we have seen, treatises about soil amendment were acutely concerned not just with the soil as a source of nourishment but, for that very reason, as itself hungry, and best nourished through a form of cannibalism, devouring its own fruits, and an inverted digestion, transforming waste into nutrition. Pressing on these relationships, we might wonder: If mother’s milk is arguably best for babies, as native soil is for plants, then might not this logic be extended to suggest that babies are the food best suited for their mothers? What Titus offers us is a commitment to pressing relationships to their limits. Through its very gore, Titus exposes the seams and limits of the debates it engages, opening up the question of where we set the limit on the local and why, and how we distinguish among children (who should eat their mothers), mothers (who should not eat their children), and the earth (which does and must devour its offspring). The mother-child relationship continues to push the limits of our ideas about intimately known food. Consider the controversy and derision that ensued when January Jones (aka Betty from Mad Men) told People magazine that she ate her placenta (in capsule form) as part of her regimen for recovering from childbirth. The discussion of this announcement quickly turned to whether it was natural to eat the placenta (“humans are the only mammals who don’t ingest our own placentas,” Jones announced) or natural to dispose of afterbirth as a bodily excrement; whether its content is known and thus perfectly suited to cure what ails the new mother or unknown and so unwholesome (the New York Times blogger Nancy Redd imagined advising a friend “You don’t know what’s actually in that! Natural doesn’t always mean good”). According to ABC News: “Many companies will pick up the new mom’s placenta from the hospital, then steam it, dry it and encapsulate it before returning it to the mom in a few days[’] time. Other reports show that some people make a dish that would normally contain meat, like stew or lasagna, then replace the meat with placenta.” The etymology of the word “placenta” associates it with food; placenta takes its name from a Latin word for “a kind of flat cake.” Some seventeenth-century writers use the word “womb-cake” to describe it.31 But if the placenta is food, who is it supposed to

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nourish, mother, infant, or both? Eating the placenta is not, of course, eating one’s infant. Nor is sucking breast milk eating one’s mother (even if it is eating from or part of her). But the continuing revulsion and prurience around both practices suggest the sentimental and demonized extremes of the continuum of local or known food.

Eating One’s Own To return to the early modern period, eating one’s child, while predictably demonized as monstrous, might also be understood as an expression of love, protection, ownership, or identification. The celebration of the Eucharist is the most obvious and paradigmatic example here in its elevation of taking and eating the body of the beloved as an act of communion. Within liturgical practice, the Eucharist is both an exceptional offering and the apotheosis of the daily, homely ritual of supper, restaged regularly as the climax of the mass. The particular debates around the Eucharist in post-Reformation England have been much rehearsed. What I want to sketch out here is the way that the communion ritual stands at the center of a web of associations in which eating the beloved is both the limit case of desperation and the extreme of love. When colonists faced with extraordinary hardship in Jamestown tried to capture the horror of what is now called the Starving Time in 1609–10, they told stories of moving from eating domesticated animals, rodents, and shoes to exhuming corpses. John Smith recounts that “so great was our famine, that a salvage we slew, and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and ate him, and so did divers one another boiled and stewed with roots and herbs.” It is hard to parse tense and agency in Smith’s statement. The poorer sort exhumed and ate the “salvage” that “we” had slain (without the intention of eating him or her, apparently). But what does the next statement mean? Did “divers” colonists (perhaps including “us” as well as “the poorer sort”) eat “one another” boiled and stewed? Or did they exhume one other “salvage”? Another account, by “the Ancient Planters of Virginia,” charts the degeneration from domestic animals, to vermin or carrion, to the most unnatural and abhorrent foods including “the flesh and excrements of man, as well of our own nation as of an Indian digged by some out of his grave after he had lain buried for three days.” The Ancient Planters next describe those who “lay wait and threatened to kill and eat” those they envied as less wasted by hunger. On the one hand, the “salvage” or Indian corpse stands as the most loathsome food imaginable,

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the proof of how desperate things had gotten. But the exhumed “salvage” is usually paired in accounts of the Starving Time with a “powdered” wife.32 Whereas the native body is the vivid example of being driven past the brink–– to eat unnatural food, “excrements,” carrion, and “salvages,” whose name links them to waste and wreckage––the wife is the prime example of being driven inward, to eating one’s own. Which is worse? According to several accounts, one colonist, Henry Collins, killed his wife “as she slept in his bosom,” cut her in pieces, and preserved or “powdered” them, using the distinctly English method of salting. This stirred up considerably more outcry than the claim that unnamed colonists had exhumed a “salvage” and eaten him. The most detailed account, and the only one by an eyewitness, was not published until years later (as was also true of most of the accounts). In it, George Percy explains that Collins “murdered his wife, ripped the child out of her womb and threw it into the river, and after chopped the mother in pieces and salted her for his food.” By Percy’s account, Collins drew the line at eating his own child. Percy specifies that, on his own orders as head of the colony’s ruling council, Collins was tortured to secure a confession and then executed. Several accounts claim that Collins was burned because of the heinousness of the crime—a curious application of the punishment usually reserved for female petty traitors, that is, women who had killed their husbands. For Kathleen Donegan, the cannibal husband haunts the history of Jamestown as what René Girard would call a “monstrous double”: “while this figure ‘stands in for’ the worst of the Starving Time, he effectively distracts us from it as well, allowing us to resist a broader analysis of catastrophe in the settlement and focus instead on its most extravagant, and punishable, example.”33 The earliest published account, Sir Thomas Gates’s A True Declaration of the estate of the colony in Virginia, with a confutation of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise (1610), challenges stories that were circulating widely, even if they were not yet in print. This account was published for the Virginia Council. It claims that colonists who had turned pirate and then returned to England have been slandering the colony and have “roared out the tragical history of the man eating of his dead wife in Virginia.” To counter their slander, and “to clear all doubts,” Gates, Virginia’s first governor, claimed that the husband “mortally hated his wife and therefore secretly killed her” and dismembered her, hiding the body parts around the house. By Gates’s account, Collins killed his wife but not because he was hungry. This text refutes the imputation that the place or the enterprise had driven Collins to the extremity of eating his own. When confronted, he used

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hunger as his excuse, claiming that she had died and “that he hid her to satisfy his hunger, and that he fed daily upon her.” But this was, according to Gates’s account, only a cover for hatred and murder. To corroborate this claim, “his house was again searched, where they found a good quantity of meal, oatmeal, beans and peas.” It is noteworthy that the murderous husband’s pantry was stocked with the food of dearth: these were foodstuffs that many were willing to eat only under desperate circumstances but their presence also suggests he did not have to kill his wife.34 Defending its own enterprise, the Virginia Company suggested that colonists blamed others for what had been their own failings, which were as benign as not figuring out how to feed themselves or as malign as murder. What they would not let stand is the troubling—if not unprecedented––story of desperate hunger driving one to eat one’s own. Because intimate cannibalism was a familiar trope in accounts of famine, the Virginia Company could challenge it as propaganda. But, as it turns out, that did not mean it had not happened. Although there were relatively few women in Jamestown during the Starving Time, they loom large on the list we might call “colonists who were eaten.” Smith concludes his account of Collins’s murder of his wife with a jocular speculation: “Whether she was better roasted, boiled or carbanadoed I know not; but such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.”35 Even after she was consumed, Collins’s wife remained on the record only through her relation to him, marital and cannibal. We can read her textual remains as evidence of seventeenth-century gender relations and marriage. The story of wanting to get rid of—and perhaps find some real use for—one’s better half was conventional and often a subject of jest. We can read the story as evidence of English anxiety, at home and in Virginia, that colonists might become more savage than the “naturals,” or we can take the powdered wife, like her cannibal husband, as an exception that diverts attention from the causes and consequences of the settlers’ starvation. I want to emphasize the conventional nature of the story of Collins eating his wife, drawing Mrs. Collins into my capacious web of representations of eating one’s own, in the center of which I place Mother Earth. When the Virginia Company tried to defend its enterprise, it challenged such stories as fabrications, more fiction than fact. Some historians have accepted cannibalism as a given, while others have questioned it. Our evidence of what happened at Jamestown has long been limited to the rival accounts— until 2013, when archaeologists discovered the remains of a fourteen-year-old girl in a trash deposit, including numerous chop and cut marks on the girl’s skull apparently made after she died. The chops and cuts to her skull are more

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random and hesitant than animal butchery would be. Dumping her body may suggest shame; her remains take their place in a trash deposit that also contains thousands of bones of other taboo foods—horses, dogs, rats, and snakes––and that archaeologists speculate were all dumped during a cleanup mandated by Governor De La Warr in June 1610.36 Through this cleanup, the survivors put the Starving Time behind them, literally burying its traces (but also preserving them). The discovery invites us to look again at the stories of cannibalism at Jamestown. We cannot yet be sure of the identity of this young girl, whom archaeologists call “Jane,” or of her relation to those who exhumed and ate from her corpse. William Kelso, the lead archaeologist at Jamestown, raises the question: “Was Jane the murdered and cannibalized wife?” He neither affirms this nor concludes that it is impossible. One of the six or seven women who were present during the Starving Time, Jane was most likely to have been one of the women who had just arrived in 1609. Her bones reveal clues that she was from the coastal plains of southern England, had eaten a diet rich in wheat rather than corn, had recently arrived in Jamestown, and ate the protein-rich diet of the affluent—but, because her lead levels were low, did not eat it off pewter dishes as they would have. This suggests that she was a servant. We know that others were buried during the Starving Time and not cannibalized. According to Kelso: “The high status of the survivors suggests that the leaders had the pick of whatever food supplies were around during the lean months, while the lower classes were left to starve. This reinforces Smith’s comment that the ‘poorer sort’ were the cannibals, and perhaps that Jane met her fate at the hands of one of them.”37 It also suggests that the poorer sort, like the “salvages” and Jane, were more likely to be eaten. If, thus far, Mrs. Collins’s remains are only textual, Jane’s story is hinted at only by her scattered and butchered bones. Like her remains, that story is incomplete. We have no other evidence of how she died (her head seems to have been struck from her body after her death) or to whom, if anyone, she belonged. She might have been Collins’s wife, or someone else’s child or servant. Perhaps being unattached made her corpse more vulnerable and expendable. But her age links her to victims marked out for cannibalism by their attachment—to their parents. Accounts of starvation frequently describe the effects of hunger on ethics and relationships by describing those who were forced to eat their own children. We see these accounts across a range of genres and from the sixteenth century across the seventeenth. By the early seventeenth century, this was a

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convention onstage. In Shakespeare’s Pericles, the extreme famine in Tarsus is described as making “mouths” that were formerly picky desperate for anything: Those mothers who to nuzzle up their babes Thought naught too curious are ready now To eat those little darlings whom they loved. So sharp are hunger’s teeth that man and wife Draw lots who first shall die to lengthen life. (1.4.42–46) This makes it the more unsettling when Pericles’s future wife, Thaisa, admires him as a comestible: “All viands that I eat do seem unsavory, / Wishing him my meat” (2.3.30–31). Descriptions of class antagonism often link it to cannibalism. At various moments of political unrest, protesters complained that the rich devoured the poor. As the Fisherman puts it in Pericles: “The great ones eat up the little ones” (2.1.28–29). The powerful might in turn depict the commons not just as a murmuring mouth but as a ravenous one that “will devour nobility” if not kept in check.38 While cannibalism was a widely used trope for describing the familiar violence of scarcity, it nevertheless retained the power to shock. We can see both its conventionality and its power in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s play The Sea Voyage (1622). Marooned on an island, the starving Morillat and Lemure contemplate various ways to satisfy their hunger. Lemure wishes his wounds would reopen so that he might quench his thirst with his own blood. Planning to eat stinking mud, they begin to fantasize about the waste products of the surgeon’s practice that they would now eat with relish: a bladder; a great wen cut from a sailor’s shoulder. Finally, spying a young woman and immediately considering eating her, they recall the very stories I am concerned with here—stories of cannibalism as recourse during famine. Morillat: I have read in stories— Lamure: Of such restoring meats: we have examples, Thousand examples and allowed for excellent. Women that have eat their children, men their slaves; Nay, their brothers. But these are nothing: Husbands devoured their wives (they are their chattels), And of a schoolmaster that in a time of famine Powdered up all his scholars.39

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This exchange is meant to outrage and disgust by moving from a wen to a woman, even as it displays its own literariness. Both Pericles and The Sea Voyage reach for stories of eating one’s children and spouses to capture the desperation of hunger in vivid terms. These were the kinds of stories people heard, retold, and shuddered over. That did not make them less credible as accounts of recent or past events. How bad was it? It was so bad that people ate their children. In William Gouge’s account of a famine during Edward II’s reign, he writes that meat was so hard to find that people ate horses and dogs, and “some (as it was said) compelled through famine in hid places, did eat the flesh of their own children: and some stole others which they devoured.” A Digger manuscript broadside describes this same famine as one in which “people were forced to eat cats’ and dogs’ flesh, and women to eat their own children.” As we saw in accounts of the Starving Time, stories of famine routinely describe how the desperate gradually overcome revulsion and taboos.40 They depict the child as the food of last resort, but as food nonetheless. Joshua Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas’s Weeks and Works includes, as part of its depiction of a famine in Samaria, a woman who appeals to the king for justice, telling the story of making a pact with her neighbor to eat their sons. They began with her son, whom she tasted first. His blood (my blood) runs round about my chin, My child returns, re-breeding in my womb; And of my flesh my flesh is shameful tomb.41 The two cannibal mothers never got to the other woman’s son. This mother imagines the son in her bowels demanding retribution. As gruesome as her story is, the language she uses to describe her cannibalism links her to depictions of Mother Earth, who is also simultaneously womb and tomb. Such descriptions of the consuming Earth mother appear from antiquity through the seventeenth century, across genres, and from classical Rome to colonial America. In Anne Bradstreet’s poem “Earth,” the Earth herself observes that dearth provokes eating one’s own––“The tender mother on her infant flies: / The Husband knows no wife, nor father sons; / But to all outrages their hunger runs”—yet also reminds readers that she is herself a cannibal mother: “your mold is of my dust, / And after death, whether interred or burned; / As earth at first, so into earth returned.” We find the gendering of earth as a mother in various creation accounts, from Ovid and Pliny, on the one hand,

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to seventeenth-century recastings of Genesis (including Milton’s). For example, in Lucy Hutchinson’s versification of Genesis, Order and Disorder, she refers to “the earth, / That universal mother whose vast womb / Doth all her own productions re-entomb.” As Shakespeare puts it in Sonnet 19, time makes “the earth devour her own sweet brood” (line 2). Margaret Cavendish says of humans that “we are only food for Nature fine, / Our flesh her meat, our blood is her strong wine.”42 In widely used figurations, then, the Earth herself is a cannibal mother, reclaiming what she has issued forth, swallowing her increase. When Du Bartas’s cannibal mother confesses that she returned her son to her womb, making it his tomb, she both underscores her crime and “naturalizes” it. At least within this tradition, she is simply doing what the Earth does. The cannibal mother is not a bad mother as much as she is like the Great Mother. The intimacy between eater and eaten underpins other accounts of cannibalism as an expression of attachment. For example, in an infamous episode in Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland, Irenaeus claims that “at the execution of a notable traitor at Limerick, called Murrogh O-Brien, I saw an old woman, which was his foster mother, take up his head, whilst he was quartered, and sucked up all the blood that run thereout, saying, that the earth was not worthy to drink it, and therewith also steeped her face and breast, and tore her hair, crying out and shrieking most terribly.” The foster mother competes with the earth, drinking up the tribute too good for it, and taking into and onto herself the blood that runs out of her son. This tale has been much discussed as emphasizing “the barbarity and unnaturalness of Irish maternity, figuring an absolute reversal of nurture.”43 It is hard to disagree with that. Yet the story also participates in wide-ranging networks of association in which ingestion is an expression of connection. In his seventeenth-century compilation of strange tales, always from another time and place, Thomas Lupton tells a story that offers a kind of mirror image of the supposedly true case of spousal cannibalism in colonial Virginia. In Lupton’s tale, a pregnant woman developed a “longing to eat or to feed on her husband’s flesh; and although she loved him entirely, yet she killed him in the night; and being satisfied with the half of his flesh, she powdered the rest with salt” presumably to preserve it for future consumption, demonstrating that Collins’s deranged prudence was, in part, conventional. Another woman, forced to marry for money, receives a letter from her true love, written in his blood and containing his dried and powdered heart. Her husband intercepts and hides the letter and feeds his wife the powdered heart “in broth, and mixed with sauces in

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her meat, and as she was eating, he asked her how she liked the broth and sauce; she said she never did eat anything that pleased her so well. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘it is nothing else but the heart of your former sweet-heart beaten to powder,’ and showed her the letter. She knowing it, said ‘it is so good and excellent, it is pity any of it should be lost,’ and so she eagerly ate it all up, went up to her chamber and with present grief died, lamenting her own and the gentleman’s hard hap.”44 In this story, the jealous husband strives to punish and horrify his wife. He expects that revealing her intimate knowledge of her food will compel her to stop eating and perhaps lead her to vomit up what she has already consumed. But her love makes her ravenous for her beloved in the only form in which he is now available to her and her last act is to eat him “all up” eagerly. Some folktales depict eating one’s children both as horrifying––imposed spitefully on parents against their knowledge––and as oddly satisfying. These tales revolve around the question of what it means to “eat one’s own,” even unwillingly. In Giambattista Basile’s seventeenth-century version of the Sleeping Beauty story, “Sun, Moon, and Talia” (1636), a man’s jealous wife plans to feed him his children by another woman but is tricked into serving goat meat instead. As her husband eats with gusto, his wife enjoins him to “eat up, for you’re eating what is yours.” After she reveals what she thinks is the truth, that he has eaten his children, he laments: “So I was the werewolf that attacked my own little sheep! Alas, why didn’t my veins recognize the springs of their own blood?” As revenge, he threatens to make his wife “compost in a broccoli plot.”45 In part, his veins did not recognize the children because what he ate were not really his children. Still, this fairy tale revolves around eating what is your own. The Brothers Grimm tale of the “Juniper Tree” (1812) again connects ownership and eating. The requisite evil stepmother kills her stepson and serves him to his father, who eats him greedily. “ ‘Oh, wife, this stew tastes so good!,’ ” he says. “ ‘Give me some more. . . . No one else can have any of it. Somehow I feel as if it’s all for me.’ The father kept eating, and he threw the bones under the table until he had finished everything.”46 Eating his own son, the father eats alone. But his daughter, Marlene, gathers the bones and places them at the foot of the juniper tree, under which the boy’s biological mother is buried. The tree stirs and claps its branches and the bones disappear as a singing bird issues out of the tree. In effect, the tree mother eats the child’s bones, reclaiming his remains and then giving birth a second time. Perhaps because the father does not know he is eating his son nor intends to do so, he ultimately reconstitutes a family without his vicious second wife, sitting down to eat with his reassembled and resurrected son and his daughter. In both of these tales,

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the father and the family survive the jealous wife’s act of feeding her husband his own. In eating their children, the fathers assert the identification with their children (by other mothers) that provoke their wives’ jealousy; they also enact a kind of ownership of their children that the uncertainties of paternity often made tenuous, and then a delivery of them through regurgitation. In some ways, I am wandering far afield from Titus Andronicus. Yet these stories, which largely postdate the play, have much in common with the Senecan and Ovidian stories that are widely recognized as sources for Titus, as I will discuss below. My goal is to shift our focus from the cannibal parent as the figure of depravity to a powerful counterstory of ingestion as an expression of love, a story with Christian and pagan resonances, and with a lingering appeal not only in the notoriously disturbing and so often bowdlerized fairy tales but even in a modern classic such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. In that bedtime favorite, Max expresses his rage in terms of eating—telling his mother “I’ll eat you up”—and the monsters express their love by pleading “Oh please don’t go, we’ll eat you up we love you so.”47 Drawing together the pieces of this complex tradition helps highlight the pledge at the center of Titus’s plan for his infamous banquet and its relationship to injunctions today that we both feed Mother Earth and eat what she needs.

Like to the Earth In Titus Andronicus, concerns about the soil, the local, and knowing and being reshaped by one’s food all come together in the final banquet. Titus’s recipe is most specific. He will grind his victims’ bones and mix the dust with their blood to make a pastry to enclose their heads. Having made these two “pasties” or pies, he will feed them to Tamora: And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam, Like to the earth swallow her own increase. (5.2.186–95) Here, Titus makes explicit the pattern in treatises on soil amendment and in the rest of the play, by which the earth acts as a cannibal mother, absorbing her own offspring. Maternal cannibalism can seem unnatural—to devour what one should deliver—but it is also closely allied to the operations of Nature, who consistently reclaims what she has given forth, and, in Titus, is consistently more destructive than generative.

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Lavinia memorably collects the blood that her father needs to make the pastry that will entomb his victims’ flesh. Titus says to Lavinia: “Lavinia, come, / Receive the blood” (5.2), placing her, with her basin, as parallel to the earth/ pit/mouth. “In collecting the blood of the brothers,” David Goldstein writes, “Lavinia positions herself simultaneously as mother and consumer, incorporating the blood of her tormentors back into her body. This image arises not from Ovid’s version, which emphasizes the tearing apart of the child Itys’s body, but from the gendered logic of colonial cannibalism,” which focuses, he argues, on incorporation.48 I would add that Lavinia’s catching and collecting of the blood also resonates with the conservationist logic of husbandry manuals in which every kind of refuse must be captured and saved and fed back into Mother Earth, as well as the conservationist cannibalism of those who eat half their loved ones and salt the rest for later. Titus’s abrupt murder of Lavinia, as a resolution to his own sorrow, is also a reminder that Titus consumes his children with more intention than Tamora does. We witness Titus killing two of them in the course of the play and it is only thereby that they can be drawn back into the family tomb. This sequence builds toward the big reveal, when Saturninus, responding to Titus’s murder of Lavinia, calls for Chiron and Demetrius. “Why, there they are,” Titus responds, “both baked in this pie, / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred” (5.3.59–61). Titus compels Tamora, against her will and without her knowledge, to stand in the position of the Mother Earth, eating her own offspring, receiving the spill of blood. The classical precedents of this scene likewise depend upon this moment of recognition. In Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Tereus is first described at the banquet his wife Progne prepares as “knowing nought [or nothing].” After he has “swallowed down the self-same flesh that of his bowels bred,” he asks about the whereabouts of their son, Itys, and Progne responds: “The thing thou askest for, thou hast within.” To confirm this, Philomela throws Itys’s bloody head in his face. Only then does Tereus cry out, trying to tear the food out of his body. “And of his son he terms himself the wretched grave.” In Seneca, when Atreus feeds Thyestes his sons, Thyestes at first feels sated, then he is overcome by a sense of foreboding: “What tumult tumbleth so my gut, / and doth my bowels gnaw?” Next, Atreus uncovers a platter containing the sons’ heads. Even when Atreus tells Thyestes they are dead, Thyestes does not grasp the fact that he has eaten them until Atreus says: “Thou hast devoured thy sons, and filled / thyself with wicked meat.” Atreus regrets that neither father nor son knew what was happening: “he rent his sons with wicked gum, / himself

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yet woting nought [knowing nothing], / Nor they thereof.” Atreus would have preferred that the father knew what was happening throughout.49 Knowledge is the sauce for revenge. It is knowing, as Leontes claims in The Winter’s Tale, that makes one “crack his gorge . . . with violent hefts” (2.1.41–47). As in his Senecan and Ovidian precedents, Shakespeare presents knowledge as what makes the food indigestible, although, tellingly, he makes it the mother rather than the father who unwittingly eats her own. Shakespeare also departs from other versions, as Robert Appelbaum points out, by serving the children in a pie, a dish designed to prevent eaters from knowing their food.50 If Titus had not told Tamora, she would not have known. In killing Tamora just when she learns she has eaten her children, Titus silences her as she and her sons silenced Lavinia. Yet Titus in some ways forecloses the real pain he has caused her. Whereas Ovid and Seneca dwell on the moment of knowing your food, Shakespeare gives Tamora no response to Titus’s revelation, barely a moment to react. He had promised to make her “surfeit” on his bloody banquet (5.2.193). But he turns away from the most dramatic moment in stories of knowing your food and therefore finding it indigestible. He also shifts the focus to the audience. We know the provenance of Tamora’s food as she eats it, even if she does not. Titus Andronicus engages discussions of agriculture in other ways as well. Marcus describes his new regime as a restoration of good husbandry: O let me teach you how to knit again The scattered corn into one mutual sheaf, These broken limbs again into one body. (5.3.69–71) Focusing on agriculture might at first amplify Aaron’s unassimilable otherness. We might see Aaron as the transplant who cannot be endenizened. But he comes into our view first as a member of Tamora’s household, of what Urvashi Chakravarty calls “the service-based family,” even before we learn that he is also Tamora’s lover.51 He is not a Goth, but he is with them. We could also view Aaron as a transplant who thrives, overcoming indigenous Romans, reproducing, and helping to remake the landscape. He plays multiple roles on the play’s farmscape. When he recounts his crimes, he includes what might be called agricultural terrorism, remembering how he would “Make poor men’s cattle break their necks, / Set fire on barns and haystacks in the night” (5.1.132–33). Aaron’s evocation of agricultural mayhem goes in a horrifying direction that would seem, at first, to take it out of the realm of agriculture and into the occult.

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Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves And set them upright at their dear friends’ door, Even when their sorrows almost was forgot, And on their skins, as on the bark of trees, Have with my knife carved in Roman letters, ‘Let not your sorrow die though I am dead.’ (5.1.135–40) Infamously, Aaron literalizes a memento mori tradition, using corpses as texts and as prompts to renewed grief in their friends. Critics often cite this passage as the most extreme example of Aaron’s monstrosity. Indeed, he flaunts it as such. Yet this story follows from Aaron’s description of laying waste to farms and cattle. Thinking in terms of agriculture might enable us to see both Aaron’s pastoral dimension and the grotesque embedded in agricultural practice. For Aaron recalls creating a kind of scarecrow. These were often called simply “scars” or “scares” in the early modern period. Gervase Markham advises placing “dead crows, or dead pigeons, or any other rags, or the shape of a man” fixed on top of corn stacks. The agricultural writer Walter Blith juxtaposes such admonitory corpses and the Crucifixion. First, he advises his reader that the vermin and disease blighting the crops are a manifestation of sin and that “the only cure thereof is our Lord Jesus set upon the pole; he must damn the curse for us, and in us.” But, apparently unaware of the irony, Blith then recommends a kind of restaging of the Crucifixion, a crow passion, with part of a crow’s carcass in a hole set around with feathers. As soon as one crow discovers it, he will “call his fellows to behold the wonder . . . which they will view with such admiration, as will make you admire the creatures’ astonishment.”52 Blith at first asserts that staging crow executions might work because crows are frightened by “a new and unexpected object”—but then entertains the possibility that crows are “possessed” by a more complicated form of identification with their dead fellow and thereby the “fear of being entrapped themselves.” In John Webster’s The White Devil, Marcello refers to this practice of displaying a crow corpse when he says that, rather than marry the moor Zanche, I had rather she were pitched upon a stake In some new-seeded garden, to affright Her fellow crows thence.53 The black-skinned Zanche is “fellow” to the crow and crows flee from the corpses of their fellows. Better than any other deterrent, the familiar corpse

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puts them off their feed. For Marcello, Zanche, like the crows, is most useful when dead. In Titus Andronicus, Aaron presents his acts of what we might call ding dong ditch terrorism as working to perpetuate sorrow rather than discourage predation. But the voluminous discussions of agricultural practices in the early modern period on which I have been drawing throughout this chapter might offer another way of thinking about this story Aaron tells about what he might or might not have done. The parallel works in two directions. If we think about the corpses Aaron artfully mutilates and positions as scare-men, then we can consider Aaron as a kind of farmer. What crop, then, would he be guarding? The most obvious answer would be Aaron’s son, toward whom he is very protective and whom he briefly imagines he could endenizen through a swap that would keep his son alive and position another mixed-race infant, one more likely to pass, as heir to the throne. At this point in the play, Aaron has already secured Lucius’s vow to spare and “nourish” his child. Critics and directors disagree about whether Lucius honors that vow. Does Aaron’s crop outlive him or not? My approach does not encourage optimism. Lucius refers to the baby as a fruit but not as Aaron’s: “the base fruit of her [Tamora’s] burning lust” (5.1.43). Focusing on the baby as a crop might position Aaron as another kind of earth mother. In Edward Ravencroft’s later adaptation of Titus, Tamora kills her child by Aaron and he responds: “She has outdone me in my own Art–– / Out-done me in Murder––Killed her own Child. / Give it me—I’ll eat it.” Jonathan Bate calls this response “bizarre.”54 It is. But perhaps it is less so if we link Aaron to the earth mouth that reclaims her own, to the rich fertile soil. Furthermore, Aaron refuses to “please” Lucius in return for this vow to tend his crop, instead telling his tale of evildoing, which, again, may be a horror story designed to appall in the present rather than an account of his past activities; he speaks to preserve and amplify his status as an “unblushing black dog.” Aaron’s ultimate crop, then, is his own outlandishness, which is not a biological given but a narrative effect. If thinking of the corpses as “scars” posits Aaron as a kind of farmer, it also suggests the way that farmers might be, from the crows’ perspective, “barbarous, beastly villains” as Lucius calls Aaron (5.1.97). As Aaron props corpses at their friends’ doors, farmers create installations of corpses designed to frighten and astonish the fellows of the dead. Even today, biodynamic practitioners follow the advice of their guru, Rudolf Steiner, that “burning the seed of the dandelion, the skin of the mouse, or the entire insect and spreading the ash over the garden plot or field will make an uncongenial home for these pests and discourage their return.” Steiner calls

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this “peppering.”55 The daily practice in a biodynamic vineyard today, then, can be seen as surprisingly similar to the confession by which Aaron amplifies his own monstrosity. Where do we draw the line between the mundane and the monstrous, the homely and the outlandish? Scarecrow practice assumes that it is natural to turn in repugnance from the astonishing sight of one’s own deceased. But Titus, like all tragedies, confronts us with just that spectacle, our dead fellows, and demands that we look. And Shakespeare goes further, presenting Aaron’s tale as a reminder that such horrifying scenes might be assaults on their beholders, intended to repel. In Titus Andronicus, the interest in agriculture persists to its conclusion, which concerns properly planting the various dead. Lucius imposes on Aaron a torment that involves both starving him and rooting him as a kind of inverted turnip, “fastened [breast deep] in the earth,” with his stem underground and his head above. For Feerick, he is a “blighted tree—a tree denied growth, ascendancy, and fruit.” But, like turnips and other crops, bolstering the soil as they decay in it, Aaron will also be a kind of green manure. As Christopher Crosbie puts it: “In contrast to Tamora, Aaron must consume nothing and instead be swallowed himself. At once ravenous and execrable, Aaron will starve even as he feeds the earth.” Installed to horrify, Aaron is both a scare-man like the ones he claims to have posted at people’s doors, and a kind of fertilizer, conforming to the agricultural advice that the “blood of cattle, dead dogs, carrion, or the like, laid or put to the roots of trees . . . is found very profitable unto fruit bearing.”56 His torment may also draw attention to the way his epithet, Aaron the Moor, links him to the soil, that is, to a moor as unenclosed or waste ground and to “moorish” as an adjective describing spongy soft or damp soil (OED). In the end, he is land-ish rather than outlandish. Thinking about the early modern stage might add yet another layer of meaning to the image of Aaron as soil amendment. According to Tiffany Stern, “ ‘burial in sand’ almost certainly consisted of standing in the trap on the stage: the trap that was the gate of the stage’s ‘hell.’ ” To locate Aaron there, Stern argues, is to depict him as already damned and in hell. But, elsewhere, Stern also reminds us that the trapdoor was called a “hell-mouth” and that this was the same “bloody hole in which Lavinia is raped in Titus Andronicus.”57 His own mouth stopped by Lucius’s order (5.1.151), Aaron is finally in the stage’s mouth. While Lucius promises to include Titus and Lavinia “in our household’s monument” with which the play began, he denies Tamora funeral rites, describing her as a “ravenous tiger.” For all Tamora’s faults, in his assessment Lucius

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forgets that her feeding was imposed upon her without her knowledge and that it was more natural than unnatural. He orders: “throw her forth to beasts and birds of prey: / Her life was beastly and devoid of pity, / And being dead, let birds on her take pity” (5.3.193–99). So Tamora will be both expelled and absorbed. These are the play’s last lines. David Goldstein points out that it is a “cannibalistic mindset” that enables Lucius to imagine like will devour like—birds of prey will eat this carnivore. Lucius also refuses or resists the insight Titus himself articulated: that the earth is the ultimate cannibal and she always eats her own. Garbage, as treatises on soil amendment reveal, is nourishment and comfort to the earth. Just as, according to Julian Yates, “the banquet becomes an exercise in waste management,” so too does the play’s conclusion. Nor is it possible to keep garbage from the consuming earth. Tamora may be scattered and gnawed upon but, in the end, she will fatten the earth, as her sons’ blood fed both the Roman soil and her. Crosbie describes this earth as “disinterested” but it might have as much appetite as anyone else in the play.58 Is Tamora—thrown to the carrion at the play’s end—so very different from Titus, who sacrifices his own children, and the earth itself, hungry for tears and blood, from which Tamora’s body is, at least at first, withheld? As so often in Shakespeare’s tragedies, the gesture of closure seems inadequate, turning from and shutting down some of the complexities in which the play has been most invested. Most critics who have focused on food in Titus, have, understandably, emphasized the horror not only of cannibalism but of being fed one’s own children. Eating one’s young becomes the final aberration in a play organized around betrayal and violation, and strewn with body parts—suggesting that the consuming mouth is as important a figure as the severed or injured hand, tongue, or heads in the play. It is hard to counter the claim that the food system in Titus—like everything else—is ultimately degrading. But the play’s position on eating and ethics is considerably more complicated than some critics have claimed. It does not, for instance, present a brief for vegetarianism. In my view, the play poses questions rather than proposing agendas or diets. Saturninus calls Titus’s murder of Lavinia “unnatural and unkind” (5.3.47) but what is natural or kind here? Goldstein suggests that “cannibalism is more a sensationalist account of normal eating than a category shift away from it.” Thomas Browne, for example, writing in the seventeenth century, avers that “we are what we all abhor,” that is, cannibals, and not only “in an allegory,” because “all this mass of flesh which we behold came in at our mouths: this frame we look upon hath been upon our trenchers––in brief, we have devoured ourselves.” That is, we have all eaten our way into being.59 We

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might also see the closed system of sustainability, by which outputs are always recycled back into inputs, as a benign form of cannibalism. In Titus, the most intimately known food is the food we find it most vexing to consider: the food that makes us heave our gorge; the knowledge we just cannot swallow. Titus forces us to reflect on the assumptions by which many of us live: that one can and should consume one’s own, leaving no waste; that we recycle everything in a closed and sustainable system; that we exclude the invasive in favor of the native; and that we know what local is, and that it is always superior.60 What about the turnip? As it turns out, it is neither early modern nor English and so reminds us that neither of those categories has a stable meaning. But the turnip also has particular early modern English meanings and so can serve as a guide through the labyrinth of early modern agricultural change. This unprepossessing occupant of the market stall condenses varied histories. When it flew over the wall to brain little Henry, the turnip was a harbinger of new forms of farming on a larger scale that would make food plentiful and thus expendable, but also of the dangers to which that could lead. The turnip was also a crucial component of a system of crop rotation and soil amendment to which many critics of industrial monocultures urge a return. Reliable yet oppressive in its long season, long shelf life, and superabundance, the turnip may make the ultimate demand—that we eat it. As I discussed at the beginning of the chapter, writers, chefs, and farmers argue that we need to “eat the diversity” of polyculture, particularly those crops that farmers grow to aerate and enrich their soils. But, at least in the particular case of the turnip, this identification between the consumer and the soil, aligning our food with its needs, reanimates the turnip’s penitential associations (recall Saint Hilarion chastising his flesh by eating turnips) even as it adds an environmental halo to eating turnips and other green manures. The force of the command that we “eat the diversity” depends on our presumed reluctance to eat as the soil needs to eat. The injunction that we eat our turnips is the newest iteration of an ongoing debate about whether turnips are fit to eat or not and what debt, exactly, humans owe to the hungry earth. Attending to the history I have traced here helps us see the hunger and demand in the oft-repeated image of Mother Earth. Annette Kolodny calls this America’s “single dominating metaphor.”61 This metaphor is still used to political ends, and now often to environmentalist ones. Even ancient authors’ depictions of the earth as a mother worked to condemn how humans treated the earth. Pliny, for instance, scolded that humans were not content simply to

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“misuse” the Earth mother’s “outward skin” but “pierce deeper and enter into her very bowels. We search into the veins of gold and silver; we mine and dig for copper and lead metals. And for to seek out gems and some little stones, we sink pits deep within the ground. Thus, we pluck the very heart-strings out of her, and all to wear on our finger one gem or precious stone, to fulfill our pleasure and desire. How many hands are worn with digging and delving, that one joint of our finger might shine again.”62 Centuries after Pliny, Milton described Mammon as the first who taught humans to “rifle” “the bowels of their mother Earth / For treasures better hid,” to wound and dig out her ribs (1.678–92). Such language sought to heighten outrage at those depredations, yet humans proceeded nonetheless. While, as James Holstun points out, Gerard Winstanley “agrarianizes the fifth commandment,” demanding honor for Mother Earth, his contemporaries could reconcile views of the earth as a mother and commitments to resource extraction. In the context of the relatively benign project of planting fruit trees, Walter Blith urges making it a priority to delve plenty “out of the earth, the true mother, in whose bowels is more wealth than ever will be drawn forth, and enough to satisfy”; he enjoins his readers to “be as the midwife” so as “to deliver the earth of those advantages she is so big withal.”63 The earth delivers, but only when humans violently dig her treasures out of her bowels. The problem, of course, lies in the contradictions and ambivalences that surround motherhood itself. Criticizing a popular environmental poster that combines the slogan “Love your mother,” with an image of the earth seen from a distance, Catherine Roach points out that since “we do not unambiguously love our mothers,” and, indeed, require them both to feed us and to “disappear all of our waste products,” without making any demands in return, the metaphor of Mother Earth is unlikely to inspire better treatment of the earth. It might, in fact, underpin an exploitative, wasteful ethos, as Stacy Alaimo points out. Alaimo champions alternative figurations that “cast nature as a feminine subject who is by no means maternal. These unruly, heretical natures not only resist the domestication of Mother Earth, but they forge an alliance between feminism and environmentalism.”64 While I see the reasons for uncoupling mother and earth, I also think that we can use close attention to the Mother Earth tradition to rethink not only our relation to nature but to mothers. Mother Earth has long been construed as both maternal and powerful, fanged, unruly, and hungry. Emphasizing the strand of this tradition that makes the earth mother a voracious omnivore endows both mothers and the earth with the power to destroy as well as create, consume as well as feed, unsettle as well as comfort.

Chapter 3

Saving Wine Terroir and the Quest for Natural Wine

Wine is said to be an expression of place. But what does “place” include? And what makes it possible to make good wine in some places and not in others? Is it the soil, the climate, the skill of the grape growers and winemakers, or some combination? These questions were debated in the seventeenth century, just as they continue to be today. John Locke, for instance, touring France and taking copious notes about what he observed in the late seventeenth century, recorded local perceptions that “a particularity in the soil” might be the reason that wine in one vineyard (Haut-Brion) was different from that produced just next door. But another writer, roughly contemporary with him, suggested that it was skill that made French wine better than English wine—that it was a matter of technique and not of location because soil can be transformed. “The soil of France is much poorer naturally, than that of England, and were not their vineyards husbanded, tilled, and manured every year, with as much art, care, and industry, as our corn lands [wheat fields] in England, they would not be able to make a piece of good wine in a season.”1 So even as we move from the topic of the soil and the local to wine in this chapter, we are also staying put, continuing to look down at the soil. Today, the word “terroir” often encompasses a wide range of environmental components (soil constitution, sun exposure, climate, precipitation, etc.) that shape wine’s taste. While “terroir” entered French via Latin in the Renaissance, it did not accrue the meanings it now has with relation to wine until the twentieth century. But we can find something like it in a Latin phrase from Virgil’s Eclogues to which, as we have seen, seventeenth-century

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writers often returned: Non omnia fert omnia tellus (every soil cannot bear every plant). In this formulation, the soil is the object or actor bearing or failing to bear. Whether imagined as limit or opportunity, the concept of terroir usually assigns a kind of agency to place. As the term is now used with reference to wine, it asserts that one can taste the essence of a wine’s place of origin and can distinguish one place taste from another. At the simplest level, terroir would seem to refer explicitly to the soil and to manifest itself in taste descriptors such as flinty, chalky, earthy, or mineral as if there were some direct transfer from dirt to glass. One seventeenth-century writer describes just such a transfer, suggesting an experiment to determine whether a plot of ground will yield good wine. One should dissolve a clod of earth in a glass of rainwater and then, when the dirt has settled to the bottom, drink the water: “Look what relish or taste it hath, such would the wine be, and therefore a vine yielding such a relished wine fittest to be planted there. Therefore, if you find therein a bitter taste, a salty or alum-like, or any other such unpleasant taste, avoid and cease to plant any vine in any such ground.” This same text states that one should not manure vines because the soil will “retain the smatch of the dung” and communicate it to the wine. Experiments in how soils shape wine flavors have continued. But while one can measure sugar or Brix level, and thus the direct impact of temperature on grapes, or can gauge the impacts of irrigation practices, no one has yet pinned down exactly how soils register in wine flavors or textures. Soil both grounds the concept of terroir and is widely understood to be a work in progress. If terroir is sometimes called “the magical property of somewhereness,” that place magic can be worked and amplified.2 Wine itself is often claimed to have magical properties. The biblical figuration of wine as the “blood of the grape,” which remained common in the early modern period, both assumes that grape juice is analogous to and can even substitute for human blood, and erases the role of human intervention in turning juice into wine (Deuteronomy 32:14; Genesis 49:11). The ancient idea that wine is born rather than made, and that it is human adjacent, persists in the widespread assertion that wine, unlike “other alcoholic drinks . . . isn’t a manufactured product.”3 Perhaps this is one reason that winemakers so often disguise or deny their interventions. Global industrial winemaking proceeds on a large scale, achieving what is often called an “international” style of wine, which is predictable, stable, ready to drink but able to travel and keep well. On a smaller scale, however,

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the fundamentals of wine production are under some dispute. Many of the people who are most self-conscious and articulate about their winemaking practices today seek in the history of viticulture, particularly what some identify as the premodern, an inspiration and resource for addressing pressing practical, environmental, and aesthetic challenges in the present.4 The premodern they revere precedes the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, antibiotics, monocultures, and heavy machinery. It might be more accurately called preindustrial. What, then, distinguishes the premodern world we have supposedly lost? Many of those who look to this past claim that changes in viticulture disrupted a premodern communion between humans and the earth, a communion we must now re-create. Both a censure of the past and an attempt to recover it, this story oversimplifies the seventeenth century, defining it as bad to the extent that it is modern, but good to the extent that it is premodern. This popular story obscures the very inbetween-ness that makes the seventeenth century in England and its colonies early modern, that is, sort of modern and sort of premodern. It also obscures the ways in which the present is even more indebted to the seventeenth century than we realize. Combined, winemakers’ conviction that the past matters and their confusion as to how issue an irresistible invitation to contemplate what early modernists know about our particular plot of the past, what we do not, and whether or how either knowing or not knowing could be useful. Since reverence for the past is often quite vague, as we will see, focusing on a specific time and place grants both traction and friction. But why choose seventeenth-century England? Even if that “there and then” has a certain claim as an influence on, if not an origin of, many North American attitudes, practices, and institutions, it does not leap to mind immediately when we think of wine. We tend to associate the United Kingdom now with beer rather than wine, largely because it remains a high-profile manufacturer and exporter of craft beer and ale. But as early as the fifteenth century, England influenced wine production as a market. Imported wine was widely available and regularly consumed; it was also subject to heavy import taxes and the ravages of time and travel. As a consequence, seventeenth-century writers, as part of their wide-ranging experimentation and reflection on agricultural possibilities and quality-of-life upgrades, tackled winemaking as an English history to be reclaimed and a promising venture, in both England and colonial Virginia.

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Time in a Bottle Wine is, in some ways, “untimely matter” in Jonathan Gil Harris’s resonant phrase.5 The wine in a glass now seems recognizably the same beverage as that whose dried traces linger in ancient amphorae. Since wine is now identified both by its grape and by its time and place of origin, we can taste another time and place in the glass, it is hoped, communing with other drinkers doing likewise. It is widely asserted that wine “tells the story of its origin,” and that a glass of wine “tells a story, first of that place, and second of that year.” Purportedly, then, to drink wine is to travel through time and space. The molecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern, for instance, describes his history of the human “quest” for alcohol, including wine, as “uncorking the past” and drinking wine as “drinking history.”6 But to value wine as conduit across time and place, one has to ignore the way that wine’s very dynamism makes it unpredictable and unstable: it opens up in a glass, it develops, but it also, disappointingly, fades or goes off. The notion that we can taste the past in a glass, and that drinking wine can connect us to our forebears, ignores all the ways in which how wine is made and what wine is have changed—and the fact that one of the most durable continuities about wine is its instability and inscrutability. What connects us to wine drinkers of the past is how much we do not know about and cannot control what we are drinking. The phylloxera epidemic of the 1860s arguably created an absolute divide between before and after. As is well known, phylloxera was a plague of aphid-like insects that attacked vine roots. Like every other major blight on grape vines (such as fungus and powdery mildew diseases), these insects came from the United States, spreading around the world with the fashion for gardening and the desire for exotic plant material. But the solution to this infestation ultimately came from the United States as well, in the form of native rootstock that had coevolved with the mites and so was resistant to them, onto which preferred grape varieties could be grafted. There are still some ungrafted vineyards today, but not many. Grafting Old World scions onto resistant New World rootstock helped protect them from New World pests, but it also undermined the distinction between old and new on which the world of fine wine still depends. As a result, that distinction is, on one level, a fiction. This crisis deeply distressed many wine drinkers who immediately claimed that the grapes never tasted the same, the wine was never the same. Their mournful conviction that something had been permanently lost

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persists in those who have never tasted a pre-phylloxera vintage. But it cannot be proved.7 The phylloxera epidemic was just another crisis in a long process of transplantation. While the prestige of some European vineyards depends on the belief that they are the perfect home for the grape vine, which cannot flourish just anywhere, that vine is not native to Europe. Vines appear to have been shipped for transplanting, for example, from the Levant to First Dynasty Egypt around 3000 bce.8 The history we can taste, then, is a history of movement and change. Outlandish experiments, like the English quest to create vineyards in England and colonial Virginia, were, though short-term failures, not that different from the experiments that spread viticulture. Furthermore, as climate changes, what is possible in any given locale is changing, too. The other chronological rupture in viticulture is one it shares with other forms of agriculture: the moment in the early twentieth century when an already industrialized farming system started to depend heavily on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The industrialization of wine has only continued, of course, with new grape clones, new responses to new pests, new kinds of equipment. The farming and winemaking practices that interest me are allied against these supposed advances, attempting to recapture earlier ways of farming and a paradise lost—but not, advocates insist, irreparably so. Starting in the nineteenth century, the discovery of bacteria’s role in making and spoiling wine opened up strategies for managing fermentation and for preserving wine. Before that, early moderns did not know how to control the effects of time and air on wines. As a result, they did not usually value older wines as better than younger ones. Time was not a friend to early modern wine, which was most consistently praised as “fresh,” “young,” or “brisk.” It was also understood to have its own timeline or life course, moving from grape must to the spent wines that formed the basis for spirit of wine (a wine concentrate or syrup), distilled spirits and medicines, or vinegar. Frugal housekeepers and tapsters found uses for wine at every stage in its timeline, from grape lees to vinegar, from new wine to distillations.9 Tackling wine as a work in progress, most who served wine, from housewives to coopers and tavernkeepers, artfully amended and blended it. We have more ways to protect and preserve wine—to save it—now. But precisely because winemakers today have so many ingredients and techniques available to them, the provenance and contents of the wine we drink now remain less certain than we sometimes like to think. Although many describe wine as a vehicle for tasting the time and place where grapes ripened, this

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wish glosses over the many interventions between vine and glass. What we know about early modern wine is that it was inscrutable: unstable, contaminated, mixed up. What we share with early modern drinkers, I contend, is uncertainty about what, exactly, is in the wine we drink. I consider here the interconnections between two modes of saving wine in both the seventeenth century and today: (1) preserving it from the ravages of time and decay, whatever it takes; and (2) redeeming it, often by exposing and decrying the processes and ingredients used to preserve it.

Blood of the Grape Despite the widespread consumption of beer in England, wine was a favored beverage for most of the seventeenth century, until coffee, tea, chocolate, and distilled spirits diversified beverage options and challenged its monopoly. Most people drank fermented beverages of one kind or another rather than water. Valueless at best, contaminated at worst, water was only considered potable if it was amended with honey, sugar, or wine or boiled. Water was so disparaged that one English prisoner of war complained in his account of his captivity by the French that he and his fellow sufferers had “no other drink but water.” He recounts the improvement in their circumstances in terms of their upgrade from water to wine. Wine had sacramental meanings, of course, in the communion cup at the center of the celebration of the mass as well as in its supposed inversion, the witches’ sabbath. Its status as sacrament depended on its capacity for transformation––its ability to become or be experienced as something else––as well as its ability to change and bind its consumers. It was the lubricant of good fellowship, from households to taverns to palaces. A standard gift to and from royals and among aristocrats, it was so prized that it was the object of piracy and profiteering; Sir Francis Drake, for instance, seized wine from the Spanish. Fortunes were made in importing wine. Elizabeth I rented out or farmed the right to collect customs duties on all imported sweet wines to her particular favorites, first Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and later the Earl of Essex. While it could be a luxury good, and a marker of elite status, wine was also a crucial part of the recompense for servants, high and low.10 Wine, then, stood as a daily drink in palaces and public houses even as it had particular significance in part because of its biblical and sacramental precedents and its visual resemblance to and conceptual resonance with blood.

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In early modern England, blood and wine were associated on the most basic level by their appearance: the wine most widely drunk and discussed usually seems to have been red because red wine did a somewhat better job of disguising the effects of time and decay. Even wines we might now think of as white, including sack or sherry, Rhenish, and canary, were sometimes made from red grapes, raisins, or a mixture of grapes. These so-called white wines were sometimes associated with urine, as the red wine on which I will focus here was associated with blood. White or red, wine was, for the most part, oxidized, dark, and sticky.11 Blood and wine were also assumed to have analogous functions in human and plant bodies and to be compatible, even interchangeable. As we will see, promoters of growing grapes and making wine in England and its colonies drew on the association between blood and wine to justify their enterprise. The biblical characterization of wine or juice as the blood of the grape suggests the ways that an understanding of human anatomy, however flawed, served as the model for understanding plant anatomy by analogy. As the circulation of blood was gradually understood, so the sap in trees and vines and the juice in fruits came to be understood as circulating through plants and essential to their vitality.12 The analogy between blood and wine both holds and breaks down in equally interesting ways. On the most basic level, the analogy obscures the distinction between the sap of a tree or vine and the juice of its fruit. It also ignores the fact that juice is not wine in the grape but requires time and intervention to become wine. Yet, in most of their discussions on wine, early modern writers were acutely, uncomfortably aware that what was in the glass was not just what had been pressed out of the grape and that wine changed over time. Even before the operations of yeast and bacteria in wine were understood, wine was recognized as dynamic, for ill and for good. William Harvey used the resemblance between blood and wine to explain what he saw as the loss in vitality that occurred when blood left the body: “In their different ways blood and spirit . . . mean one and the same thing. For, as wine with all its bouquet gone is no longer wine but a flat vinegary fluid, so also is blood without spirit no longer blood but the equivocal gore. As a stone hand or a hand that is dead is no longer a hand, so blood without the spirit of life is no longer blood, but is to be regarded as spoiled immediately it has been deprived of spirit.”13 Harvey compares shed blood to flat wine; both have lost their spirit. In her influential study of humoral medicine and the early modern body, Gail Kern Paster points to the proverb “There is no difference of bloods in a basin” to demonstrate that blood could only do its job of asserting social

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distinctions when it was inside the body. Once out of the body, Paster argues, blood lost its “spirit or driving force” to become “waste matter to be disposed of.”14 Yet Harvey’s description of “equivocal” gore suggests that blood as it leaves the body is both in and out, living and dead. It is the sap of life in the process of coagulating into a thing. Wine too was both living and dead. This equivocal status links it to soil, as we have seen in the last two chapters, and to hedges, as we will see in Chapter 4. Blood’s equivocal status outside the human body and the analogy between blood and wine informed even the most practical early modern agricultural advice. With regard to pruning, for example, one treatise advises that vines will bleed “themselves to death” if they are pruned too late in the season. In agricultural manuals, we find both a lingering association of blood with pollution and blight—in the advisory, for example, that a menstruating woman who walks among plantings will wither them—and a particular value placed on blood as a soil enrichment, especially for vines. In several of his texts, for example, Hugh Plat reports that “blood laid at the roots of old vines, hath been commended for an excellent substance to hearten them,” although he advises care in the use of so rich and hot a compost. John Evelyn advises that “blood is excellent almost with any soil where fruit is planted, especially the mural [by which he means trees grown against and fastened to walls], to improve the blood of the grape of great advantage, being somewhat diluted, and poured about the roots.”15 The figuration of wine as the “blood of the grape” allows Evelyn to link soil amendment and outcome, suggesting a natural affinity between the two. (We, too, put blood and bones in our gardens but usually in composted forms that protect us from thinking about their origins.) Shed blood found value as a fertilizer precisely because it retained some of the vitality it supposedly lost when it left the body, enabling it to add the juice of life to grapevines. On the level of figuration, widely varied texts register this common agricultural practice. In Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Bishop of Carlisle warns that if Henry is crowned, “the blood of English shall manure the ground” (4.1.137) and, at the end of the play, the new King Henry IV laments “that blood should sprinkle me to make me grow” (5.6.46). Francisco in John Webster’s play The White Devil conjectures that, if Vittoria is as evil as others think, then As in cold countries husbandmen plant vines, And with warm blood manure them, even so One summer she will bear unsavory fruit, And ere next spring wither both branch and root.16

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Both plays acknowledge the practice of using blood as compost and suggest that it boosts growth even if its fruits are “unsavory” and short-lived. Like blood used as manure, civil war and regicide, adultery and murder, are simultaneously violent and generative. Just as blood’s resemblance to wine distinguished it as especially beneficial compost, so wine’s resemblance to blood underpinned its medicinal value. This is captured in variations on the proverb “Good wine makes good blood.” Some discussions of the benefits of wine defended it not just as a supplement to the blood but almost as a substitute for it. In his treatise The Tree of Human Life, or, the Blood of the Grape, Tobias Whitaker, physician in the household of Charles I, contends that wine has a vital heat, as if it were exuded by a living body, as if it had a soul. It therefore benefits the body and especially builds up the blood because, he writes, “wine, especially Claret or red, is sanguified”; it is, he elaborates in a later edition, “half blood before it be received.” While the verb “sanguify” was usually used to describe how the body or an organ (such as the liver) produces blood, Whitaker uses the passive construction to capture how wine has been made blood before it enters the body. He seems to mean that wine is always equivocal, part itself and part blood, and poised for further transubstantiation. He claims to have witnessed, in himself and others, wine drinkers’ “consumptive and extenuate [or shrunken] bodies restored to a farcocity [which seems to mean fullness or plenitude as if restuffed], and from withered bodies to fresh, plump, fat and fleshy; and from old and infirm to young and strong.” Wine suits itself to different humors and persons, giving each what he or she needs. Whitaker’s word for the affinity between blood and wine is “homogeneal”: wine is “homogeneal, pleasant and familiar to human constitutions and tempers.” Recounting that he himself was cured of consumption by wine, Whitaker concludes that wine “in purity” exceeds “all spermatic humors, sucked either from women, or beasts.” Just as blood might fertilize vines, so wine is sometimes depicted as a kind of fertilizer for human health. For example, Falstaff attributes Prince Hal’s “heat” to his diet: “for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father he hath, like lean, sterile, and bare land, manured, husbanded, and tilled, with excellent endeavor of drinking good, and good store of fertile sherry, that he is become very hot and valiant” (Henry IV, Part 2, 4.2.105–9).17 Discussions of the medical benefits and risks of wine rehearse arguments that will later be made about blood transfusion. Receiving wine as a kind of blood supplement or replacement can restore and replenish. But it can also invade and infect. If wine’s close association with blood constitutes its benefit

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for Whitaker, it is also what worries some other commentators. John Worlidge, in Vinetum Britannicum: Or a Treatise of Cider (1678), follows Whitaker in explaining that “there is no drink more homogeneal to the blood than wine, the spirit thereof being the best vehicle of any medicine to the most remote parts that the blood circulates in.” Worlidge refers here to spirit of wine, an important late stage in the life of wine; distilling or boiling wine down to a spirit or concentrate saved it for other uses, including serving as a carrier for medicines or an addition that might preserve other wines. While, as we saw, Harvey suggested that spent wine had lost its spirit, we might say that, at the end of its life, wine became a spirit and found new life thereby. But, for Worlidge, wine’s role as a carrier and the “homogeneality” between blood and wine might also make wine dangerous: “therefore if any evil mixture be in it, the more it operates, and is soonest conveyed to the heart and all other parts of the body.” In other words, because wine is so like blood, it will convey contamination all too efficiently. “If it be new, that is to say, under the age of a year, or be set into a new fermentation by the addition of new wine or stum [grape must], it purges, and puts the blood into a fermentation, that it endangers the health of him that drinks it, and sometimes his life.” Whereas relatively new wine that is being raised into a new fermentation is too busy for the blood, older wine poses the problem that it is usually spoiled. “If it be old wine, which is commonly the best, then the vintner’s cunning in preserving it, and making it palatable by his secret and concealed mixtures, renders it dangerous to be drunk either fasting, or in great quantity; many having died suddenly merely by drinking of such wine.”18 The problems with wine, then, are problems that every English writer on wine in the early modern period discusses: deterioration and adulteration. It was so difficult to stabilize wine in this period that virtually everyone doctored it in one way or another. Those who recommended these interventions called them managing, amending, correcting, preserving, curing, remedying, restoring, recovering, meliorating, reinforcing, sustaining, and recruiting wines. Strategies for preserving and improving wines might have been as benign as the addition of herbs and spices. They included variations on what have since become reliable methods: increasing its sugar level (with added sugar, honey, raisins, spirit of wine, or bastard—a blend of wine and honey); or using a preservative in the form of vitriol (a metal sulfate) or sulfur. Early modern wine amenders knew that the ancient Greeks had put sulfur in their wines to keep them from “fuming”; some experimented with this preservative, which is still widely used in winemaking, although early modern writers

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described it as a purifier as much as a preservative. In addition, other attempts were made to clear cloudy wines or remove impurities. These included boiling or smoking, and adding vinegar, milk, wood shavings, powdered marble or alum (an astringent mineral salt), egg whites, parel (a mixture of eggs and other ingredients which might include alum, salt, and water or milk), and isinglass (fish gelatin), on the argument that these additives will bond with any foulness or filth in the wine and cause it to sink to the bottom. Pigeon droppings were even recommended to make wines sparkle. This list itself should suggest the dangerous potential of such additions. Widely practiced then, they are not so different from standard practice now, as we will see. Beverages made by mixing different kinds of wine or combining wine with sweeteners and other ingredients were routinely disparaged as “bastard,” a widely used term for an often-drunk, sweetened or mixed wine, and as “balderdash.”19 Both terms signal something spurious or deceptive in these mixtures. But while bastard’s name announced that it was blended and sweetened, most other wines were as well. In the early modern period, wine amendment was recognized as widespread and denounced as fraud. What went into the barrel, then, was a bit more eclectic than it is now. But, then as now, amending wine was part of the standard business of storing and serving it. In early modern England, most wine probably tasted pretty terrible. Making it tasty was as miraculous as turning it into blood or gold. As a consequence, some discussions of the adulteration of wine, in the guise of amendment, assign to those who doctor wines a kind of priestly or alchemical presumption. Plat points out that coopers not only “hoop the vessels” in which wine is stored but blend and amend wines, to the profit of merchants and vintners. How, he asks, do they learn the “great variety of juggling” they practice? How is it that “these plain fellows that never read their grammar, nor scarcely know their A, B, C, should be able to run through Ovid’s Metamorphosis as they do at midnight”? Plat goes on to describe “these alterations, transmutations, and sometimes even real transubstantiations of white wine into claret, and old lags [dregs] of sacks or malmseys with molasses into muscadels.” John Evelyn, in Pomona (1679), a treatise on cider making, reviews the various ways of amending wine in order to warn readers off wine and win them over to cider. He concludes: “If health be more precious than opinion, I wish our admirers of wines, to the prejudice of cider, beheld but the cheat themselves; the sophistications, transformations, transmutations, adulterations, bastardizings, brewings, trickings, not to say even arsenical compassings of the sophisticated God they adore,” that is, wine. Evelyn’s noun “compassings” gestures toward both

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contrivances and compost. In the satirical dialogue In Vino Veritas, Chip the Cooper presents the amendment of wine as a kind of alchemical transformation. “Wines in general are not only abominably sophisticated, but lamentably metamorphized; the very Rosicrucians themselves transmute not metals so much as you and we do liquors.”20 These comparisons simultaneously elevate and disparage the amendment of wine, expressing distrust of all processes of “sophisticating” in its now-rare meaning of mixing something “with some foreign or inferior substance,” thereby rendering it impure or artificial and robbing it of its simplicity or wholesomeness (OED). Rather than turning wine into blood, vinous magicians turn wine into poison. Even as they were associated with the occult, the foreign, and the priestly–– not to mention the villainous or criminal––wine amenders were right at home. Relatively humble yet presumptuous workers undertook these transubstantiations and metamorphoses in taverns and households in England; even housewives might righteously engage in vinous adulterations and bastardizations.21 Their efforts might have clarified wines, but they also muddied their origins. Renaissance drinkers did not taste another season and climate as much as they sampled a fragile compromise cooked up in a London tavern or a Yorkshire kitchen. Layers of time, place, and agency commingled in a single mouthful. When transubstantiations occur in English wine shops rather than in French vineyards, at the hands of coopers, tavern keepers, and housewives, is the wine that results domestic or foreign? Amendment both adulterates wine and, arguably, domesticates it. Those who believed in the “real transubstantiations” of Catholic ritual and the Rosicrucian transmutations of alchemy were widely ridiculed as gullible, colluding in their own deception. Descriptions of wine amendment as parallel to transubstantiation or alchemy placed wine drinkers in their ignominious company: wine drinkers, too, were simultaneously desirous and dumb. Merchants could get away with adulteration because “not one in ten of our chaps knows the difference, if it be but (thought) wine, it goes down cleverly; poor fools, they have not wit enough to distinguish good from bad, except it be very plain indeed, dead or sour.” One vintner supposedly boasted that “nothing was so easy, as to deceive men’s palates, in themselves various, uncertain, and often misled by fancy and humor; that a little supple-cringing, a few fair words, and a positive asserting it to be such or such wine, neat and rare, carried it off cleverly.” In the epilogue to As You Like It, Rosalind reminds the audience of the proverb that a “good wine needs no bush,” that is, that good wine needs no advertising (Epilogue, line 3).22 But critics of wine in early

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modern England warn that bad wine needs only “a few fair words” to pass it off as good. Like alchemists and priests, the logic goes, vintners cunningly deceive their targets. In exposés of the processes used to “save” wine, we have found an extraordinary array of verbs. These range from “ordering, preserving, and helping” wines (the title of Gervase Markham’s chapter on the subject) to verbs that link wine amendment to more suspect processes of transformation. Those more negative verbs obscure how much wine amendment had in common with the processes of composting waste, “marrying earths,” and amending soils through mixture, which we considered in the first chapter. What is more, as we have seen, textual production and consumption depended on additions, subtractions, and recombinations. Amendment was something many authors did. Yet, when it came to wine, mixing, adding, and revising were as suspect as they were common. Vintners were thought to engage in “unwholesome mixtures.” The result might be a mixed-up taste: “as many different tastes, / As can be found in compound pastes, / In Lumber pie, or soporiferous mithridate.” Richard Haines concedes that “many people are much against mixtures in drink” and reassures the wary that “’tis not all mixtures, but dangerous or improper mixtures which ought to be avoided.” The acceptable mixture adds like to like, for instance, sugar or wine syrup to wine. Yet figural uses of wine concede that wine is a mingling from the start, as many grapes form one wine. As we have seen in Chapter 1, William Cavendish compares “Love’s Transmigration” to “sweeter grapes, whose squeezed juice is divine / Mingling ourselves, making but one pure wine.”23 The widespread awareness that imported wines were almost invariably adulterated motivated the claim that honest beverages of English manufacture would be better for English constitutions—despite the fact that much of the alteration of imported wine probably took place in England. The quest to make English wine which can rival that of the Continent continues today, receiving an assist from global climate change. The desire to make wine in England in the seventeenth century emerged first from concerns about punitive import taxes, the costs of transport, and, before reliable ways of stabilizing wines, the inevitable loss in flavor with time and transit, as well as the risks of additives. But it gained urgency from what Mary Floyd-Wilson calls geohumoralism— the presumed relationship between body and place, health and location. Sir Thomas Browne robustly refuses this notion when he claims, in Religio Medici, that “I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and symphathizes with all things. I have no antipathy—or rather idiosyncrasy—in diet, humor, air,

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anything. . . . I am no plant that will not prosper out of a garden; all places, all airs, make unto me one country—I am in England everywhere, and under any meridian.”24 In Chapter 2, we saw expressions of confidence that the English could endenizen plants while remaining fundamentally English wherever they went. But many also persisted in the belief that sympathy bound body, birth, and diet (among other things) and that the foreign was antipathetic. By this logic, if blood and wine are analogous, even fungible, then it is perilous to infuse English bodies with foreign blood. At a time of agricultural innovation at home and colonial expansion abroad, defenders of English winemaking drew on the claim that wine was not just any food or beverage but had the potential for a more intimate relationship to the body—for good or ill—in order to argue that English wine would best suit English bodies. One of the earliest and most influential articulations of this argument appears, ironically, in Richard Surflet’s English translation of Maison Rustique, or The Country Farm (first translated in 1600). But howsoever foreign wines which are fetched from far countries may seem pleasant unto our taste, yet indeed the truth is that we are not to use them except it be with as great advice and judgment as may be, because that besides their manifest outward qualities, they have also close and hidden ones, which indeed may become familiar and well agreeing through some sympathy with the inhabitants of those countries where the said wines grow; but unto us they are enemies, by an antipathy or contrariety which is betwixt them and us, which are of a soil and country far unlike.25 Foreign wines keep secrets from their drinkers, chief of which is their own status as enemies rather than friends. In 1665, William Hughes’s The Complete Vineyard assured his English readers that English wine was “most natural to our constitutions” as part of a project to “advance our English wines.” At the end of the seventeenth century, England’s Happiness Improved . . . Containing the Art of Making Wine of English Grapes . . . Equal to that of France and Spain, later reissued as Vinetum Angliae, makes this case for the health benefits of English wine for English drinkers: “Those liquors produced from our natural growth . . . are far more agreeable to the constitution of English bodies, contributing to health and lively vigor, and if not taken in excess, which indeed in all things is hurtful, they lengthen years and free old age from those calamities that adulterated wines and foreign liquors make it obnoxious to, in the pains,

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aches, and many diseases that their sediments entail, by corrupting the good or creating bad humors in the body.” The sympathetic beverage, then, is not local as much as national.26 Proposals to save the English from their dependence on imported and spoiled wines reveal an unsettling question at the heart of geohumoralism. How much can climate and consumption transform racial or ethnic identity? In its link to blood, wine both stood for absolute differences among people and for the ways that daily practices might remake them. Wine sometimes figured racial and ethnic distinction, as when, in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Salerio uses wine to describe the racial distinction between Shylock and his daughter Jessica on which he insists: “There is more difference . . . between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish” (3.1.32–34). But Salerio’s chosen comparison belies his confidence in legible distinctions. As we have seen, wine was widely associated not with legibility and purity but with mixture, impurity, and the impossibility of pinpointing origins or knowing contents. The widespread amendment of wine might be disparaged by analogy to miscegenation: George Sacheverell, for instance, argues that adulterated wines “Like the base issue of a mongrel rape / Doth quite degenerate from the genuine race, / And the high blood in that rich juice debase.” Depending on the affiliation of wine and blood, Sacheverell here uses the meaning of race particular to wine––“the particular stock or breed of grape from which a wine is made; a particular class of wine; the characteristic flavor of this, supposedly influenced by the soil” (OED, 8a). In the final part of its definition, the OED suggests that this use of race, which it first records in 1520, is linked to what we now call “terroir.” The OED also links this usage to the more familiar meanings of race as a grouping of persons, plants, or animals. Sacheverell’s simile confirms that this meaning is closely linked to the more familiar meaning of classifying and hierarchizing humans in groups and the attendant assumption that mixture can debase the supposedly high or pure. In discussions of wine amendment, we find the conventional early modern disparagement of mixture that, I argued in Chapter 1, was suspended in instructions for making compost and amending soil. Whereas soil amendment required and valued mixture, wine amendment was both widely practiced and disparaged as a sullying and sophisticating combination of dissimilar ingredients. If, as Urvashi Chakravarty argues, “to speak of blood is to speak of race,” to speak of blood and race in the seventeenth century was often to speak of wine as well, and to assign wine the power not just to figure racial and ethnic distinctions and degenerations but to shape them.27

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Even those texts that promoted cider as a substitute for wine were also based on the idea that the locally produced would be most salubrious for English drinkers. As the author of a pamphlet recounting the death of three persons from “drinking of adulterated white wine” asks: “For what drink possibly can be more congruous to an English constitution than that of cider?” John Worlidge, in his treatise on beverage making in England, Vinetum Britannicum, argues that cider and juices of “English Fruits” are the best drinks for English bodies. Not only will making fermented beverages out of apples and pears spare expense, but these drinks “(being once accustomed) will be as proper and wholesome for our English bodies as French wines, if not more.”28 Note that English bodies must become accustomed over time to this proper and wholesome beverage, as they have to French wines. This will be progress rather than a return. Promoters of English beverages argue that imported wine renders the English slavishly dependent on other countries; it has suffered in transit; and it lacks some ineffable property that suits English-grown and English-made drinks to English bodies. So, even arguments for cider rather than wine depend on a subtle association of wine and blood, body, place, and drink. Although geohumoralism underpins some of these arguments, whether in favor of making wine in England or replacing wine with other Englishmade beverages, the definitions of the English and the local remain pliant. To begin with, those who promote English winemaking argue that it is not new but rather a reclamation of a lost art, traces of which survive in English place names, histories, and gardens. What was once known has since, somehow, been forgotten. The history of grape growing and winemaking in England is a history of colonization of one kind or another. In his history of Britain, William Camden dwells on the legacy of the Romans in planting vines “rather for shade than fruit.” He also insists that the landscape itself reveals a past that might offer hope of a future: “We have no cause to wonder, why many places in this country and elsewhere in England are called Vineyards, seeing it hath afforded wine.” John Parkinson adds that “many monasteries in this kingdom having vineyards, had as much wine made therefrom, as sufficed their convents year by year: but long since they have been destroyed, and the knowledge how to order a vineyard is also utterly perished with them.”29 The history of English vines and winemaking that serves as precedent and inspiration is, then, a history of transplants, occupation, and decline. Thus, paradoxically, the solution to the problem of imports and the mismatch of foreign wine with English blood lies in different imports: importing

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plant starts and know-how from the Continent. “Vines themselves have sometimes been Strangers as well in Italy as in Britain,” one writer reminds his readers. Like other plants that have become stalwarts of English gardens, staples in the English diet, vines “in a few years may become naturalized to our soil.”30 Again. Once we introduce the idea of naturalizing or endenizening plants—a crucial consideration in the many treatises on soil amendment and agricultural innovation in the period, as we saw in Chapter 2—then the difference between native and imported quickly collapses—on one level. On another, this distinction proves to be remarkably flexible and therefore durable. The local is not what comes from here but what has been localized, made to flourish here. If vines once grew in England, as various writers aver, then why didn’t sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England produce wines that could compete with French wines, already the gold standard? Writers at the time acknowledged differences of soil and climate. Parkinson, for instance, claims that even those who have brought in French experts, “being skillful in keeping and dressing of vines,” have failed to make drinkable wine. “And, indeed, the soil is a main matter to be chiefly considered to seat a vineyard upon: for even in France and other hot countries, according to the nature of the soil, so is the relish, strength, and durability of the wine.” Parkinson insists that it is hopeless to try to make good wine in England especially because “our years in these times do not fall out to be so kindly and hot, to ripen the grapes, to make any good wine as formerly they have done.”31 In Parkinson’s view, then, climate had disrupted a tradition going back to the Romans. The cold summers Parkinson mentions can be attributed to what is now called the Little Ice Age (LIA), a marked drop in temperature from 1300 to 1850, which was particularly acute from the late sixteenth century to about 1660. In a special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History on the Little Ice Age, Morgan Kelly and Cormac O’Grada find “little sign that any such event occurred.” They particularly focus on refuting the contention that “late medieval England suffered the collapse of its grape cultivation and wine production due to cooling temperatures,” since this claim is, in their view, “one of the most resonant pieces of evidence adduced for the LIA.” They do not document this claim, citing discussions of climate trends in Burgundy rather than England, and ignoring contemporary sources. But English wine serves their purposes because it is a joke to begin with. They argue that there were never many vineyards in England and that the English simply did not try very hard to grow grapes because they could get wine they liked better cheaper from

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France. On one level, this is of course true. Yet, as we have seen, there were defenses of English grape growing and winemaking, and they emphasized that English wine would be cheaper than imports, at least as good, and better suited to English constitutions. Whether there could or should be an English wine industry was a debate, not a foregone conclusion. For Kelly and O’Grada, disparaging English wine fosters the enterprise of disparaging climate change. In the same volume, Sam White opposes Kelly and O’Grada point by point, but he actually joins them in dismissing the significance of wine, arguing that “the entire issue is irrelevant, and their discussion is misleading. England was never known for its wine industry (although global warming could change that). The LIA is hardly necessary to explain its demise.” We should note White’s parenthetical acknowledgment that global warming is offering an assist to English winemaking. For White, wine in England is a “tangential matter” and “an easy target to avoid confronting the serious evidence.”32 I would counter that wine is one of the agricultural products through which both producers and consumers register (or must find inventive ways to evade registering) the impact of climate change, then and now. Parkinson and his contemporaries had no explanations for dropping temperatures nor could they predict how or when the climate might change again. How, then, could the English return to making wine? Many blamed a loss of expertise and will, so as to insist that humans alone were the problem and therefore could be the solution. What had been done, they insisted, could be done again. When we look at seventeenth-century sources, we find a shared assumption that English wine production had declined and debate regarding why that had happened and whether it could be reversed. Many writers counter all arguments against disadvantages of soil and climate. Plat, for example, blames “the extreme negligence, and blockish ignorance of our people, who do most unjustly lay their wrongful accusations upon the soil, whereas the greatest, if not the whole fault justly may be removed upon themselves.”33 The English must overcome their ignorance—by learning from skilled winemakers elsewhere. The son of a London brewer, Plat was especially interested in English beverage manufacture because he inherited and ran taverns; sold beer, wine, and spirits; and made wine from grapes he grew himself. He boasted that his wine was “rich, and of a strong boiling nature” and would keep for “a whole year, and sometimes longer, without any show of fainting deadness, or discoloring: which is as much as any vintner can well require in his best French wines.” Touting his own vintage, Plat also draws our attention to the limited life span

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expected for all wines, homemade and imported. In his Floraes Paradise, Plat offers his wine as a “new, rare, and profitable invention,” second only to secrets in metallurgy. He identifies women as particularly appreciative consumers of his homemade English wine. Defending it as just as good as imports, he avows that “if any exception should be taken against the race and delicacy” of his homemade wines, “I am content to submit them to the censure of the best mouths that profess any true skill in the judgment of high country wines,” adding that the French ambassador said “that he never drank any better new wine in France.” “Race” can mean many things in Plat’s praise for his wine, but it seems most likely that he refers to the meaning specific to wine which I just mentioned, that is, a kind or class of wine, its essence or spirit, and a distinctive taste that links product to place. Race here is, then, an early word for “terroir,” what makes Plat’s wine distinctly his, what distinguishes it from others.34 Plat was not the only one experimenting with winemaking. Barnaby Googe, in an “Epistle to the Reader” in his translation of Heresbach’s Four Books of Husbandry, mentions that, at the time he is writing in the late sixteenth century, at an “ancient house” at Chilwell, in Nottingham, there “remains yet as an ancient monument in a great window of glass the whole order of planting, pruning, stamping, and pressing of vines. Besides, there is yet also growing an old vine, that yields a grape sufficient to make a right good wine, as was notably proved by a gentlewoman in the said house.” This great window might have included a roundel like this one, made in Norwich in the late fifteenth century, depicting the harvesting of grapes (Figure 3). The Chilwell gentlewoman is then the preserver of an ancient tradition, like the window, like the vine, and also an innovator who “proves” that it is possible to reclaim a lost past so as to realize a future for English wine. But she is also a privileged person with the freedom to experiment. Gervase Markham suggests that winemaking is an upper-class indulgence. Some in England have planted vineyards, he concedes, and he hopes they have prospered, but “great works are only for great men,” and, we might add, women, and “not for the plain English husbandman” who can, at best, grow table grapes on a warmed wall in a glass house.35 The compendious text Samuel Hartlib His Legacy (1652), which was published by Hartlib but for which the sections on wine were written by Robert Childs, points to “some ingenious gentlemen” who “usually make wine very good, long lasting, without extraordinary labor and cost,” especially one in Kent, identified in the margin as Sir Peter Ricard, who “yearly makes 6 or 8 hogsheads, which is very much commended by divers who have tasted it, and he hath kept some of it two years, as he himself told me, and it hath been very

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Figure 3. Medieval stained glass roundel, c. 1480, made in Norwich, showing a worker cutting grapes. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

good.” But this text also recounts that “lately in Surrey a gentlewoman told me, that they having many grapes, which they could not well tell how to dispose of, she, to play the good housewife, stamped them to make verjuice; but two months after drawing it forth, they found it very fine brisk wine, clear like rock water. And in many other places such experiments have been made.” The one “she” stands out amid the three “theys,” trumpeting the moment when she resolves their uncertainty and we learn what motivated her, the desire to play the good housewife and outwit the ravages of time. Similarly, William Coles’s Adam in Eden: or, Nature’s Paradise, also published in the 1650s, hails the effort of a single woman: “And though many of our vines be of the same kind with those in France, yet they seldom come to maturity, to make so good wine as theirs, our country being colder. However, I have heard of wine made in England of grapes growing in Mrs. Pit’s garden at Harrow on the Hill” (on the outskirts of London).36 The praise for the effort of a single woman in Surrey or Harrow on the Hill suggests the sliding scale of the local, which most often boiled down

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to one gentlewoman or ingenious gentleman, one old vine, one year’s glut of grapes, one housewifely scheme. But the local could also extend as far as English colonies, especially Virginia, in which the English aspired to make “English” wine with either native or imported grapes. These projects sought both to demonstrate that the English could do anything the French and Spanish could do and to lessen their dependence on costly imports. Any wine made from grapes under English control, wherever those might grow, and made for an English market, could be considered English. The venture of making English wine in the Americas began with the earliest English travelers seeing vines growing all over the ground and up the trees. Every early account of Virginia, every attempt to promote colonization, mentions these wild vines, which grew everywhere “though never pruned nor manured.” Because of them, viticulture was central to the plans for the colony from the start. This was not necessarily because colonists were eager to make wine. Most expected that in Virginia they would not have access to it. Instead, the Virginia Company itself promoted wine as one of the commodities settlers could produce and export. In promotional tracts and correspondence, we find frequent promises of a future for Virginia wine. Someone knew someone who had made drinkable wine. John Smith, for example, claimed the colonists made “near 20 gallons of wine, which was near as good as your French British wine” from “hedge grapes.” “A plentiful vintage” was always right around the corner. But attempts to back up promises with product fell short. Some colonists did make wine and sent it back to London. But in 1622, the Council of the Virginia Company wrote to the governor and Council of Virginia that the wine they had sent back “was by long carrying spoiled but principally by the musty cask wherein it was put, so that it hath been rather of scandal than credit unto us.”37 By this report, the problem was not only the quality of the wine but the perennial problem of preserving it, in this case during an even longer sea voyage than that between, say, France and England. The solutions proposed again depended on imports of one kind or another. Even some of the most optimistic projections move quickly from spotting native grapes to a somewhat more realistic assessment of what winemaking would actually entail. Robert Johnson, writing in an early Virginia Company publication, assures readers that “we doubt not but to make there in few years store of good wines, as any from the Canaries,” referring to the Spanish Canary Islands off the coast of Africa and the popular fortified sweet white wines they produced. Canary meant, interchangeably, both the place and its product. Even this early text, promoting the profits to be achieved by planting

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in Virginia, proceeds to explain all that must be done to make this English Virginia Canary: it will be achieved “by replanting and making tame the vines that naturally grow there in great abundance; only send men of skill to do it, and coopers to make cask[s] and hoops for that and all other uses, for which there is wood enough at hand.”38 Attempts to tame the vines quickly gave way to an emphasis on imported plant starts. Native grapes, while hearty and abundant, did not make good wine. They tasted “foxy.” Vitis vinifera was not native to North America, and would not flourish there (until grafted onto native stock). Precisely because there were native grapes, there were native pests and diseases to which those grapes had developed resistance—but European grapes had not. “Thus the very fact that America had native vines, which so excited the early settlers with the promise of winemaking, was the cause of the European vine’s failure there.”39 While growing grapes and making wine were more skilled operations than was sometimes assumed, even the most expert winemaker could not make European wine out of native grapes or make transplanted European vines resistant to American pests and diseases. They could not know that, of course, so they busily imported “vignerons,” a word the English imported from the French to describe how farming and winemaking conjoin in the expertise of one person who “cultivates grape vines” and is a “winegrower.” Some of these experts seem to have arrived as early as 1610. The Virginia Company again sent “divers skillful vignerons” out in 1619 (the year that the first African slaves arrived in Virginia from Angola), “with store also from hence of vineplants of the best sort.” One later account of the fate of these experts suggests that they objected to the conditions under which they worked. According to Edward Williams in 1650, the vignerons did not impart their knowledge because they resented their working conditions: “Those contracted with as hired servants for that employment, by what miscarriage I know not, having promise broken with them, and compelled to labor in the quality of slaves, could not but express their resentment of it, and had a good color of justice to conceal their knowledge, in recompense of the hard measure offered them, which occasioned the laying aside of that noble staple, the diligent prosecution whereof, had by this time brought Virginia to an absolute perfection in it, and to a great degree of happiness and wealth which would attend it.” If only it had been otherwise, Williams writes, “from hence might Barbados, St. Christopher’s, and all our islands in the Indies, have richer, better, and . . . much cheaper wines transported to them from a place much nearer in distance than Spain or the Canaries.” By forcing their imported vignerons to labor “in

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the quality of slaves,” Williams complains, the colonists had lost the chance to supply English wines to the very islands on which the English were establishing slave systems to produce other luxury commodities such as sugar. The settlers so resented the perceived refusal of the French vignerons to help them make wine in Virginia that an act of assembly in 1632 directed that French vignerons and their families should not be allowed to plant tobacco on the charge that they had withheld their skill, ruined the vineyard, and doomed the chances that wine could rival tobacco as an export.40 The Virginia Company and the Crown struggled to turn the colonists themselves into vignerons. In 1622 the Virginia Company, at James I’s command, sent a guidebook, “published by authority,” for every householder. John Bonoeil, who was master of the king’s silkworms and had recruited and overseen the work of the French vignerons in Virginia, wrote the instructions included in His Majesties Gracious Letter to the Earl of Southampton, . . . commanding the present setting up of silk-works, and planting of vines in Virginia. One report suggests that the colonists were not moved by the books promoting various industries. One Captain Butler, “expecting according to their printed books a great forwardness of divers and sundry commodities,” found little evidence of any industry underway when he arrived in 1622; he claimed that the colonists disparaged the printed books that had raised his expectations: “The pamphlets that had been published, their being sent thither by hundreds, were laughed to scorn and every base fellow boldly gave them the lie in divers particulars. So that tobacco only was the business and for ought that I could hear every man madded upon that and little thought or looked for anything else.” Butler does not specifically mention wine, but the contempt for pamphlets might well have extended to Bonoiel’s. “Divers planters,” contested Captain Butler’s account, insisting that “but for [the] people’s deriding of these commodities or [the] books sent by the Company: we have never heard of any such scoffing or derisions but as the Governor and Counsel there are very desirous and have set forth Proclamations to cause all men to set both vines and mulberry trees, so the people generally are very desirous & forward to raise those former commodities of wine and silke, & likewise divers other good commodities.”41 Did proclamations “cause” men to plant vines or were the people “generally very desirous & forward” to produce wine as a “good commodity”? The Virginia Company does not seem to have relied on their planters’ inclinations or on written instructions. They lobbied for a law in 1619 that required every householder to plant and maintain ten vines “yearly” and learn to “dress a vineyard.” That law threatened death to anyone who would “rob any

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vineyard, or gather up the grapes,” as had earlier Virginia law codes. In 1625 the General Assembly passed a law requiring twenty vines be planted for every male over twenty years of age, but it was repealed in 1641. The last attempt to legally enforce grape growing and winemaking was an Act of Assembly in 1658 offering ten thousand pounds of tobacco to whoever “shall first make two tuns of wine [around 500 gallons] raised out of a vineyard made in this colony.” The Virginia Company continued to urge each governor to encourage winemaking. But by the end of the seventeenth century, this hope seems to have died. Tobacco enabled farmers to make a huge profit reliably. As a consequence, the most damaging punishment for unhelpful vignerons that could be imagined in 1632 was forbidding them to grow tobacco; the great reward imaginable for successful winemakers in 1658 was tobacco. Wine simply could not compete with tobacco as a cash crop.42 Even the most infamous wine in colonial Virginia seems to have been imported. According to one document, the colonists used it to achieve retribution for a 1622 attack by the Powhatan people on English settlers, which left 347 people (or a quarter of the English population in Virginia) dead. Writing in 1705, Robert Beverley, from whom we get the body count, described the attack as a consequence of overfamiliarity and friendship, since the natives had brought gifts of food, attacked from inside the colonists’ homes, where they were eating with them, and murdered them with “their own instruments and working tools.” “Divers planters” (the same ones who contested Captain Butler’s disappointment in their industry) insisted that the colonists had planted “divers vineyards” in “sundry places but all of them put back by the Massacre.” Butler did not see vineyards in 1623, they argued, because the Indians had destroyed them or at least disrupted their cultivation. The “massacre,” then, could justify the planters’ failure to grow grapes and make wine. This was just one way in which this attack proved to be useful to the surviving English in Virginia, as we also saw in Chapter 1. As Alison Games puts it, this attack “liberated the English from pretensions of amity.” The colonists then used the appearance of amity to get their revenge. They poisoned a barrel of sack and served it to Pamunkey people in 1623. As many as two hundred of them died.43 The main source of intelligence on this countermassacre is a letter which begins with a report that a ship from Spain including “19 butts of excellent good wines” (around 2,470 gallons) and other foodstuffs had arrived in good shape, and goes on to recount how Captain Tucker lured natives to toast “in sack, which was sent of purpose in the butt with Captain Tucker to poison

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them.”44 Tucker and his men also toasted, but from a separate supply of wine. Everyone who describes this massacre cites this one letter. But no one connects the end of the letter to its start. For obvious reasons, historians who tell this story focus on the impact of the poisoned sack and not its origin. But the possibility that the English depended on imported wine to avenge themselves and save their plantation underscores both the persistent cultural significance of wine and the failure to make it in Virginia. They depended on imported wine as they depended on corn from the natives. On the one hand, the colonists had already taught the Pamunkey people that wine was the beverage of fellowship, and could then exploit that expectation so as to poison them. On the other hand, for all the promise that they would, very soon, be making their own wine to rival the French, they do not seem to have had enough even for this nefarious purpose. They needed Spanish sack to achieve English revenge. As we have seen, the story of Virginia wine begins with plant sightings. People see vines and think this means they can make and export wine. There is a parallel between the stories of wine and tobacco—although tobacco quickly became the crop that defined and sustained the venture. In both cases, the English saw a plant growing in Virginia that they recognized: the vine or tobacco. Recognizing these plants inspired plans for cultivation. Quickly discovering that the native plant they had found was not really what they wanted, however, they turned to transplants from abroad. The resemblance between one cultivar and another both prompts and masks a process that depends not on exploiting a native but on transplanting. In the case of tobacco, that shift proved enormously and rapidly successful. But in the case of wine, the imported vines were vulnerable to diseases to which the native vines were resistant. They were not a solution. That solution would come centuries later with the grafting of European scions onto native American rootstocks. If the story begins with seeing plants—as recorded by explorers and promoters (some of whom, in fact, had never been to Virginia but had just read other books about it)—it then unfolds in books promoting winemaking, laws requiring it, and letters discussing it. The textual archive is rich. Yet wine does not figure importantly in accounts of early Virginia’s trade relations and manufactures.45 Nor does the project of making wine in Virginia register at Historic Jamestowne (the archaeological site). It survives only in one vitrine at the Jamestown Settlement (the living history site), devoted to “Failed Attempts with Silk and Wine.” We find exhibits of other industries the colonists attempted, such as glassmaking, and evidence of drinking vessels and coopers making barrels, but the attempts to grow grapes and make

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wine are invisible. What remains is the Williamsburg Winery’s “Jamestown Cellars Settlers’ Spiced Wine,” a “grape wine base, with added cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, clove, and allspice.” This is, the winery’s tasting notes advise, “a delightfully fun wine.” The label tells us it is “Prepared in the favored style of the 17th Century English Settlers.” That is, it is an amended wine. Spices and high sugar content work to obscure the wine’s taste. That taste of the past is a cover-up and a mashup. In the seventeenth century, the desire to plant vineyards in Virginia suggests that both Englishness and the local are adaptable, flexible concepts. Wine made in Virginia from imported vines by French experts might be English if the English control the colony and the plantings there. Wine made in England from imported vines that had been “naturalized” could become English enough to prove more wholesome for English bodies. But wines imported into England and doctored there are not English, no matter how they are transubstantiated. The local is an achievement rather than a given, a process as much as a place. It must be created and asserted through occupation and narration. The importance of English wine for English bodies was a story some promoters of an English wine industry told their readers, a story that drew on magical associations around blood that were simultaneously unraveling. The early modern writers I have been discussing assert that one’s blood and beverage should share the same country of origin. But then again, they also reveal that wine, wherever it seems to be from, is ultimately from foreign stock, at the same time that its adulteration is as likely to be domestic as outlandish: it is as much the composition of the merchant, cooper, or housewife as it is the blood of the grape. The visual resemblance so crucial to the assumed affinity of blood and wine might itself have been fabricated. Still, it remains a compelling myth that nature matches place, body, and plants, so that at our doorstep we find those foods, drinks, and medicines best suited to our needs, whose appearance providentially describes the sympathy between them and human bodies. An article in Woman’s Day magazine from 2012 states that healthy foods resemble the body parts they benefit. The article is illustrated with paired images of comestibles and organs; among the arresting juxtapositions of clam and testicle, sweet potato and pancreas, are red wine and blood. “Red wine, which is rich in antioxidants and polyphenols, including powerful resveratrol, looks like blood,” the author points out. Attempts to make recent scientific research readily accessible might seem at first to authorize and naturalize the venerable association of wine as “homogeneal” with blood. Early modern people sometimes claimed that resemblances between plants and bodily

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organs might indicate sympathy and thus be a guide to curative properties. While Michel Foucault locates this way of thinking in the sixteenth century, it clearly persisted into the seventeenth century and continues in the twentyfirst. In Botanologia: The British Physician or the Nature and Virtues of English Plants (1664), for example, Robert Turner argues that “God hath imprinted upon the plants, herbs, and flowers, as it were in hieroglyphics, the very signature of their virtues; . . . as, the nutmeg being cut, resembles the brain.”46 Resemblance might still be a useful mnemonic, as it is in the Woman’s Day story and in images one can easily find across the internet of, for instance, an artery shaped decanter (Figure 4) or a glass of red wine next to vials of blood. Resemblance does not prove a relationship between wine and blood that is somehow both magical and natural. But the persistence of these images demonstrates the continued investment in wine as human adjacent, a supplemental bodily fluid one can ingest.

Figure 4. Strange Carafe No. 5. Reproduced by permission of Etienne Meneau.

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Promoting a dream of English wine, the writers discussed here exploited the instability and figurative power of these two categories, blood and wine. In the process, they suggested, on the one hand, that blood and wine are markers of identity, rooting body, home, and dietary habit in one’s native soil, and, on the other, that one’s constitution, as fundamental as the blood in one’s veins, might be remade by daily practices and dietary choices. Describing the transformations required to make imported wines drinkable as transubstantiations and alchemical transformations, they simultaneously exposed the wines as frauds and emphasized their remarkable power. They argued that blood is precious and, ultimately, another waste product to be fed back into that hungry cannibal, the earth. With regard to wine, seventeenth-century writers and experimenters were not husbands of a timeless past but rather excavators and inventors of usable pasts in the service of imagining alternative futures. Today, visions of wine’s future, in England and elsewhere, claim authorization in part by referring back to a premodern past. But it often turns out that the past referred to is fabricated, and serves not to connect present to past as much as to obscure some of the kinds of continuities I have pointed out: a tradition, for instance, of contamination and mystification, rather than a history of purity lost. In early modern England, as we have seen, precisely because they invested wine with the power to save or harm the health of drinkers, writers who promoted experiments in beverage making at home and in Virginia struggled to save wine from time’s ravages through various interventions and to save England and the English from the taint of imports. Today, saving wine remains a cause. Sometimes the urgency driving winemakers resembles that of their seventeenth-century predecessors: exposing and avoiding amendments. Sometimes what is at stake is different: addressing the consequences of industrial farming and manufacture, developments that early modern people could not have imagined but for which they are sometimes blamed nonetheless.

Winegrowers and Biodynamics In this section, I will focus on two stages in the process from soil to glass: (1) farming practices, particularly biodynamics; and (2) winemaking— particularly the crafting of wines variously described as real, natural, naked, or authentic. Although the practitioners who interest me produce relatively small quantities of wine, they generate vats of self-justifying discourse, in which they

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both celebrate themselves as innovators and self-consciously refer to past ideas and methods as inspiration. I draw on three bodies of evidence: websites and tour scripts from biodynamic vineyards in Northern California; recent pitches for lower intervention or more natural winemaking; and the printed how-to guides to agriculture and particularly viticulture from the seventeenth century from which I have already been drawing in this chapter and preceding ones. Many winemakers today assign agency and voice to terroir, broadly defined as conjoining locale, climate, and husbandry. Nicholas Joly, a Loire winemaker, offers a particularly rhapsodic and capacious explanation of terroir: “When a vine is situated where it can unfold its full potency as a highly atypical and selfwilled vegetative being, it will imbue its fruit with a taste endowed by the place in which it grows. Simple enough? It weds the soil via its roots, uniting with it intimately, and receiving through its leaves all the climatic conditions specific to that area.” Not simple, then. But this vision is also not unique to Joly. Many winemakers discuss a wine’s “site expression” or, more evocatively, define terroir as “what the earth is saying to [and through] the grape.” To whom is the grape speaking? Apparently, first the winemaker and then the drinker. Aggressive interventions will stifle the earth’s voice: “The site-specific characteristics that lie at the heart of terroir seem to be expressed only where winemakers are able and willing to allow them,” and “thus terroir is a partnership between the site and the winegrower.” The Bonny Doon Vineyard website defines “essence of terroir” as “the shared intelligence of plant/soil/winegrower.” We have seen how English writers in the seventeenth century imported the word “vigneron” from the French to describe the link between grape growing and winemaking. In the word “winegrower,” these promotional materials redress the lack in English of the French term “vigneron” by coining their own compound of growing and making. As one winegrower puts it, “the hand that controls the irrigation valve” should be “the hand that makes the wine.” As Hank Beckmeyer of La Clarine Farm explains, “I have come to see that terroir is not a completely independent, location-based phenomenon. It relies on the farmer/winemaker/vigneron being part of the equation. It is the person who steers the terroir towards an expression.”47 Rejoining what had been put asunder, the term “winegrower” downplays the fact that wine is manufactured as well as grown even as it conjoins making and growing, concentrating authority in one person. The mystical communion between winegrower and land is especially notable in biodynamic farming, based on the agriculture lectures delivered by Rudolf Steiner, also founder of the Waldorf Schools, in 1924.48 The biodynamic approach has had its greatest impact on viticulture, especially after

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prestigious French vineyards went biodynamic, starting in the 1970s. There are now a handful of biodynamic vineyards in California and in Oregon as well. Steiner’s lectures engaged the past on two levels: he responded to the recent devastation of World War I and reached behind that to a usable past that might be recovered from the wisdom and practices of the “old peasant almanacs” and the “simple” “peasant farmers” he remembered from childhood and whose disappearance he lamented. Biodynamic viticulture not only eliminates chemical fertilizers; it also depends on integrated pest management and biodiverse planting to promote beneficial insects, enriching soil through preparations that are a kind of compost tea, recycling gray water and limiting irrigation, keeping farm animals, and hand-harvesting clusters as they ripen rather than all at once. Overlapping with procedures at many organic vineyards, these strategies work to outwit the problems posed by the fact that vineyards are, by definition, monocultures. Planting the same crop, year after year, winegrowers risk depleting soils and starving out pollinators. Vineyards that have gone biodynamic are called “rescued,” emphasizing the reclamation of what had been lost. Proponents argue that biodynamic methods yield vines with longer productive lives (thirty to thirty-five years instead of twenty to twenty-five). Above all, the goal of biodynamics is to “wake up the plants,” as one winery puts it, so that their personalities emerge and express themselves and the vineyard, “or more accurately, the agricultural organism, gradually becomes more individuated, its personality emerges; it becomes the macrocosmic reflection of the intent of the wine-grower.”49 Defenders of biodynamic practice claim not that the wine is better for the consumer or even better for the earth but that it is of better quality, variously described. The website of the trade association of the Winegrowers of Dry Creek Valley invites tourists on a “picture-perfect” itinerary of the region: “Earthy, vibrant and rich with character, you will find that Quivira wines deliver one of the most authentic wine drinking experiences you can find anywhere.” The dangling modifier suggests that you, the consumer, can be as earthy, vibrant, and rich with character as the wines. Benziger Family Winery claims that its wines have “character and conscience”; “We don’t just farm this way because we think caring for the land is the right thing to do, it also happens to be the best way to make distinctive, authentic wines.”50 Understanding why these practices work, however, is left to faith. Many eschew certification as biodynamic by Demeter USA in favor of the winegrower’s volition. As the Bonny Doon website puts it: “Biodynamic seems to work best when it is voluntarily adopted, not something that is taken

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up coercively.” Through this voluntary process, the winegrower communes with the vineyard, conceived as a single organism. While some accounts of biodynamics imagine a vertical axis—drawing spirits down from above and up from below—many also, in their emphasis on terroir, thicken a parameter around a plot of land, fantasizing and mystifying absolute identification with and control over one’s property and product. Biodynamic (and biodynamicish) growers argue that they come close to attaining a closed system with “no external inputs” and wine rather than waste as the only output.51 In Chapter 2, I linked the fantasy of a closed system by which one consumes one’s own to composting, local food, and cannibalism. This list places farming practices in strange company and might seem to vilify wholesome aspirations such as reducing waste. But I use this chain of associations not to denigrate composting or biodynamics but to challenge the assumption that closed circuits are always safer, sounder—or even possible. The ouroboros is a mystical symbol of continuity and regeneration, and thus the perfect symbol for a regenerative agriculture. Yet that agriculture has to be open to ideas and inputs, alive to the porosity of its very boundaries, rather than closed. The fence that divides a vineyard from its neighbor helps earn organic or biodynamic certification, define and protect the brand, and map the contours of terroir, achieving a kind of reterritorialization in contrast to the deterritorialization that Ursula K. Heise (following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) advocates. It is hard to imagine a greater investment in what Heise critiques as “local rootedness” and the utopian celebration of a “sense of place” than one finds in biodynamics and its offshoots. We have seen that proposals to amend soil depend on the stakeholder farmer because the farmer with an investment in her soil will husband it most effectively, investing in its future. On the one hand, biodynamics usually tends to reverse the trajectory from small to large farms. On the other, doubling down on the proprietary, biodynamics and other forms of regenerative or restoration agriculture also participate in what we might view as a new enclosure movement, one that resists and dismantles the aggregation of small plots, ditches the plow, and roots the farmer in her land, whether she is a tenant or an owner.52 Resistance to factory farming and industrial winemaking are grounded in a sense of place, often overlapping with land ownership. Biodynamic viticulture invokes the premodern to distinguish itself from organic farming and winemaking, almost as a kind of branding or niche marketing. This involves close attention to an astrological calendar and the use of compost boosters called “preparations.”

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Under ideal circumstances, these preparations use herbs grown on-site and, often, ripened in animal parts, particularly buried in a cow’s horn (which Steiner emphasizes should be that of a lactating cow) or exposed to the air in a stag’s bladder. Sandor Katz points out that the preparations rely on a kind of fermentation: “These preps are intended to harness and harmonize earthly and cosmic forces. The stirring ‘activates’ the prep energetically, or oxygenates it to encourage a rapid proliferation of aerobic organisms––whichever way you prefer to conceptualize it.” The resulting concentrate is then laboriously and prayerfully stirred into water to activate and dilute it and sprayed on vines or on compost heaps where it may act as a microbial inoculation of the soil. The preparations carry with them not just the essence of the plants and animals of which they are composed but of the farmer as well. Katherine Cole, in Voodoo Vintners, her account of biodynamic wineries in Oregon, explains that “the belief is that the preparations aren’t merely herbal treatments for plants; they’re carriers of the farmers’ intentions, which have been swirled into them through the powerful act of stirring. While it isn’t a requirement for [biodynamic] certification, intention is that little bit of witchcraft that separates the most committed practitioners from the unbelievers.” This is simultaneously a kind of reenchantment and a recentering of the human. Joly makes this explicit: “By extending our knowledge, by giving back to the earth all its faculties through a respectful and artistic agriculture, the human being can come to play his full role”—a role at the center of the vineyard and the universe. As Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyards explains: “The Biodynamic proposition is really as much about transforming the farmer as it is the farm. A Biodynamic grower is linked to his farm in a much more intimate way.” While Hank Beckmeyer of La Clarine Farms has departed from biodynamics as too interventionist, he shares the androcentric and territorial investment of these other winemakers: “My soil is my soil, my terroir, and truly sustainable. And I am very much a part of it.”53 In Beckmeyer’s formulation, a more sustainable viticulture requires both standing back from interventions and leaning in by taking possession of, even identifying with, his terroir. Biodynamics calls for a Renaissance of anthropocentrism, recentering and regrounding the farmer/owner. Although biodynamics is curiously human-centered, its proponents struggle to place its traditions in a human timeline. When is the time that must be recaptured? Who are the predecessors whose wisdom must be recovered and revalued? Biodynamics is an attempt to turn back the clock, reaching back to what winegrowers think has been superseded. Joly, for example, has created an association called the “Return to Terroir” to raise wine standards

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by recapturing a sense of place that is somehow located in the past. But biodynamics is very vague about what past exactly is being evoked and who are the ancestral experts whose wisdom is valuable. Throughout her account of biodynamic viticulture in Oregon, Cole variously refers to great-grandparents, “Mesopotamians,” “medieval European farmers,” and “forefathers.” Joly draws our attention to “ancient authors,” “great masters,” and “primitive people.” While he refers to “olden times,” he also speaks somewhat more specifically about “the botanists of the Middle Ages and their rich store of knowledge, so little understood by our modern era” but then includes among them “Hildegard von Bingen and Nicholas Culpeper,” who lived six hundred years apart.54 When exactly was this not-modern time and who exactly should we listen to? Biodynamic agriculture’s focus on the moon is probably the least controversial way in which it gestures toward the past, and draws together daily practice and spirituality. The website for Demeter USA, the organization that certifies farms and vineyards in the U.S. as biodynamic, includes an update on the current phase of the moon, along with a quotation from Pliny the Elder: “Pliny the Elder, the first-century Roman naturalist, stated in his Natural History that the Moon ‘replenishes the earth; when she approaches it, she fills all bodies, while, when she recedes, she empties them.’ ” On the Demeter website, Pliny serves to place biodynamics in a much longer history than Rudolph Steiner can, adding the authority of antiquity to veneration for the moon. But what happened between then and now? Certainly, in early modern almanacs and herbals, we find detailed instructions regarding when to plant and the assumption that following them not only ensures success but is required for it. Many early modern writers combine the attention to astrology with the farmers’ intentions that we see in biodynamics. As but one example, in his Floraes Paradise, Sir Hugh Plat begins with instructions on how to plant a “philosophical garden,” arguing that “he that knows how to lay his fallows truly, whereby they may become pregnant from the heavens, and draw abundantly that celestial and generative virtue into the matrix of the Earth; this man, no doubt, will prove the true and philosophical husbandman.”55 He will surpass all other farmers no matter how well-read they are. However, Plat does not explain exactly how to lay those fallows truly; he just affirms that one should. The authority is within and above, not in books. That is, even Plat cannot teach it. One knows it or one doesn’t. Through a process many might call modernization, a growing skepticism emerged in the seventeenth century about the influence of the moon, particularly on fruit growing. In his Planters Manual (1675), Charles Cotton argues

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that “some there are, who in planting have a great regard to the Moon, and believe the wane to be much more proper for this work than the increase; but experience shows this observation to be vain.” In the early eighteenth century, one S. J. disputed the claim that the moon governs sparkling wines, an accident not yet understood or controlled: “However Bacchus may have the patronage of the vine assigned him, I do not remember that ever Cynthia [goddess of the moon] assumed any governance over that plant. They might with a greater pretense of reason, impute it to the winds, which generally sit in about those times, which by agitating the air, put the wines upon a fermentation.”56 Attention to the moon was both under scrutiny by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and has persisted as an uncontroversial aspect of farmers’ almanacs from Pliny until now. What about those dung-filled cow horns, for many a symbol of the bizarre side of biodynamics? Do they have any premodern precedents? They might at first seem to correspond to early modern uses of generative body parts in food and medicine—as Louise Noble and others have explored—as well as relics, image magic, counterwitchcraft charms, and talismans. As we have seen, blood and corpses were valued forms of fertilizer, and not always in the composted and unrecognizable form in which blood and bones enter our garden beds today. Hooves and horns were a coveted contribution to compost heaps, although they were usually shaved rather than left whole. Gervase Markham, that prolific writer on agricultural topics, acknowledges the generative properties of horns, but distinguishes them from talismanic powers. On the one hand, as Markham expands his compendious text, Markham’s Farewell to Husbandry, between the 1620 and 1625 editions, he adds a chapter detailing possible soil amendments, including horns in his copious lists of particularly valuable enrichments. On the other hand, Markham’s presentation of advice from the “ancient husbandman” (probably Pliny) also changes. In each printing, the text rehearses ancient practices for protecting crops, including mixing an ox horn with dung and burning it in the field as a cure for or protection against the blighting or withering of crops. But starting with the 1625 edition, Markham concludes his discussion of the ancient husbandman with a dismissal. “But in as much as all these, and many other the like, smell rather of conjuration, charm, or exorcism, than of any probability of truth, I will neither here stand much upon them, nor persuade any man to give further credit unto them, than as to the vapors of men’s brains, which do produce much many times out of mere imagination; and so I will proceed unto those things which are of far greater likelihood.”57 For Markham, these

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practices share their origin in “the vapors of men’s brains” and “mere imagination” with similarly disparaged superstitions such as occult belief, alchemy, and Catholic faith. They thus resemble the alchemy and “real transubstantiations” involved in amending wine. Moving forward, for Markham, means leaving such beliefs behind. While Steiner’s lectures can provoke the skeptical to imagine that he invents biodynamics from whole cloth, looking back to ancient and early modern writers suggests that, knowingly or not, Steiner and his biodynamic followers revived earlier practices that were once in use. By the early seventeenth century, a polymath such as Markham knew about such practices and he dismissed them. But it is not as simple as that. First, we need only look elsewhere in the works that bear Markham’s name, or browse the prolific output of his contemporaries, to find the coexistence of faith and skepticism, empirical observation and fantasy, bookishness and hands-on experimentation, nostalgia and innovation. As bracing as his skepticism is, it is not the whole story. In 1625 Markham did not excise the discussion of ancient crop protections; he simply added his dismissal, leaving the two side by side. In a 1641 almanac, this advice might still be offered under “rules of husbandry”: “Against hailstorms and tempest, take bats, voles, housecats, and set them on stakes in the corners of the field: For planet-straken [that is, to prevent or amend planet-struck or diseased plants] take the shaving of any horn mixed with horse-dung, and burn it in divers places of the field.”58 Many writers continued to recommend the efficacy of horns as a combination of a soil amendment and a talisman––or at least to suggest that farmers might have little to lose in trying them. In his notebooks, John Locke sometimes identifies information he finds questionable with “Query,” or, more simply, “Q.” While traveling in France in the 1670s, for instance, he noted that he had picked up the tip “To make vines bear in a barren ground put a sheep’s horn to the root & it will do wonders” but also registered his doubt by adding “Q.” When he returned to his notes later, he expanded on that “Q” as both an expression of doubt and a plan to put the suggestion to the test: “I have been told that a sheep’s horn buried at the root of a vine will make it bear well, even in barren ground. I have no great faith in it, but mention it because it may so easily be tried.”59 So Locke, decades after Markham, records both doubt and a willingness to experiment, even with practices that seem to depend on a faith he does not share. His sense that one might as well try something that costs little stakes out a middle ground between the traditional and the modern. This is a middle ground that many practitioners now inhabit but for which they do not have

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a name. Furthermore, most believers in biodynamics have a ready answer for the fact that a seventeenth-century writer like Markham disparages “a little bit of witchcraft.” For those invested in a paradise-lost agricultural narrative, Markham here allies himself with the decline of magic, the disenchantment of nature, and the industrialization of farming.

Natural Wine The question of whether we are turning backward or forward, and of the value of human mastery, recurs in discussions of winemaking. While an international style of wine requires many forms of manipulation, and, arguably, tastes the same no matter where it is from, the makers of this new/old style of wine argue that interventions impede a wine’s expression of place. In contrast to the biodynamic recentering of the human, this “more or less old fangled,” “new (but centuries old)” school of winemaking aspires to reduce human input to a minimum. The proponents have a hard time agreeing on a name for the wine they want to produce: natural, authentic, real, and naked have all been used and have all been critiqued. But, to greater or lesser degrees, these winemakers aspire to add nothing to and remove nothing from the wine. The descriptions of the resulting wine consistently refer to standard interventions as masks or makeup. According Jon Bonné, the author of The New California Wine, “great grapes, grown in an appropriate place, should rarely require a winemaker to fix things later with additions of yeast, acid, or water—makeup, essentially, that covers up the deficits of mediocre terroir.” Such praise participates in an ancient tradition of associating ornament and artifice with the feminine. For Bonné, what makes the new California wine new is a commitment to eschewing the usual easy fixes. These disguises not only block our access to the real or naked wine they obscure, it is argued; they also disrupt continuities. Joly argues for a return to real wine to avoid a future in which “any sense of continuity with the past may vanish forever.” Jamie Goode and Sam Harrop, the authors of Authentic Wine: Toward Natural and Sustainable Winemaking, call the path to this “authentic” wine variously a “retracing of steps”; “a respect for tradition, a sense of place”; and a “rediscovery.”60 Goode and Harrop begin one chapter with a quotation from Columella, the first-century Roman writer on agriculture who, as we have seen, was an enormous influence on English agricultural writers: “We consider the best wine is one that can be aged without any preservative; nothing must be mixed

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with it which might obscure its natural taste [naturalis sapor]. For the most excellent wine is one which has given pleasure by its own natural qualities [suapte natura].” But the next sentence in Columella, which Goode and Harrop’s epigraph does not quote, begins with a qualification: “but when, either through the fault of the country, or of new vineyards, the [grape] must labors under any defect,” one must do the best one can.61 And this extends to boiling the wine or adding wine concentrate, saltwater, and pitch. Columella’s reverence for natural wine, on the one hand, and encyclopedic instructions on how to amend and preserve wine, on the other, might remind us that even as winemakers turn to the past for inspiration they are also fighting the passage of time. Decay is part of wine’s life course and history. The arguments for an English wine industry in the seventeenth century closely resemble those for naked or real wine now; both share a horror of adulteration and a wish that there might be a natural or minimally processed wine, as well as ingenuity regarding how to preserve or reclaim wine. By the late sixteenth century, Hugh Plat laments that “we are grown so nice in taste, that almost no wines unless they be more pleasant than they can be of the grape will content us, nay no color unless it be perfect, fine and bright, will satisfy our wanton eyes. . . . This makes the vintners to trick or compass all their natural wines.” Plat acknowledges here that the impediment to the natural is a cultivated taste for more than nature can necessarily provide. As we have seen, it was so difficult to stabilize wine in this period that virtually everyone doctored it in one way or another to conceal and slow spoilage, enhance sweetness, and extend supplies. These interventions were routinely termed “sophistication,” linking them to other suspect transformations of the honest or natural into the corrupt and suspect.62 Although common, amendment threatened the notion of wine as a kind of bodily fluid, perfectly suited to the human constitution. This is why various writers advocated a more local and so more natural wine that would need less doctoring, be less sophisticated or mixed up. Today as well, proponents of natural or naked wine work to expose adulterations and save wine. Recent warnings to vegans about the additives still used in making wine emphasize that gelatin, fish bladders, egg whites, and other animal products are used to clarify wine (attracting detritus so it can be removed) (Figure 5). These processes remain mysterious, since wine labels need not specify either fining (or clarifying) agents (which are added to and then removed from the wine) or the additives routinely used to enhance sweetness, acidity, or color, all of which are still winemakers’ secrets. One example would be Mega Purple, a form of grape concentrate, used to deepen

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Figure 5. What’s in Your Glass? Reproduced by permission of Jude King, Hannibal Brown Wines.

color and enhance sweetness. This is the equivalent of turnsole, a plant used to make deep red or violet dye that was added to wine in the Tudor period. Many descriptions of wine additives use graphics to shock by placing fish, eggs, milk, and a cow in a wine glass, or employ the scandalized language of the exposé, promising to reveal “what a wine label won’t tell you.”63 But the secrets they disclose have been common knowledge for centuries; such additions have been lamented almost as much as they have been relied upon. They are evidence not of a shocking rupture in winemaking but of an occluded continuity. The history of saving wine, as we have been tracing it here, is a history of mixing, adding, and altering. While there are some limits on what certified biodynamic wineries can add to wine (no isinglass, blood, or gelatin, for instance), they can use commercial yeasts and fining agents (such as milk or eggs), manipulate sugar and acid, and add sulfur. In terms of the winemaking process, they can use centrifugal pumps, heat or cool during fermentation, and filter. The biodynamic winery Bonny Doon, for example, which is unusually transparent on its wine labels, confesses to using indigenous yeast, yeast nutrients, French oak chips, and copper sulfate in the winemaking process and adding tartaric acid and sulfur to the grapes in Le Cigar Volante, one of its many “naturally soulful, distinctive, and original” wines. Even a biodynamic wine such as this one might not meet the most exacting definitions of authentic or natural. But then few wines are or have been “natural,” and turning back will not solve this problem. The history

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of wine is a history of what Hugh Plat long ago described as “alterations, transmutations, and sometimes even real transubstantiations.”64 This is, in part, because wine is made as well as grown. Wine is in time and so cannot capture time unmediated. Attempting to argue for the value of studying the seventeenth century is often a challenging task. But the growers, makers, and storytellers I am discussing here initiate a conversation about their relationship to the past. In their reverence for peasants and native peoples, Hildegard von Bingen, and Nicholas Culpepper, winegrowers reach back to what Paul Lukacs calls an invented tradition, or what Raymond Williams calls “a myth functioning as a memory.” That myth helps many winegrowers use history to authorize themselves even as they selectively both ignore what we can know and create what they feel they need. What is the function of invoking the past but not really knowing it? Katherine Eggert argues that some early modern knowers turned to alchemy as a strategic means of not learning other, more difficult or “ideologically thorny” disciplines. Eggert invokes Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger’s notion of “Agnotology.” If epistemology is the study of how we know, then, they argue, agnotology is the study of “how or why we don’t know.” I am especially interested in Proctor’s notion of “fertile ignorance,” which Eggert suggests operates as a strategy of latching on to what we do not know in order to disown what we can know but prefer not to.65 The concept of productive ignorance leads me to ask what the reverence for the premodern, and the oversimplification of the early modern that comes between then and now, allow winegrowers not to know. Above all, they protect winegrowers and their consumers from the knowledge that not knowing the process between vine and bottle, or the real content of the glass, has always been part of wine drinking. The celebration of the premodern also strengthens the identification between owner and land, as we have seen, thickening the boundaries of the vineyard as a closed system and linking husbandry to private property. Perhaps the look backward is also a way to avoid a look forward. If winemakers’ interventions remain a kind of trade secret, another is the question of how global climate change will rewrite the map of wine. Winemakers all over the world are experimenting with different varietals and rethinking their relationship to irrigation because they have to. But the possibility that the map of winemaking will change (as it has changed) is something few winemakers in prestigious appellations are willing to discuss publicly. There may also be a subtler operation at work: they may not always let themselves know this either. Even in England and Virginia, where the seventeenth-century

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dream of making drinkable wine might finally be coming true, at least in part because of climate change, winemaking is celebrated not as a departure but as a fulfillment. Although James I’s attempt to establish vineyards around Jamestown was a failure, it provides a useful precedent, enabling the Virginia wine industry to present itself as a return and not a departure. The Virginia Wine Marketing Office’s website emphasizes that “our roots run deep” and that they bear “new and exciting fruit every year.” Until recently, they trumpeted that “Virginia Wine Is True to Our Roots.” Now they showcase the slogan “There’s a Movement Growing in Virginia,” but they still remind visitors that “The Roots of Virginia Wine” extend back to Jamestown.66 This website, like the Wines of Great Britain website, highlights history but does not mention climate change. The wine industry is aware of the impacts of climate change. Researchers are investigating how to address drought and reduced access to water; increased salinity of the water that is available; warming temperatures and heat extremes; and new pests and diseases. Big wine companies with deep pockets are hedging their bets by buying land in areas they anticipate will remain cool enough to support grapes, such as Oregon and British Columbia. But as one winemaker puts it, if it gets too hot to grow grapes in Napa, how much of a market for luxury wines will there be? There is no moving away from climate change. Yet, for the most part, in the stories wineries tell visitors to their websites and vineyards—stories meant to burnish their brand and entice consumers—they downplay how climate change is shaping their operations today and their plans for the future.67 As I have shown, biodynamics and natural winemaking place a startling emphasis on the human winegrower. While climate change is both manmade and beyond the control of any one person, in a vineyard, one can try to control one’s own land, vines, water, and workers. In the winery, one can control what one does or does not add to or do to the wine. But there are factors outside the vineyard that shape one’s options. It is not, ultimately, a closed system because it is part of a larger ecology. In questioning the functions of not knowing the past one invokes, I do not mean to idealize knowledge as inevitably translating into ameliorative action. We know a great deal about civilization’s impending environmental collapse, but fail to act on that knowledge. The fantasy of the closed vineyard and the embedded winegrower wards against such paralysis by narrowing the scope of action and scaling down to the individual and to the present. Digging into the local makes it possible to act at least within and through one’s terroir. Doing so reverses the trajectory Dipesh Chakrabarty traces from biological agency to

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geological agency. If the disparity between human and nonhuman timescales with regard to climate has opened rifts between knowing and acting, then one can, at this time and in this place, till them. If, as Chakrabarty argues, climate change is, among other things, a crisis of historical understanding, “a sense of the present that disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond the grasp of historical sensibility,” conjuring the ties between present and past attempts to ward off that inconceivable future through intentional action in the here and now.68 Looking backward at the history of viticulture can at least teach us that wine’s story is one of change and unpredictability. We cannot preserve the savor of the past; we cannot anticipate the future. But we can dig in right now. We can look up and around, considering, for example, what are called “crop wild relatives”—that is, wild plants that are closely related to domesticated ones, which often prove to be resources for addressing changing conditions. The unendenizened, to return to a term from the last chapter, may help the denizens adapt anew. We can also look to the margins, as we will see in the next chapter.

Chapter 4

Weaving Hedges

For specialists in seventeenth-century England, the hedge as a living fence or barrier seems to mean one thing—enclosure, that is, both the engrossing of small farms into larger parcels of land and the fencing of those larger fields, along with the fencing or hedging of common lands to restrict access and foreclose common use rights. We also think we know that enclosure is bad. The hedge is, then, an instrument and a symbol of negative social and agricultural change. In contrast, the hedgerow, a diverse planting band now being promoted as a solution to many of the problems of modern agriculture, seems messier, prettier, and more biodiverse. Hedges and hedgerows would seem at first to have different functions and meanings. We might even take them as marking a divide between the seventeenth century (hedges) and today (hedgerows). In this chapter, however, I hope to trouble that simple opposition and trace connections across time. The terms “hedge” and “hedgerow” are often used interchangeably. Looking at recent usage, we might distinguish between the hedge as a barrier and the hedgerow as a planting band or bed. Today, a hedgerow most often means a border of mixed plants, usually from ten to fifteen feet wide, sometimes including trees, used to break up monocultures and promote biodiversity, create a habitat for beneficial insects and native pollinators, protect against soil erosion and control weeds, serve as a windbreak, “buffer pesticide drift, noise, odors and dust; act as living fences and boundary lines; . . . and provide an aesthetic resource.” Various initiatives encourage planting hedgerows as an investment in the future of agriculture, which depends on reconceptualizing a marginal or waste space as an opportunity. While mixed planting bands can be positioned anywhere, they usually occupy and mark margins or boundaries.

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Hedgerows for Biodiversity, a Beyond Pesticides fact sheet that promotes planting hedgerows, reminds its readers that “all hedges . . . are edges.” Another advocate for hedgerows points out that, unlike other edge habitats that allow creatures to retreat into the depths of, say, the woods, “a hedge is an edge habitat that has two sides or, in other words, a hedge is all edge.”1 But if hedges mark edges they also themselves need to be marked. One of the main threats to hedgerows now is that they will be mistakenly ploughed under or driven over, especially when they are newly established. This directs our attention to one of the reasons hedgerows fell out of favor and now need to be revived. While they helped create and defend large farms, they also obstruct the heavy equipment those farms require. Advocates emphasize that good signs are necessary to establish and protect hedgerows. Hedgerows are also signs in themselves. In the early modern period, hedgerows in the sense of diverse plant bands, which might be porous and intentionally or accidentally biodiverse, were both well established and, as we will see, touted as innovations. But hedges as barriers, marking property lines and rebuffing incursions across them, also proliferated on the landscape as a crucial engine of enclosure and agricultural transformation. Hedges newly planted to enclose lands and livestock—and maintained carefully to be impermeable––sequestered as private property what had once been open to common use. As a result, one of the most frequent forms of protest was tearing down those hedges. There were other forms of fencing, of course, including the distinctive dry or mortarless stone wall. But as Columella argued in the first century, “the most ancient authors preferred a quick-set hedge to a constructed wall, on the grounds that it not only called for less expense but also lasted for a much longer time.” I have chosen to focus on the quickset hedge that uses live trees and shrubs—sturdy, thorny ones––as its backbone because it is the kind of hedge on which proposals for enclosure as part of agricultural reform and protests against those changes focused in the early modern period. I have also chosen this kind of hedge because of its peculiar coupling of the living and the dead, plant material and human effort, and because it, by its very nature, required persistent maintenance and so was a process as much as a thing, a perpetual work in progress. While one historian argues that English agriculture “drew razor-sharp lines between waste and enclosure, between this side and that side of the hedge,” I consider how the hedge blurs distinctions, inviting visionary attempts to imagine it as the commons it had replaced, and connecting past to present, even as it also divides the two. In this, the hedge is a kind of ecotone, that is, “a transitional area between two or more distinct ecological communities,” in

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this case, the field and the forest, containing the characteristic species of each, and as a consequence “a stressline,” “a zone of rapid change,” and “a place of danger or opportunity, a testing ground.”2 While the hedge has a backstory and an understory, it is also what Michel de Certeau calls a “spatial story,” a story process that founds, organizes, and disappears spaces.3 Itself woven, the hedge offers an occasion to think about the processes of weaving and reweaving. The hedge/row, as we will see, can be enchanted and enchanting, arresting and engaging. It moves from estate plans to poetry to proverbs, from fields to maps, from the page to the stage, from parliamentary debates to proposals for agricultural reform to protests. It appears variously from an aerial perspective, from inside trapped by its thorns, at the center of the screen, or at the edge of farm fields and the margins of pages. My emphasis on appearance, here, suggests how the hedge comes into and blocks the view—it is a barrier to sight, but also a spectacle. It is the means of figuring or describing otherwise invisible processes of inclusion and exclusion. Even as it is literally rooted in place, the hedge is figurally mobile, turning up in strikingly different locales, registers of evidence, and genres. How do the hedge’s figural possibilities fertilize material ones and how do its material manifestations seed figural possibilities? Grounded and on the move, the hedge we will consider here is a barrier between places and a place in itself, a clarifying boundary and a bewildering puzzle. It is a feature of the landscape that haunts the imagination, perhaps as powerful as a trope as it is daunting as a physical barrier. As the hedge travels, it carries what design theory calls its “affordances”— that is, its latent uses––with it. The issue is, then, not only what the hedge or enclosure does but also what it is capable of doing; latent affordances can be activated in new settings. As Caroline Levine argues more generally of literary form, “While its meanings and values may change, the pattern or shape itself can remain surprisingly stable across contexts. But as they move, forms bring their limited range of affordances with them. No matter how different their historical and cultural circumstances, that is, bounded enclosures will always exclude, and rhyme will always repeat.” Although I find Levine’s reminder that the bounded enclosure is a form useful here, I also want to emphasize the capaciousness and unpredictability of the enclosure’s affordances and its potential for change and surprise. The hedge became associated with agricultural enclosure—since it was the binding technology that both enclosed and excluded––but it also bore more complex affordances than we might at first expect. When we look at hedges, we contribute to that complexity of

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meaning; it is in us as well as in them. I follow Wai Chee Dimock in assuming that “the literary . . . is not an attribute resident in a text, but a relation, a form of engagement, between a changing object and a changing recipient, between a tonal presence and the way it is differently heard over time.”4 The literary is a relation, then, that we will now engage in with the hedge as it functions variously as history and as trope, as barrier, edge, and common. In its many appearances in proverbs, for instance, the hedge often describes a boundary but one that can be transgressed: “Where the hedge is lowest, men may the soonest over,” for instance, which is related to the expression “A low hedge is easily leaped over.” In A Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney wonders whether pastoral poetry is an easy target for critics because they associate it with the low and the landscape it describes; in the form of the proverbial low hedge, it is easy to overleap and underestimate: “Is it then the pastoral poem which is misliked (for perchance where the hedge is lowest they will soonest leap over)?” Other proverbs similarly use the hedge to describe both sharp division and the in-between: to be on the right or wrong side of the hedge; to be on the hedge (as in on the fence). The proverb itself is a kind of linguistic hedge, an utterance that both stakes a claim to common knowledge and asserts distinctions (high or low, right or wrong). Walter Benjamin describes the operations of a proverb in a botanical idiom that links it to the hedge as a spatial story: “A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around the wall.”5 Stemming from the Anglo-Saxon “gehaeg,” which underpins not only “hedge” but also “hay” and “haw” as in “hawthorn,” the plant that formed the backbone of most English hedges (Figure 6), the noun form of the word “hedge” describes bushes or trees forming a fence, boundary, or barrier (OED). It sometimes describes just a row of bushes and sometimes describes “the entire complex of hedge, trees, brambles and herbaceous plants of the hedge bottom and the bushes of the hedge itself.” The noun participates in an astonishing range of compounds, which may be a legacy of the root’s Old English origins. The noun’s attraction to other nouns also reveals the hedge’s botanical capaciousness, its many functions and constituents, including hedge-mallow, hedge-rose, and hedge-garlic. The verb form of the word hedge—to create a hedge or to surround with a hedge or fence, literal or figural—reminds us that hedges are artifacts and collaborations among farmers or owners, plants, and animals that require money, skill, time, tools, labor, and space. They are planted and maintained for a purpose: initially, to define and protect land, to

Figure 6. Hawthorn from Gerard’s Herbal. Reproduced by permission of the University of California, Davis, Special Collections Library.

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shelter against the wind, to protect against incursions of livestock. But they also manage social relations. The proverb “Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedge” suggests the power of the hedge to create the good neighbor as in the more familiar version of this proverb: Good fences make good neighbors. Gervase Markham claims that an impervious hedge maintains “a continuance of amity amongst neighbors.” But hedges are not simply guarantors of good social conduct or effects of human agency. The proverbial warning that “hedges have eyes” or ears suggests the knowledge and agency humans invest in the hedge itself.6 Like compost, dung, and manure, discussed in Chapter 1, the word “hedge” can be a verb as well as a noun. The varied uses of “hedge” as a verb suggest its sprawling, even contradictory capacities. To hedge in is to protect but also to confine; to hedge out is to exclude. We see the notion of the hedge as protection in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when Claudius assures Gertrude that he is invulnerable because of the divinity that doth “hedge” a king and so protects him from treason (Hamlet 4.2.123–24). (Of course, he knows better than anyone that even the hedge of kingship cannot protect one who is sleeping in a garden.) In contrast, in Julius Caesar, Cassius warns Brutus not to “hedge” him in (4.3.30), activating the verb’s more negative connotations; Portia claims that her choice of spouse is limited because her father “hedged [her] by his wit” to yield herself only to the winner of the casket test (2.1.18).7 But as the play shows, she hedges her bets. As a verb, “to hedge” can also mean “to go aside from the straight way; to shift, shuffle, dodge; to avoid committing oneself irrevocably; to leave open a way of retreat or escape” (OED). Falstaff, in Merry Wives of Windsor, confesses to Pistol that he is “fain to shuffle, to hedge, and to lurch” (2.2.21). This meaning persists when we hedge our bets, funds, or risks. I turn to examples from Shakespeare as an efficient way to sketch out the word’s range of meanings and uses. But I also do so to suggest the ways that the hedge, as a feature of the landscape and of the language, straddles nature and art, material and figural, paralysis and agency, protection and entrapment, restriction and liberty. The hedge seems always to be a site of struggle and interpretation rather than a clear line. Shakespeare’s entanglement in such hedge struggles is especially evident in attempts to make sense of his personal relationship to enclosure and hedges. In his 1976 play, Bingo, Edward Bond draws on the surviving documents regarding the Welcombe enclosure (1614–17) to depict Shakespeare as profiting from enclosure and colluding in the harsh punishment of hedge-breakers. While

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the documents suggest that the conflict focused on enclosure ditches (rather than hedges), Bond’s stage directions begin by stating that “a hedge runs across the top of the stage.” For Bond, the hedge divides the landowners from the poor and places Shakespeare firmly and shamefully with the landowners. “His behavior as a property-owner made him closer to Goneril than Lear,” Bond insists. Some literary critics have similarly argued that Shakespeare sided with the hedge builders against the hedge-breakers, not only in his own community but in his plays.8 In contrast, critics who wish to emphasize Shakespeare’s radical sympathy with the poor accept the hedge as a crucial dividing line but move Shakespeare to the other side. Chris Fitter, for example, avers that “Shakespeare’s plays are haunted by concern for the victims of dispossession”; he takes as one example Poor Tom’s two otherwise cryptic references to the wind blowing through the hawthorn in Lear. These references, Fitter suggests, “may derive, I think, from the fact that hawthorn was the Tudors’ quick-set hedge of choice for establishing new enclosures.”9 In Fitter’s view, Shakespeare is on the side of those excluded and immiserated by enclosure, closer to Poor Tom (and, by this point, Lear) than to Goneril. Bond attacks Shakespeare and Fitter defends him. But both turn to the hedge to locate Shakespeare in moral as well as political terms. For them, the question is relatively simple: Which side is he on? I want to move one step further back in order to consider the what as well as the where: What comes in between and thus defines the two sides? And what about being on or going through the hedge? In the first scene of Bond’s play, as soon as the hedge is established, it is breached; “an old man comes through the gap in the hedge.” How does the hedge function (and fail) as a dividing line?

Hedge History in England In England, hedges were both an ancient way of determining property lines and protecting crops and a familiar feature of the landscape that accrued newly vexed meanings in the early modern period. They became the prime instrument of enclosure, turning smallholdings into large estates, and fencing off common lands to restrict access and use. Common lands were already the property of manorial lords but local commoners had some rights of usage or “common,” and enclosure conflicted with and limited those rights. Common lands were not wastelands, then, although it sometimes suited their owners to

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think of them that way. Alan Everitt argues that we should, instead, think of common lands as “reservoirs of resources.”10 Hedges were not uniquely English nor did they arise only as part of enclosures, but they have become associated with the process of enclosure—to such an extent that they can seem to stand for it or to bear no other meaning. The seventeenth century witnessed a remarkable shift from legal acts forbidding enclosures—eleven between 1489 and 1624—to the first of the acts requiring enclosure of individual parishes starting in 1603 and extending to 1695. As the overlap of acts for and against enclosure in the early seventeenth century suggests, legislation did not express or affect cultural consensus. Nor did a shift happen decisively. Even on the most basic level, that same term, “enclosure,” masks a shift from prohibitions against depopulation (or pushing tenants off the land) to promotion of land tenures that would encourage the creation of large privately held farms, increasing the food supply for a growing population and maximizing profit, but also restricting land ownership and its entitlements to the few. Once blamed as the cause of vagrancy and poverty, enclosures were later promoted as a remedy. R. H. Tawney suggests that the term enclosure may be misleading. “The construction of hedges—enclosing—is simply the machinery by which the new lines of demarcation between one man’s land and another’s are drawn and kept firmly in their place; and though the word enclosure gives a vivid picture of the alteration which is produced in the appearance of the country, re-allotment or redivision of land describes much better the process by which it is brought about.” Nevertheless, the term “enclosure” is still the one used to describe the transformation at the center of processes of enormous economic, political, and social change: in land tenures (from an emphasis on occupation and use to the emergence of private, transferable property); in agricultural methods (from small farms to increasingly large ones focused on more efficient methods and higher yields); and in economic and social relations (from feudalism to capitalism, from the community to the individual). Joan Thirsk emphasizes not just the consequences for owners, tenants, and workers but the change in the texture of all social relations: “After enclosure, when every man could fence his own piece of territory and warn his neighbors off, the discipline of sharing things fairly with one’s neighbors was relaxed, and every household became an island unto itself.” These changes at home helped shape English encounters with land and peoples abroad, where the English took unbounded land as available for the taking and used fencing, in one way or another, to stake a claim. However wide-ranging and enormous these changes, they were inscribed on the land through one visible technology,

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the hedge. It is not just that the law changes and then the hedge inscribes that change on the land. Rather, the hedge, like the spatial story in de Certeau’s terms, “is designed to create the field necessary for political or military”––in this case explicitly agricultural––“activities.” It creates this field both literally, fencing the terrain to be improved, and metaphorically. Hedge “stories ‘go in a procession’ ahead of social practices in order to open a field for them. Decisions and juridical combinations themselves come only afterwards.”11 Enclosure’s very name suggests that the operation in question works—it creates a container—and that it is easy to picture and to understand. Yet, as William C. Carroll argues, enclosure is an “unstable . . . all purpose signifier for virtually every negative socioagricultural development” in the early modern period.12 The hedge became the signifier of that signifier. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, those who attacked or defended enclosure saw the hedge. But they saw it from opposite sides and different angles. While the hedge drew a clear line on the landscape, then, it was one whose meaning was robustly contested. One man’s protection was another’s dispossession; an owner’s right blocked a commoner’s. And yet, even those who were excluded by hedges might engage them not only as obstacles but as resources. For contemporaries struggling to make sense of the changes figured in and enacted through the hedge, it becomes a typological echo of the tree of knowledge, marking another great turn in human history. The thorny hedge marks the landscape as fallen––after the Fall, God curses human cultivation with “thorns also and thistles” (Genesis 3:18), suggesting the toil that will now be required to wrest food from this prickly and formidable landscape, but also the kinds of plants that will later be used to create hedges. In a much-cited passage from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (first published in Latin in 1516) about depopulation, Raphael Hythlodaeus describes engrossing small parcels and enclosing pastures so that there is “no ground for tillage” as a form of stealing “proper and peculiar to you Englishmen alone.” By this process, “one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge.” Smaller farmers are then “thrust out of their own” or tricked or “compelled to sell all.” As a consequence, “away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in.”13 Trudging away from their farms, the dispossessed whom Hythlodaeus describes resemble Adam and Eve, driven out of Paradise. But while God sent Adam “to till the ground from whence he was taken,” these farmers on the wrong side of the hedge have nothing at all to till (Genesis 3:23).

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Over a century after More’s critique of enclosure, we can see both continuity and change in debates about enclosure. Adam Moore’s Bread for the Poor. And Advancement of the English Nation. Promised by Enclosure of the Wastes and Common Grounds of England (1653) promotes enclosure as the solution to every English economic problem, the platform for growth. For Moore, enclosure is “the principal and only means then to ripen the fruit of new hopes” and leave the lands “cleansed and purged of the former deformities, and so fully improved by their careful industry” that there will be more pasturage for cattle, an increase of grain, support for a growing population, and a new source of firewood in the hedge itself. On the one hand, More and Moore are describing the same thing. But, for More in the sixteenth century, responsibility for the poor meant not enclosing while for Moore in the seventeenth it required enclosing. In Moore’s view, the very process of enclosure will create employment: “ditching, hedging, fencing, setting, sowing” and will benefit “the whole State, who now (as a wretched and needy mother) is enforced to make continual massacres of them, for those misdoings which even their want of bread urges them to commit.” Moore’s metaphor depicts the state as a murderous mother, forced by the lack of enclosures to first starve its subjects and then murder them for the crimes their hunger compels them to commit. Without enclosure, state and subjects are enforced and constrained; only enclosure will, paradoxically, set them free. Moore goes so far as to argue that the lack of enclosure places a bar on God’s injunction to human reproduction. People cannot increase and multiply if they have no place to live and no food to eat so, in effect, if the English do not enclose then they contravene God’s plan for humankind.14 Moore’s contemporary, Gerard Winstanley, writing at roughly the same time, joins him in raising the stakes of enclosure to a biblical level. But where Moore calls enclosure a kind of “reformation,” reopening the path to fulfilling God’s founding command to humankind, Gerard Winstanley understands enclosure as the real fall from grace into the unequal distribution of resources. In Fire in the Bush, for example, he describes the Earth as “entangled, and appropriated into particular hands” so that “the power of the Creation lies under bondage.” He elaborates that “all the strivings that is in Mankind, is for the Earth, who shall have it; whether some particular persons shall have it, and the rest have none, or whether the Earth shall be a common treasury to all without respect of persons.” Winstanley’s version of history suggests that the Fall was a fall into hedging and that redemption will take the form of the ultimate hedge-break: The son of God will come “to break down all your

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pinfolds [a pen, pound, or enclosure for livestock], and to lay all open to the Common.” The hedge becomes, for Winstanley, the prime instrument of and figure for the inevitably twinned processes of inclusion and exclusion. The rich man “hedges the weak out of the Earth, and either starves them, or else forces them through poverty to take from others, and then hangs them for so doing”; “particular churches are like the enclosures of land which hedges in some to be heirs of Life, and hedges out others.” He calls out his reader: “You are that power that hedges some into the Earth, and hedges others out, and takes to yourselves by the power of the killing sword.”15 Just as More’s Hythlodaeus vividly describes the one who casts out the many as a cormorant, so Winstanley’s use of hedge as a verb points to the human agents and institutions who hedge in and out. Still, it can sometimes seem as if the hedge creates enclosure and so, without the hedge, the problem would be solved. The hedge starts to seem like an agent in itself. We might see the hedge as, in Jane Bennett’s terms, an “agentic” assemblage with “violent effectivity” or, in Karen Barad’s terms, “less an assemblage of agents than . . . an entangled state of agencies,” agencies that “emerge through their intra-action.” For Barad, “matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency.” Donna Haraway, in her argument for the “tentacular thinking” we need in the troubled times she calls “chthulucene,” repeatedly turns to the “theoretical trope” of the string figure to describe collaborative “threading, felting, tangling,” as well as “dreadful graspings, frayings, and weavings.”16 The hedge as I am discussing it here is, at once, an archive, an agent, a theoretical trope, and a feature of the landscape. The hedge is a weaving that is constantly extending beyond and pulling into itself with its tentacles and “loopy tendrils” to entangle and entwine. Historians have documented decades of fierce struggle in which hedges themselves figured significantly. The lords of manors, sometimes called “hedge kings,” planted hedges to enclose land. But then protestors tore hedges down, ploughed them up, even burned or buried them. Leveling hedges might be seen as hands-on practice in leveling social distinctions. According to John Walter, “the throwing down of hedges in agrarian riots was the most common form of riot in this period.” Just as hedges required time and effort to make, they required time and effort to break. Examining prosecutions of hedgebreakers, Briony McDonagh specifies that hedge-breaking entailed forcing a gap through which people and animals might pass, cutting hedges down, burning them, digging up the roots and filling in the accompanying ditches. Through such actions, protesters “made it costly and time-consuming for

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enclosers to re-enclose the land.” Roger Manning claims that “it was upon the enclosing hedge that villagers with a sense of wrong vented their rage”; “the commoners hate the gentry, but it is the symbolic hedge upon which they vent their hatred.”17 Busy attacking hedges, hedge-breakers, Manning argues, committed very little overt violence against gentlemen. The hedge, then, diverted hostility away from the hedge kings, absorbing violence into itself. Acting as it was in part intended to do, as a kind of shield for landowners, the hedge can continue to screen human agencies from our view as we look back at this period. It can lead us to misrecognize the agencies of so-called hedge-breakers as well as hedge kings. According to McDonagh, “what has received strikingly little comment in the existing literature is the range of strategies which accompanied—or were even adopted in place of—hedge-breaking as means of negotiating enclosure and common rights.” Protesters, she shows, cleverly used litigation as well as various kinds of violence. Arguably, we help erase protesters’ complex negotiations and nuanced distinctions among forms of protest when we think only about hedges and hedge-breaking. For example, despite Winstanley’s focus on the hedge, the Diggers he led did not break down hedges to reassert their common use rights to manorial lands; they occupied and cultivated unenclosed fields to assert that what were sometimes called “waste fields” belonged not to manorial lords but to the people as a common treasury. What’s more, gentlemen might themselves use hedge-breaking as part of the process of defending their own entitlements and property. As a consequence, sometimes peers or gentlemen “procured” the hedge-breaking.18 For the poor, attacks on hedges combined protest with the need to extract resources from hedges. As Thomas Tusser wrote in husbandry advice that remained the same from 1573 to 1672, the poor in the country find that “every hedge, / hath plenty of fuel & fruit.” Tusser refers to the fact that tenants had the right to forage on the landlord’s estate for kindling and food such as berries. One word for this traditional privilege, “hedgebote,” combines the location of the hedge with the word “boot,” meaning good, advantage, or profit, to describe the common good located in hedges. It was very difficult to distinguish this “indigenous use right” from theft or vandalism. In a chapter on building fences in his Campania Felix: Or, a Discourse of the Benefits and Improvements of Husbandry, Timothy Nourse suggests that, near cities, banks of earth are preferable to quickset hedges because “’tis impossible almost to raise a quick-hedge, by reason of the great numbers of poor who inhabit the outskirts, who upon all occasions, and especially in cold weather, will make plunder of whatsoever is combustible.” Even those out on walks for business

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or pleasure, Nourse warns, will prey on the hedge, presumably cutting walking sticks. The casual damage they do can take years to repair.19 Because hedges might be assaulted—torn down in protest or plundered for resources—they needed to be formidable to perform their work. Columella recommends a method of placing thorn hedges in a ditch and training them up sticks precisely because the resulting hedge is indestructible: “It is obvious that this thorn-hedge cannot be destroyed unless you care to dig it up by the roots; but there is also no doubt that even if it has been damaged by fire, it only grows up again all the better.” In England, the hawthorn became a common backbone of hedges not just because it was hardy but because it was hurtful; it enabled the hedge to function as what Nicholas Blomley calls “organic barbed wire.” Indeed, the thorny hedge of the seventeenth-century, particularly what one historian calls “the metaphor of the thorn,” inspired the design for barbed wire patented in the nineteenth, with its spikes “imitating thorn branches.” One of the first U.S. manufacturers was the Thorn Wire Hedge Company, founded in 1876. The purpose of the hedge was after all, as Blomley puts it, to make “it difficult for human and nonhuman bodies to move as they had done in the past.” As a “spatial story,” the hedge, “the mouthpiece of the limit,” says “stop.” It attempts to utter an “absolute no.”20 But the hedge was constructed on the assumption that “no” would not be enough; it had to repulse transgressors as well as warn them off. Blomley emphasizes how injured one would be in trying to thrash through the thorns. In describing hedges as organic barbed wire and emphasizing their menace, Blomley draws together their practical and symbolic effects. Nothing could be more sharply material, more a reminder of how history and vital matter can hurt, than those thorns. The hedge’s ability to make animal and human bodies bleed first earned the esteem of enclosers and the ire of the excluded. But its thorns have captured the imaginations of commentators on enclosure ever since.

Hedge Tropes On the landscape, the hedge told contemporaries something had changed. In retrospect, it continues to organize how historians think about and narrate that change. In both cases, the hedge drew a line and opened up contention over what that line meant. Written on the land, installed in the historical imagination, the hedge is always simultaneously material and figural. For Winstanley, for example, hedging was both a series of events in which he

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hoped to intervene in the moment and a way of grasping and describing the whole of human history. In short, one cannot really disaggregate history from tropes. It is fitting, then, that I begin this section—a shift in emphasis rather than a movement from one topic to a distinctly different one—with Shakespeare’s histories. In Shakespeare’s history plays, the neglected hedge serves as the symbol of good husbandry fallen into disorder. In the famous scene in the Duke of York’s garden in Richard II, the gardeners include “hedges ruined” in their litany of the unfortunate consequences of Richard’s rule (Richard II, 3.4). Hedges are, for them, works in progress. As Garrett Sullivan points out, their “description of the garden foregrounds both the processes of enclosure required to demarcate boundaries—the references to pale and hedges suggest enclosed spaces— and the labor necessary to keep them up.” This scene in Richard II is often paired with a moment at the end of Henry V, when the Duke of Burgundy laments the consequences of war for “our fertile France,” whose fecundity decays rather than being husbanded. In both of these scenes, the hedge, like the vineyard, must constantly be cut back and corrected. It is alive—a quickset hedge is often distinguished from a dead one—but its very vibrancy requires constant grooming and discipline. It is also ineffective; it fails to contain. As Jean Feerick points out, “garden meanings and imagery creep through the dramatic ‘walls’ and ‘hedges’ of these enclosed spaces and spread across the narrative seams of the plays at large.”21 I will quote the passage from Henry V at length so that we can see the two references to hedges—what Gary Taylor calls the “rather peculiar inclusion of hedges”:22 Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart, Unpruned dies; her hedges even-pleached, Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair, Put forth disordered twigs; her fallow leas The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts That should deracinate such savagery. The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,

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Losing both beauty and utility. And as our vineyards, fallows, meads and hedges, Defective in their natures, grow to wildness, Even so our houses and ourselves and children Have lost, or do not learn for want of time, The sciences that should become our country, But grow like savages. (Henry V, 5.2.41–59) The first description of hedges as “even-pleached” refers to plashing, planching, or pleaching, the process of cutting one stem and bending it across an upright one to create a less permeable barrier (Figure 7). The technique is ancient; Julius Caesar describes seeing the results in Gaul, where the Nervii, lacking their own cavalry, fortified themselves against the cavalry raids of their neighbors by bending saplings sideways and intertwining them with brambles

Figure 7. Planching hedges: The Hedger (1934 engraving from the British Museum). © Trustees of the British Museum.

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and thorns to make “wall-like hedges” that “not only could not be penetrated, but not even seen through.” In book 2 of Virgil’s Georgics, the poet may refer to this practice when he enjoins his reader to “weave hedges.” The Latin verb (“texo/texere”) links the weaving of fabrics to compositions of words, textiles to texts. Its use here also associates the bending and interweaving of pliant branches with both writing and weaving.23 In seventeenth-century England, Gervase Markham recognizes this as a process “in which there is much fine art, and cunning to be used.” The weaving must be repeated every seven to eight years, otherwise the hedge will grow thick at the top and thin at the bottom, with the unfortunate result “that not only beasts but men may run through it, and in the end it will die, and come to nothing.”24 Burgundy’s description places this labor in the peaceful past. The hedges, once even-pleached (or neatly “interwoven,” as many editions gloss this term) are now putting forth disordered twigs that undo that weaving, making the hedge less uniform. The thorns that make the hedge formidable, once grown out of order, signal not good husbandry but chaos. But how is a disorderly hedge like a prisoner? The more one thinks about the simile, the more bewildering it becomes. As James Siemon argues, Burgundy “represents quickset hedges—the very symbol of ‘capitalist’ landowning, pursuit of profit, exploitation of rural labor, expropriation of land, and the development of absolute private property—as the martyred prisoners of disorder.” Linking freedom and grooming, imprisonment and neglect, the simile suggests that the “hedge prisoners”’ redemption will, paradoxically, involve more effective correction. The prisoners’ hair links them to “the wild man, the witch, the madwoman, and the devil,” all of whom, according to Edith Snook, “often had unruly hair, with their hair marking their uncivil status.” Close cropping would civilize the hair as it would the hedge.25 But perhaps the hair does not just mark the hedge as wild and untamed. Yet again, the hedge both marks a boundary and entangles rather than separates. In the early modern period, human hair was viewed, on the one hand, as a thing “devoid of life,” an excrement, and on the other, as a living body part. Through one’s hair, understood as a living extension of the body, one might be vulnerable, like Samson or victims of witchcraft. What Edward Geisweidt calls the “vegetable quality” of the hair also linked living and dead, plant and human. Thomas Gibson argues that “[hairs] are no parts of the body, and therefore have no animal life; yet they have a vegetative life, and that peculiar to themselves, and not owing to the life of the body, seeing they continue to grow after a man is dead, as has been observed in embalmed bodies.”26 Even

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Gibson’s pronouns and cases are telling here. For Gibson, hair is not an undifferentiated plural (the hair) but a group (the hairs), not an “it” but a “they.” Burgundy’s odd simile then—“her hedges even-pleached, / Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair, / Put forth disordered twigs”—might underscore not just the resemblance of twigs and hair—many Roman writers used the Latin word “coma” to describe human hair, animal fleece, and plant leaves–– but also the parallel between plant and human as unruly works in progress. In the extended simile to which he builds, Burgundy again links hedges and humans. He has surveyed the disorder he sees all around him as the result of a lack of human care: what is unpruned, overgrown, and uncorrected; savagery that could and should have been deracinated or uprooted not just by tools (the coulter, the scythe) but by the humans wielding them, who are entirely absent from the passage except through comparisons. Yet, in the final simile, he also describes the overgrown hedges as “defective in their natures,” even as “our houses and ourselves and children.” Is the defect in nature, a nature somehow shared between their natures and ours, or in lapsed husbandry? Both they and we are fecund, conceiving and growing. As a consequence, the need for discipline is constant. Even if viewers do not remember their history, the Chorus will soon advise them in the epilogue that Henry’s son will lose France. Husbandry is never permanent; it is always a work in progress that has to be maintained. Weeds will colonize every empty space and choke sweeter plants. The hedge’s hair will grow back, even if Henry crops it. Burgundy’s speech does not appear in the first printed quarto (which differs from the Folio in many substantive ways including lacking the Chorus). In the Folio, as Charlotte Scott asks, “Why does Shakespeare put the language of social welfare, order, and management into the mouths of the opponents?” Scott argues that Burgundy is describing an English landscape rather than a French one. For Scott, only the vine distinguishes this landscape as distinctly French rather than English: “Although several English farmers had tried to grow vines, wine-making remained an industry strongly allied to the French. Burgundy’s invocation of the vine, ‘the merry cheerer of the heart,’ is the only referent that could define the landscape as part of France.”27 But, as we saw in Chapter 3, the vine was both remembered as a lost feature of the English landscape and promoted as an aspirational part of English agriculture. In any case, I agree with Scott that the vision of agricultural improvement—the constant need to groom and order nature—is one that applies to England too. The vine and the hedge both evoke England as well as France. Here again, the hedge, like the English Channel, connects as much as it divides.

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One of Shakespeare’s sources, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, does not assign such a speech to Burgundy. But if we look in vain for Burgundy’s speech in Holinshed, we can find hedges as both resource and tactic in his account of Henry’s defeat of the French. According to Holinshed, Henry V countered his troops’ disadvantage in numbers and weapons with the strategic use of situation: he placed his troops on a plot of ground “on both sides defended with hedges and bushes.” Then, he employed the “politic invention” of pitching sharp stakes in front of the archers, moving those occasionally like the wood in Dunsinane and then hedging the archers in: “the [English] footmen like an hedge” on each side prevented escape “so that the [French] footmen were hedged about with stakes, and the horsemen stood like a bulwark between them and their enemies, without the stakes.” In Burgundy’s speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V, a hedge is like a prisoner; in Holinshed, footmen are like a hedge. In both cases, figuration signals the agency of the hedge, and similes work as compounds do to couple humans and hedges. Moving from Richard II, to Henry V, then back to Holinshed, we can see that hedges are not just indices of historical process—ruined and disordered vs. pleached, old vs. new––or even just caches of materials. They take their place among the intertwinings of human and botanical agencies that recent scholars including Vin Nardizzi and Jean Feerick have charted.28 These plant-human couplings were often construed negatively. For example, the author of a 1598 pamphlet, A Hedgerow of Bushes, Brambles, and Briars . . . Of the vanities and vain delights of this world, aspires to help the reader avoid “the wrong and bushy bad way” by taking care that “if we be entangled in any briar of this hedgerow, we strive to get out in time, lest being caught by one briar, and careless to get loose, another also lays hold” with the sad result that “by degrees we be fastened and overwhelmed in the hedge, as when we would get loose we cannot, and the night come upon us unawares.” The reader should follow the example of “the silly sheep, feeding by the hedge,” who, as soon as he finds himself “caught by the briar,” will “so struggle and strive, that in the end he will get loose, albeit he leave some of his wool behind him.”29 Whatever the cost, one must struggle free of the briars and thorns, the vanities and delights of this world. The hedge, in metaphor as in the landscape, blocks human movement and volition. Issuing its absolute no, it seems to stand in every way opposed to the humans it checks. And yet, as it pulls wool off of the silly sheep, it also tears off human skin and clothing, incorporating these remainders into itself; it leaves its traces on those who escape its clutches, pierced with thorns, leaves in their hair. The boundary

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between the hedgerow and “our selves” is not stable. It reaches out to grab us and we carry part of it with us if we get away. I want to continue thinking about the hedge’s agency by looking at the cluster of fairy tales we know as Sleeping Beauty. Both canonical versions, Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century version and the Grimm brothers’ early nineteenth-century one, emphasize the hedge that grows up around the castle in which the heroine sleeps, after pricking her finger on the spinning wheel. Both of these versions begin with desperate and sorrowful royal infertility, relieved within a sentence or two by the joyful birth of a daughter and a much-celebrated christening. At that christening, one fairy, whom Perrault describes as “aged” and “uninvited,” gives the baby the “terrible gift” of a curse; she decrees that the young princess will prick her finger on a spindle and die. A younger fairy, who has held back her own gift, steps in with a spell that will partially counter this curse. The princess will sleep for one hundred years until a prince comes to awaken her. Although the parents try to protect their daughter from spinning wheels, she nevertheless pricks her finger when she is fifteen or sixteen. As Perrault describes it, once the princess pricks her finger and falls asleep, the king and queen kiss their sleeping child, leave the palace, and issue proclamations forbidding anyone to approach it. As if in response to those proclamations, “within a quarter of an hour, a great number of trees, some large, some small, interlaced with brambles and thorns, sprang up around the park and formed a hedge so thick that neither man nor beast could penetrate it. This hedge grew so tall that you could see only the topmost turrets of the castle, for the fairy had made a safe, magic place where the princess could sleep her sleep out free from prying eyes.”30 The prince is able to penetrate the hedge because a century has passed and he is “the prince who is meant to have her”: “No sooner had he stepped among the trees than the great trunks and branches, the thorns and brambles parted, to let him pass.” In the course of the story, this hedge becomes a they, a plant collective. The Brothers Grimm add two details: that the hedge captures others who have attempted to find the princess and that it transforms when the century has passed. While Perrault’s rescuing prince learns about the sleeping beauty only when he spots the turrets above the great wood, in the Brothers Grimm version the story has been circulating throughout the century of sleep, encouraging various suitors to try their luck at getting at the princess. Soon a hedge of briars began to grow all around the castle. Every year it grew higher until one day it surrounded the entire place. It had

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grown so thick that you could not even see the banner on the turret of the castle. Throughout the land, stories circulated about the beautiful Briar Rose, for that was the name given to the slumbering princess. From time to time a prince would try to force his way through the hedge to get to the castle. But no one ever succeeded, because the briars clasped each other as if they were holding hands, and the young men who tried got caught in them and couldn’t pry themselves loose. They died an agonizing death.31 The hedge, then, is cluttered with the corpses of failures, “fastened and overwhelmed in the hedge” to return to that phrase from the 1598 pamphlet, A Hedgerow of Bushes, Brambles, and Briars. Many illustrators have tried to capture this gruesome image. Edward Burne-Jones included the scene in a series of paintings of “The Legend of Briar Rose,” now at Buscot Park (Figure 8), and in a series of fireplace tiles depicting the story (now at the Victoria and Albert Museum). Trina Schart Hyman’s version of the Grimm Brothers’ Sleeping Beauty, from 1977, both depicts the moldering corpses and uses the gruesome hedge to frame the text, including the line that “the thorns, like angry hands, held them fast” (Figure 9). In such illustrations, the corpses, suspended in the hedge––hedge prisoners, if you will––resemble the family members connected by the rose bushes in a famous

Figure 8. “The Legend of Briar Rose, The Prince Enters the Briar Wood, 1892,” after the painting by Edward Burne-Jones, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photogravure.

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Figure 9. Trina Schart Hyman, illustration from Sleeping Beauty. Reproduced by permission of the Trina Schart Hyman estate.

image of the union of the Lancasters and Yorks from Hall’s Chronicle (Figure 10). Here, too, the bodies are both connected and stuck suspended in the canes. Indeed, the hedge of thorns is a graphic of barbed connectedness, a way of rendering visible how kinship and political competition feel and how reproductive futurity hangs up on the thorns of conflict in the War of the Roses. The two stories I link here appear at first to be so different as to be opposites: a fairy tale about an unnamed princess and prince, and a chronicle history of a known ruling family, one drawing attention to its status as a story outside of time and the other purporting to chart actual events. Yet juxtaposing their two images of hedge prisoners, victims of either enchantment or genealogy, suggests the imaginative links between the two forms. The fairy tale purports to tell a family’s story. The chronicle is a kind of fantasy of how we got here from there. In both, the hedge represents entrapment and connection, impediment and advance.

Figure 10. Title page from the 1550 edition of Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke. Reproduced from Wikicommons.

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Let us look at a moment in the third of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, in which the future Richard III describes his ambition in terms of being like one lost in a thorny wood, That rents the thorns and is rent with the thorns, Seeking a way and straying from the way, Not knowing how to find the open air But toiling desperately to find it out. He concludes that the only way to free himself is to “hew my way out with a bloody ax” (Henry VI, Part 3, 3.2.174–81). The thorny hedge trope, here, evokes recursivity not linearity; the family is the thorny wood; the ax is the only way through and out. There are so many dead ends in this dynastic hedge maze. But as part of cutting his way out, Richard, in Richard III, hedges in others. As Katie Wales shows, Queen Margaret resorts to symploce—anaphora at the beginning of the lines and epistrophe at the end––to convey syntactically how Richard himself squeezes his victims. I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him. I had a Harry, till a Richard killed him. Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him. Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him. (4.4.37–40) Symploce derives from the Greek word for interweaving, because of the ways it combines two figures in one. But in its use here it also evokes planching or hedge-building as a form of weaving. As Margaret sees it, Richard hedges in his rivals, enclosing and cutting off the obstacles to his ambition.32 Returning to the Sleeping Beauty tales, a detour through Richard’s mind makes it possible to see more clearly how the thorny hedge there, too, works to impede desire (or ambition), to stall individual maturation, and to disrupt the transfer from one generation to the next. But in neither version of the fairy tale is the way out via bloody ax. Instead, it seems to be the hedge that controls ingress and egress. At first, the hedge keeps sleeping beauty in, and keeps out those who would rescue or molest her. It also provokes our hero to plunge in. In the Brothers Grimm version of Sleeping Beauty, the story that provokes the prince is a story about a hedge: “He heard an old man talking about a briar hedge that was said to conceal a castle, where a wondrously beautiful princess named Briar Rose had been sleeping for a hundred years.” The king’s son, who

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will rescue Briar Rose, finds a different hedge than the one that entraps other aspirants: “It so happened that the term of one hundred years had just ended, and the day on which Briar Rose was to awaken had arrived. When the prince approached the briar hedge, he found nothing but big, beautiful flowers. They opened to make a path for him and to let him pass unharmed; then they closed behind him to form a hedge.”33 Briar Rose and her prince lived happily ever after, of course, although it is not clear whether they got out. This hedge is not an absolute no but rather a not yet and not you. This hedge waits and discriminates and metamorphoses. A headless, extended, determined, “entangled state of agencies,” the hedge in the Sleeping Beauty stories disguises the castle and protects as well as confines the sleeper; the briars “clasp each other as if they were holding hands” or, in another translation, “clung together as though they had hands” to stop intruders. The briars turn into flowers and those flowers part for the chosen one, perhaps of “their own accord” or perhaps because the spell dictates it. In visual depictions, the hedge of thorns figures obstacles to human desire and action. But it is also an agent of death, even a weapon. In Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), for example, Maleficent, the evil queen, casts a spell to stop the prince from reaching Sleeping Beauty: “A forest of thorns shall be his tomb”–– and we watch as lightning strikes the pavement in front of the castle and thorns erupt from between the cobble stones and spread out and up exponentially. Here, as in most popular depictions of hedges of thorns (including the 2014 Disney film Maleficent), the hedge is botanically homogeneous—unlike the biodiverse ecosystems of most hedges then and now, which Perrault’s very specific description of trees, large and small, interlaced with brambles and thorns captures.34 But homogeneous or biodiverse, the hedge is also always animate. If thorny hedges impede or at least forestall desire, they also facilitate human desire and action when the time is right, taking matters into their own branches and tendrils. The hedge, it turns out, is a central character in Sleeping Beauty, appearing in remediations from Perrault to the Grimms to the two Disney versions fifty-five years apart. It also attaches itself to the heroine who is called either “Briar Rose” or “the Sleeping Beauty in the wood.” Jane Bennett describes such an assemblage as “a force to be reckoned with” but also suggests that it is not “purposive in any strong sense,” that is, “adapted to a purpose or end,” or “performed with conscious purpose or intention” (OED).35 In contrast, the hedge in all these versions of the Sleeping Beauty story is precisely “purposive,” serving a purpose the fairies assign to it. But it is hard to pin down which fairy

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is responsible for the hedge. Is it the aged and vengeful fairy? Or the young and kindhearted one? Might we view the hedge itself as wanting or intending? Can we view the hedge as materializing Sleeping Beauty’s own desire—first a no and then a yes? We can pursue these questions by turning to Giambattista Basile’s seventeenth-century version of the Sleeping Beauty story, “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” which predates the Perrault and Grimm versions. Basile’s story does not include a hedge protecting the sleeping beauty. The king who finds Talia “(whose name derives from the Greek word ‘Thaleia,’ meaning ‘the blossoming one’)” rapes her in her sleep and she does not awaken until she gives birth to twins and her infant daughter sucks out the splinter that enchants her. Talia has more suffering ahead; as I discussed in Chapter 2, the king’s jealous wife tries to kill the twins and feed them to him. While the rape in this tale draws our attention to the mystification of consent in other versions of the story, in which the hedge admits the prince, who then kisses the sleeping princess, imposing her happy ending on her, when we compare the Basile, Perrault, and Grimm versions of the story, it is striking that the one version without a hedge includes a rape. Even in its absence, the hedge shapes the story, leaving the sleeper more vulnerable. Talia apologizes to the enraged queen by saying that “it wasn’t her fault and that the king had taken possession of her territory when she was under a sleeping spell.” Without the hedge, the sleeping heroine is a common woman, lacking protection and the capacity for consent.36 This places her in a long tradition in which the virgin is the hortus conclusus or enclosed garden (and the woman who is not hedged in and owned is “common”). These associations might run the other way, as well, depicting enclosed lands as sheltered wives and common lands as whores. As Adam Moore argues in his defense of enclosure: “But suppose you will say, you are all incorporate, and become one body, and so do use your common as an inseparable spouse, to be your helper: why are you then so cuckolded by foreigners and strangers, and your common used before your face, even as commonly as by yourselves? Or indeed, (whilst you make it a common prostitute to every lust) how can you help it? Were it not better therefore and more secure to take her home to your chamber, and keep her with a guard where she cannot be abused?”37 For Moore, the agricultural field, like the wife, must be enclosed, guarded, and husbanded. The rape in the earliest and least well-known version of Sleeping Beauty serves as a reminder that moving from agricultural enclosures (and the immiseration they entail) to fairy tales is not an escape from a history of dispossession and injury. Fairy tales, too, are organized around enclosure and

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repulsion, prohibition and rapine, just as fantasies (of possession, domination, and exclusion) drove, and still drive, the history of enclosure. With its magical powers, the hedge of thorns, like so many features of fairy tales, borrows from the animate natural world of myth, parable, and saints’ stories. It might be possible to link the hedge of thorns to Jesus’s crown of thorns. In England, the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury suggests how the very properties that made the hawthorn formidable might make it miraculous. Legend claims that a worn-out Joseph of Arimathea thrust his staff into Wearyall Hill near Glastonbury and it took root, just as Christianity did. This white thorn tree has continued to bloom each Christmas. Starting with a gift from James Montague, royal chaplain and bishop of Bath and Wells, to Anne of Denmark, James I’s queen, a blooming sprig has been sent to the monarch each winter. According to Richard Broughton’s Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1633), the tree’s blooming and fruiting “proceed from a supernatural agent and worker to witness the holiness of these Saints, and their religion.” For Broughton, it is a miracle the tree survives since its trunk is “so cut and mangled round about in the bark by engraving the letters of people’s names resorting thither, to see that wonder” and to maim and break off branches “to carry them away for show.” Through their graffiti and souvenir-seeking, the faithful both damage and disseminate the tree, on the one hand, and mingle themselves with it, on the other. Precisely because it was viewed as agential, “this prodigious Somerset shrub,” “the extraordinary hawthorn,” was burned during the civil war because of its association with Catholicism; it has been vandalized as recently as 2012. Alexandra Walsham, who discusses the holy thorn in a chapter on “invented traditions,” emphasizes that the story not only survived the Reformation but seems to have been “embellished, if not partly engendered by it.” It does not appear in records before the dissolution. Although Walsham does not link the flowering hawthorn and hedges, the proliferation of hedges on the landscape may add another layer of meaning to the fact that the holy thorn is a post-Reformation phenomenon.38 The magical powers of this plant are not a holdover from a once-enchanted past but rather an innovation, a reminder that enchantment is as modern as it is medieval. Jane Bennett connects the kind of agency I have assigned to the hedge to the enchantment we see in stories of evil fairies and holy thorns. The magical power of the hedge is not, then, a throwback to a premodern relation to the landscape nor does it divert us from the bruising cruelties of the enclosing hedge. Rather, we can see how the hedge, as organic barbed wire and as paradoxical emblem of the everyday miracle of fertility, gets things done. “In

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the mood of enchantment, we sense that ‘we’ are always mixed up with ‘it,’ and ‘it’ shares in some of the agency we officially ascribe only to ourselves.” Bruno Bettelheim famously argued that the enchantment of fairy tales had its uses. Rita Felski argues that one of the uses of literature, one of the ways it finds its value for us, is enchantment, an enchantment that is simultaneously “an intensely charged experience of absorption and self-loss” and a critical assessment of that absorption: “Even as we are enchanted, we remain aware of our condition of enchantment, without such knowledge diminishing or diluting the intensity of our involvement.” This “double consciousness” places us again, in effect, inside and outside the hedge.39 It also conjoins enchantment with purpose or use. Just as Burgundy in Henry V argued that the husbanded landscape and the groomed hedge combined “beauty and utility,” so the agencies of the hedge are connected to the questions What are hedges are for? and What do they do?

The Purpose of Edges To think more about that, I would like to consider the borders on some printed pages, especially title pages. In the sixteenth century, compositors (or typesetters) in printshops began to combine single ornamental elements, often called “flowers,” to create a serial pattern, a band or border, which would then frame a title page. By the 1560s print borders were cropping up in the margins of pages printed in England. We can see a printed border on the title page of a text I have already mentioned, A Hedgerow of Bushes, Brambles, and Briars (Figure 11). Juliet Fleming, whose work on what she calls printed flowers drew my attention to them and informs my discussion, seeks “to free sixteenth-century type ornament from the associative burdens that it carries as long as it is considered to represent flowers.” As she points out, the most common term used for this ornament was not flower but “vinet,” a term the OED defines as “a running or trailing ornament or design in imitation of the branches, leaves, or tendrils of the vine, employed in architecture or decorative work.” In Fleming’s view, these borders were “examples of a Europeanized ‘arabesque’ style that was also known as ‘branched work.’ ” Yet calling this design element a vinet, rather than a flower, does not suppress its horticultural associations. The vinet, especially in its resemblance to branches and tendrils that move—running and trailing––links it to the hedge as we have been considering it.40 The connection I am suggesting is again not just a

Figure 11. Title page of A Hedgerow of Bushes, Brambles, and Briers. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library.

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matter of resemblance or even of historical convergence, although it is interesting that hedges proliferate on the landscape in roughly the same period that they flower on printed pages. Juxtaposing the printed border and the hedge offers an opportunity to think about what hedges do—in fields, in fairy tales, on pages. First, hedges create and announce the page’s or field’s status as property. Just as the hedge made property private, the architecture of the printed page “began to exhibit some limited degree of conformity, with the result that the specific disposition of flowers began to function, albeit in fleeting and unsystematic ways, to mark books as being the products of particular printers or coteries, and even in one case (that of the English sonnet sequence) as belonging to a particular genre.” Just as the printed border changes one’s perception of the page, the hedge both announces a change in a field’s status and invites a changed perception of a field—as productive land rather than wasteland, as private rather than common. Arguably, the hedge calls the garden or farm into being rather than protecting what already exists. As many early modern writers themselves recognized, the very word for paradise is connected to the Persian “pālīz,” describing a walled vegetable plot; the “verdurous wall” Milton describes enclosing paradise makes it paradise––even if it also fails to keep Satan out. If the defining landscape of fairy tales is the enchanted forest then, according to J. R. R. Tolkien, that too “requires a margin, even an elaborate border.” On a more mundane level, the proverb “ungirt [or unenclosed], unblessed” captures the belief that the hedge made and sanctioned the farm.41 The printed hedge also served an ornamental function: to be beautiful and to invite the reader to see the printed page as beautiful: a pleasing visual field, into which she might project herself, an aesthetic object to be looked at rather than a meaning delivery system to be seen through. This particular purposelessness is, then, purposeful, because it shapes the reader’s engagement with the page. This hearkens back to the role of the richly illustrated margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The hedge’s own status as aesthetic object—rather than just the frame of the aesthetic object—has long been a topic of debate. Tom Williamson argues that, in the eighteenth century, what were perceived as “pre-enclosure” hedges might be valued as objects of beauty while the more recent and utilitarian ones could not. “The straight new quickset hedges planted across the former commons represented the forces of agricultural capitalism destroying the independence of an ancient peasant society: the ancient hedges whose origins had long

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been forgotten, in contrast, could be associated with the timeless peace and beauty of this threatened lifestyle.” It was only later that “the hedges created by Parliamentary Enclosure also eventually came to be viewed as timeless elements of a picturesque landscape: their historical significance was soon forgotten.”42 Forgetting the hedge’s purpose and provenance made it possible to see it as beautiful. Beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder but in the rearview mirror. The boundary that separated a garden from the surrounding countryside—a boundary usually erected by enclosure—was then obscured for aesthetic reasons. Eventually, landscape architects hit upon the idea of “erecting the fence in a ditch, below eye level, so that there seemed to be no barrier between the garden and the outside world. The subterfuge was called a ‘ha-ha’ because this is what a stroller in the garden would exclaim on the verge of falling into the hidden ditch.”43 The enclosing and excluding barrier was still there but it was invisible, creating the illusion of an Arcadian pastoral space and smudging the history by which that supposedly unbroken connection between estate and common pasture had been disrupted. Today, defenses of hedgerows employ Burgundy’s terms of beauty and utility, arguing that hedgerows add to the beauty of a farm by inviting spectators to see the crops themselves as beautiful. As Sam Earnshaw writes in Hedgerows for California Agriculture, “Habitat plantings wider and larger than single rows can encourage more diversity of birds and wildlife, and can become an income-generating attraction for regional eco-tourism activities” as well as part of the farm’s “aesthetic” and “niche marketing.”44 On the farm as on the page, the aesthetic is purposeful and productive. Indeed, arguments for the beauty of hedgerows help challenge the assumption that the margins of fields should be empty. In the seventeenth century, some farmers proposed a similar project of filling blank spaces and exploiting them as resources. In Bread for the Poor, his brief for enclosure, Adam Moore, taking seriously the biblical injunction to “keep and dress” the earth, advises that “it now behooves us to survey and search the angles of our garden, and so to dress the desert and fruitless borders of it.” For Moore, every angle must be filled; if it is not fruitful, then it is desert. Similarly, Fleming suggests that one function of the printed border was to help “keep blank spaces clean from unwanted ink during pressing.”45 Page margins were kept clean by filling them. Yet empty margins have prevailed as the standard—for farms as for pages. Efforts to promote hedgerows have to argue against the entrenched preference

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for clean—meaning empty––margins framing fields. The recent manifesto Bring Farm Edges Back to Life! proposes the hedge as an alternative to what it describes as “the traditional approach of ‘clean farming’ ” or “keeping all land that isn’t planted to a crop either scraped or sprayed clean.” Mike Madison calls that traditional approach “the philosophy of ‘kill everything except the crop’.” Clean farming is extremely high maintenance, requiring labor and pesticides to keep margins bare of weeds and to clear fields of the very crop residue that can enrich and protect soil. The soil that clean farming struggles to keep bare then erodes readily. Clean farming emerges from an aesthetic as well as practical sense that border vegetation implies sloppy farming and invites weeds and pests that will move from border to center. Defenses of hedgerows suggest that farmers might reconceive “clean” to mean not plant-free but rather weed-free. Land that is not planted with crops might be reimagined as a resource for the whole farm rather than a burden. The mantra to keep soil clean would then give way to the mantra of conservation agriculture that soil should always be covered. Wendell Berry states that “hedgerows are marginal areas, little thoroughfares of wilderness closely crisscrossing the farmland, and in them agriculture is constantly renewing itself in direct response to what threatens it”; hedgerows offer an experimental space for developing and testing ideas. To appreciate their possibilities, he urges, readers and viewers should “turn a curious eye to the margins.”46 The hedgerow then becomes yet another front on which to debate what the divine injunction to “till the earth” entails. Is it keeping “waste grounds” empty or filled? What makes emptiness or waste productive? Notice that the injunction that is the manifesto’s title—bring farm edges back to life!—focuses on human agency and responsibility. If attacks on hedges in some ways took them as stand-ins for the less accessible humans whose policies they materialized, then these proposals put humans back on the hook. This means you, farmer or reader! You are enjoined to turn a curious eye to the margins and make borders fruitful. An aesthetic reorientation, in this case, would bear huge dividends in terms of retaining and enriching soil, sequestering carbon, reducing the use of pesticides and energy, and opening up an experimental space for promoting biodiversity. The hedgerow, like the printed border, can redefine what “clean” means by filling an empty space so that it is not available for contamination. But the occupied edge does not just prevent incursions—of unwanted ink, of weeds, or perhaps of marginalia. Filling up the space attracts other kinds of interaction. The hedgerow can draw spectators into it, and not just to entrap them like Sleeping Beauty’s suitors.

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Hedgerow as Common The possibility of interacting with the hedgerow, rather than simply being stopped or injured by it, or hewing one’s way out of it with a bloody ax, brings me to another conceptualization of the hedge I want to discuss. Here again, material functions and figural possibilities intertwine. The trope of the hedge as a kind of common is, in part, simply an extension of a traditional function of the hedge, and of the right to hedgebote. The freely available resources became a way to soften the edges of enclosure. For example, Moore defends enclosure in part by saying “the hedgerow of enclosures” will provide increased quantities of firewood. Some gleaning from hedges—when it leaves the plantings largely intact—was understood to be open to all (and not just to tenants). In this way, hedges are sort of public. In the early modern period, we find references to eating from hedges all over the place. Eating from the hedge might be a sign of desperation or hardiness. For example, Octavius reminds Antony that he once ate “the roughest berry on the rudest hedge” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.4.63–64). But references to the hedge as a food source also serve to sentimentalize poverty as a form of freedom. John Taylor describes how the beggar, rather than getting his food from a “cut-throat slaughtering shambles,” where meat would be butchered and sold, instead finds that “each hedge allows him berries from the brambles” and that the fruit of the hedge “attends his appetite where’er he goes.” This movable feast changes with the seasons, making the hedge into a kind of cornucopia for the poor. Nor were the hedge’s resources restricted to them. John Evelyn advises readers of his treatise on salads that “every hedge affords a salad (not unagreeable).”47 Treatises on physic recommend foraging from hedges, not as a last resort in poverty but as the superior alternative to imported and compounded drugs. We have discussed attitudes toward local and endenizened plants in previous chapters. The hedge figures importantly as a source of such culinary and medicinal plants. William Coles seeks to acquaint his reader with “those more wholesome herbs and plants that he hath growing at his own door, which are more consonant and proper for his body” than are “those outlandish plants and ingredients, which are almost if not altogether impossible to be obtained.” The proximate plants he recommends are, then, both more wholesome and easier to find. Coles advises his reader to forego imports and the hard work of manuring and tending a garden, to instead “make use and gain of wilder places,” finding “hedge-mustard or bank-cress,” and plants like the bramble that “grows in every hedge almost.” Coles privileges apple and pear trees growing “wild

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in woods and hedgerows,” over the peaches, plums, and apricots that grow against walls in gentlemen’s gardens. Robert Turner, in his Botanologia . . . or, The nature and virtues of English plants. . . . By means whereof people may gather their own physic under every hedge, or in their own gardens (1664), consistently distinguishes among plants that grow “wild in the hedge-rows,” those that grow “commonly in most fields,” those cultivated in gardens, and those that grow only in other countries.48 He assumes that what one finds in hedges and fields, growing “naturally,” is available for foraging. And, as his title suggests, he advocates those found plants as especially salubrious. The hedge also exploits its affordances in creating privacy. Gail Paster argues that, in The Winter’s Tale, when Autolycus says he will “but look upon the hedge and follow you” (4.4.826–28), he “invokes a familiar phrase” for urination, thus “elaborately signaling a desire for privacy in excretion” and mimicking “excretory refinement . . . not only to excuse himself but to reinforce the social differences between himself and his companions” (the Shepherd and his son, the Clown). The Arden editor, John Pitcher, glossing “look upon the hedge” as “I’ll just take a leak,” adds that “urinating on the hedge emphasizes the contempt he [Autolycus] has for all boundaries set by owners (hedges around property) and for authority.”49 For Paster, Autolycus sets himself above his companions by announcing that he wants to urinate in private; for Pitcher, this urination is an act of class contempt of which Winstanley might approve. Taken together, Paster and Pitcher suggest how, even in a slang expression, the hedge creates social distinctions. It is a privy and it privatizes property. So far, I have not found references to “look upon the hedge” as slang for urination anywhere but in discussions of this moment in The Winter’s Tale. Searching for the phrase “look upon the hedge” in Early English Books Online (EEBO), one finds only one occurrence—in The Winter’s Tale. Much more common is a proverb that associates looking over a hedge with coveting or contemplating stealing the property protected by that hedge: “as good steal the horse as look over the hedge,” advises one version. Others warn that retribution falls unevenly: “It is less dangerous to some, to steal / A horse, than others to look o’er the hedge.”50 One can well imagine Autolycus, who covets the “white sheet bleaching on the hedge,” looking over the hedge as well, to consider what he might steal on the other side (4.3.5). Was the slang expression “look upon the hedge” once common, or is it evidence of how the hedge stirs up retrospective fantasies about the common: the common practice of urination; the desire to downplay what Autolycus might have in common with the shepherd and clown; the common that is foreclosed through hedges

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around property. Whatever it means that Autolycus says he will “look upon the hedge,” editors and critics look upon it, and what they find reflects their own sense of the early modern social map. It might at first seem counterintuitive to link the hedge to a privy and to privacy. But Lena Orlin argues that, paradoxically, in early modern England, it was easier to achieve privacy outside than in. As a consequence, those outside were sometimes suspected of plotting. She links the proverbs “The walls have ears” and “Hedges have ears” to suggest the particular privacy attainable in unenclosed spaces: “If any structure of sufficient size could conceal eavesdroppers, then what was reassuring about the garden was not only its acoustical inefficiency, as sound dissipated in open air, but also its spatial range, so that confidences could be exchanged elusively, in motion, rather than captured in stasis.”51 The very structures that sheltered confidences, she points out, could also conceal spies on those intimacies. This assumption frequently governs dramatic plots. In Twelfth Night, Maria advises her coconspirators “Get ye all three into the box tree” (2.5.13), which the Norton edition glosses as a “hedge of boxwood,” so that they can spy on Malvolio as he finds her forged letter. In Much Ado About Nothing, the scheme to lime or bait Beatrice and Benedick requires getting first one then the other of them in an arbor so they will overhear the confidences staged for them. Hero tells Margaret to “bid her [Beatrice] steal into the pleachèd bower / Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun, / Forbid the sun to enter” (3.1.7–9). The pleachèd bower is also called “the woodbine coverture” (3.1.30); Benedick has hidden himself in this bower in 2.3 as well. Its pleaching is crucial to the plotting that brings Beatrice and Benedick together. On the stage, then, hedgelike structures conceal spies while simultaneously exposing them to the audience and drawing our attention to the role of such structures in creating the illusion of privacy and breaching it. These hedges have ears indeed. Hedges also provided shelter. The same hedge that repelled some large animals offered habitat to a host of smaller ones—and to humans. It was proverbial that vagrants slept in hedges. According to John Taylor, “When trees and steeples are o’erturned with wind, / A beggar will a hedge for shelter find.” To be born “under a hedge” was to be of low birth; Jack Cade, for instance, was born “under a hedge” (Henry VI, Part 2, 4.2.48). There is even the proverb “It’s good sheltering under an old hedge” (meaning it is good to marry an older woman).52 In sheltering the vagrant, the hedge is both failing in one regard—if its purpose is to be an absolute no—and succeeding in another, sustaining the very people it also shut out.

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We can see a particularly vivid and fully developed example of the hedge as a place and a plot in Richard Brome’s play A Jovial Crew, one of the last plays performed before the theaters were shut down in 1642. The plot focuses on how squire Oldrents’s steward, Springlove, longs to escape his responsibilities in order to join his friends, the jovial crew. It locates the crew not on the open road, as is often assumed, but, repeatedly, in the sheltering hedge. A technology of exclusion, the hedge becomes the site of a life outside the protections and responsibilities of an estate. We learn that beggar marriages take place “under a hedge” (4.2.25). Oliver Clack expresses his admiration for “the handsomest beggar-braches that ever graced a ditch or a hedge-side” (3.1.293–94); his father, Justice Clack calls the merry beggars “hedge-birds” (5.1.71); Sentwell elaborates that this category includes “Hedge-ladybirds, hedge-cavaliers, hedge-soldier, hedge-lawyer, hedge-fiddlers, hedge-poet [the poet Scribble is also called “our hedge-musemonger” (1.1.449)], hedge-players and a hedge-priest [“our Parson Underhedge” (4.2.64)] among ’em” (5.1.81–89). What the hedge compound means is that each is now transported by poverty, from player to hedge-player. The dis- or relocation signals both the fall in status and the new home. Defending his desire to escape his obligations as a steward, Springlove insists that “[Phoebus] shines as warm under a hedge-bottom as on the tops of palaces” (4.2.151–52), suggesting the hedge bottom and the palace top as the limits of the social landscape but also leveling the hierarchy. Although it was proverbial that “the sun does not shine on both sides of the hedge at once,” Springlove insists that, when it shines, it shines as warm.53 This catalog suggests an inverted bizarro world, typical of many accounts of transgression, in which every social type has its hedge counterpart. We might view the play as an escapist fantasy, suggesting that vagrancy is both liberating and freely chosen, rather than a dire necessity. Or we might view the play, as Martin Butler has suggested, as an interrogation of what motivates escapism, an exposé of its disastrous consequences, and “a sharp rebuke to the court for its economic and political bankruptcy”; “Brome’s point appears to be that however strong the desire to escape from one’s troubles may be in 1641 it is none the less reprehensible and potentially disastrous.” On the one hand, the hedge is an alternative world. The beggars create the kind of antidomesticity Catherine Richardson finds in a range of sources: “one which is relocated outside, under the hedge or in the ditch, in between legitimate areas of jurisdiction, needing to be unmade at every liaison.” In A Jovial Crew, Julie Sanders senses something “radical in the decision of the beggars to live their lives within alternative social spaces and by alternative social codes.” On

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the other hand, as Sanders herself points out, the play is a cultural geography of the 1630s, what Butler calls “a profoundly historical play, giving vigorous expression to the most central preoccupations of its time.” Yes, this line of argument concedes, the play mobilizes familiar literary conventions––pastoral fantasies of escape, as well as the conventions governing depictions of worlds turned upside down––but it does so in order to engage the political, social, and economic changes that define its moment and for which enclosure still often serves as shorthand: rising population and unemployment; harvest failures and economic depressions; rising rents; inflation and low wages; the huge shift in land tenures; and decline of the kind of hospitality Oldrents represents. As his name signals, Oldrents’s hospitality, which includes sheltering beggars in his barn, “could be seen as a romantic and nostalgic throwback to better times.” The play’s arc, from the Oldrents household to Judge Clack’s, can be read as tracing the deterioration in hospitality. Yet, as we will see, even Oldrents’s hospitality smacks of John Taylor’s chilling parenthetical remark: “(For ’tis within the power of mighty men / To make five hundred beggars, and feed ten).”54 In the course of the play, Oldrents abandons his household and responsibilities to take to the road/hedge himself. In the end, the apparent opposition between estate and freedom, house and hedge, insiders and outsiders, collapses. Oldrents is Springlove’s father. Their backstory exemplifies the adage “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” Oldrents’s own grandfather tricked Wrought-on, the grandfather to Patrico (the hedge-priest), out of his land. As a result, Wrought-on’s “posterity” was “exposed to beggary” (5.1.464– 65). Meeting her unaware of the connection, Oldrents impregnated Patrico’s sister, who became Springlove’s mother. Once the hedge-priest reveals this tangled web, Oldrents recognizes Springlove as his son, grants him an income, and gives Patrico an annuity. In addition to three couples united at play’s end, the comic process offers some restorative redistribution of wealth to draw the hedge-priest and Springlove into the gentry (from which they had been thrust by Oldrents’s family). While Helen Ostovich praises “Brome’s genuinely comic ending,” others are less satisfied. It is true that the vicious Judge Clack—whose philosophy is “punish ’em first and be compassionate afterwards” (5.1.134–35)—forbears his habitual recourse to the whip and the stocks. He orders his clerk: “Give all the beggars my free pass without all manner of correction! That is to say, with a-hey, get ’em gone” (5.1.549–51). But what does this free pass give the beggars? As Garrett Sullivan emphasizes, it means that they now have to return to their

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home parishes, which must take responsibility for them. It is not just the play’s middle, then, that shows “what it means to be without political rights altogether.”55 I do not propose to resolve the debates about the play. Rather, I want to link its capacity to stir up debate to the hedge at its center. If, as the Brome online editors argue, “Brome’s balancing act is a tour de force,” then it balances on the hedge. The play emphatically depicts the hedge as an edge that can be occupied, not just by a lone vagrant but by a jovial crew. As exiles from labor within the estate, the jovial crew then work to make the hedge—conceived as the limit that defines a place—into their own social space through their interactions within it. As Brome depicts them, they experience the hedge as a space that is “more strange, shifting, and malleable, more open to being differently inhabited or used” than a household, to use Patricia Fumerton’s terms for other unsettled early modern spaces. Indeed, through their use of it the exiles make the hedge such a habitat.56 But it is also a haven—and a community–– from which they are ultimately expelled by the play’s end. The proposals I have discussed thus far all emphasize the resources that just happen to be in the hedge: the wood that forms its backbone, the herbs that spring up in its understory, and the canopy it creates. These resources, found rather than planted, might be employed to manage enclosure and exclusion or an increasing and undesirable reliance on imported medicines. But there were also seventeenth-century proposals for reimagining hedges as community gardens and planting them with this view in mind. One of the earliest descriptions of the hedgerow as a food source appears in John Gerard’s Herbal (1597). He says he “has seen,” in the pastures and hedgerows of Roger Bodnome, “so many trees of all sorts” that the servants drink only cider and the hogs are so spoiled for choice that they will “not taste of any but of the best” apples. While Gerard does not explicitly address enclosure, he enjoins his reader to plant fruit trees: “forward in the name of God, graft, set, plant and nourish up trees in every corner of your grounds, the labor is small, the cost is nothing, the commodity is great, your selves shall have plenty, the poor shall have somewhat in time of want to relieve their necessity, and God shall reward your good minds and diligence.” Gerard participates, then, in promoting tree planting, as did others who were concerned about diminishing supplies of the wood needed as a building material and fuel source.57 Here, though, the emphasis is on food. Later writers took up Gerard’s suggestion, whether they acknowledged him or not, explicitly promoting the hedgerow as a solution to poverty and

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hunger. Walter Blith, in The English Improver Improved, recommends dividing hedgerows with crab trees: “What a benefit might the fruit of these trees yield either in perry or cider, to be transported into other parts, or else to relieve our poor at home? of which were there plenty this dear year, one third part of the malt of this nation might be saved, and so that barley be for bread.” Other writers followed Blith in identifying hedgerow orchards and cidering as an indirect solution to grain shortages and a replacement for “foreign drinks,” as we saw in the last chapter. A text promoting the planting of fruit trees as a “design for plenty” states that the people of France would have starved in some famines without their chestnuts, walnuts, apples, and pears, which proved better than “asses heads, doves dung, or old leather, which some have been constrained to eat to preserve life; yea sometimes the flesh of dead men, and their own children.”58 By this account, fruit trees will function as a hedge against the escalation of desperate eating, leading ultimately to eating one’s own, that we examined in Chapter 2. Many writers address a concern Gerard anticipates from the start: “The poor will break down our hedges, and we shall have the least part of the fruit.” The solution later writers devised was to imagine the hedge itself as a kind of common from which anyone might harvest and forestalling theft through abundance. In “To Saxham,” Thomas Carew imagines a householder whose bounty is such that it defeats theft: “They cannot steal thou gives’t so much.” In The Commons Complaint (1611), Arthur Standish proposes that farmers should plant trees that will provide fruit and kindling in their hedges and addresses concerns about theft by arguing that “it is scarcity that causes stealing.” In countries where they plant trees in hedges, Standish argues, people are free to take “that which hangs over the highway,” leaving plenty on the inside edge near the fields. Standish refers to a policy that still governs gleaning: what falls on public thoroughfares or hangs out over the fence is available for public use. Today, Hedgerow Harvest in the UK runs foraging courses for gathering “wild” food, presumably instructing students not only in what is edible and what is poisonous but also in what is wild or available and what is owned. They take their name from a 1943 Ministry of Food pamphlet, which advises readers that, in a time of rationing, “there is a wealth of wild foods in our hedgerows and fields” but reminds them not to break hedges to get it.59 While others have noticed and discussed these seventeenth-century proposals to plant fruit trees, I want to emphasize how reimagining the hedge, shifting its use as trope, participates in a process of historical change. Refiguring the hedge reacts to the changing presence and meaning of hedgerows; tries to

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address poverty and hunger; and manages the hedge’s new presence and function on the landscape. This ingenious refiguring of the absolute no, or the violent assemblage, back into the common did not work, however. Most early modern hedgerows were not really orchards; few of those excluded by hedges felt so grateful for apples that they reconsidered their ire. The proposals themselves reinforced the idea that the hedge, like the property it enclosed, belonged to the landlord, who might, if he deigned, use it to provide a form of poor relief. The hedgerow orchard would have been, at best, private property, maintained at the landlord’s expense, and then, through his beneficence, shared. But looking back at this largely unsuccessful attempt to reimagine, even rebrand, the hedgerow, from the vantage point of attempts to promote hedgerows now, we can see how these failed proposals resemble current justifications for hedgerows. Advocates of hedgerows again describe them as sources of beauty for humans. They also describe them as food sources, but now the emphasis is on feeding beneficial insects and the natural predators of maleficent vermin, rather than humans (who themselves were once considered the vermin to be excluded by some enclosers). According to one advocate, “including plants in hedgerows that provide habitat for pollinators has the potential for increasing the effectiveness of pollination on nearby fields and can build up a reservoir of insects that work for the farm.”60 Indeed, hedgerows are often now called “insectaries.” Reconceptualizing the hedgerow as a common for wildlife has the potential to erase the earlier communities that sheltered in and fed off of hedges, erasing one history of social and economic struggle even as it advances environmental conservation. We also come back to the question of purpose. In the past, biodiversity emerged over time and somewhat accidentally, as birds and winds spread seeds into the hedges. This makes an old hedgerow a “historical record” or archive as well as a “nature reserve.” The story of its understory is history. In the early modern period, this biodiversity was recognized and exploited—for instance, by those foragers for physic I mentioned earlier—but it was not usually planned. Now, biodiversity is one of the primary justifications for hedgerows. This contribution is so valuable that some recommend “interplanting” strips of “beneficials” within crops or fields themselves, thus integrating the hedge into the field.61 What appears at first to be a reversal of meaning—an instrument of privatization reconceived as a common good—is also another kind of continuity. It is also an occasion to think again about that decidedly early modern

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concept—resemblance—and what it reveals and obscures. What looks similar is not necessarily similar. I have used the linked words hedge/hedgerow to follow one thread through a maze of cultural meanings, even as I also keep pointing out that the thread is kinked in some places, frayed in others. But then again, the resemblance between an occasion of riot, Disney animation, a feature of the early modern printed page, and conservancy initiatives, then and now, might open up connections and questions that we would miss if we did not use resemblance to think across apparent discontinuities. We need to consider how, to take just one example, the hedge has been a cultural agent, facilitating bruising and restorative processes of cultural change, not only through roots in the ground and branches in the air, but also through evolving tropes. In what we have seen here, the hedge might occupy the blank edge of the page and frame the text. It can stall the plot. But it is also, I have argued, at the center of the page and the stage. It is the plot. Constantly requiring reweaving, the hedge is story as well as history. In histories of occupation, dispossession, and improvement, the hedge is a crucial technology for laying claim to land and bringing a decisive end to struggles for possession. But as hedge-breakers and hedge-communities show, that ending is also a beginning; that boundary becomes its own fertile terrain of contestation and story. Alice’s adventures in wonderland begin when she sees a white rabbit “pop down a rabbit hole under the hedge” and impulsively follows him down; the movie Over the Hedge begins when the woodland creatures awaken from hibernation, spot the hedge that divides them from a new suburban development, and determine to scale it. The hedge connects as much as and even as it divides. As de Certeau puts it: “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.”62

Epilogue Visiting Jamestown

If you visit Jamestown Settlement, where you are invited to “relive the experience of America’s first permanent English colony,” you might see some herbs and vegetables planted in experimental beds. A costumed interpreter who helped design the herb and vegetable beds at the site explained to me that they figured out what to plant through a kind of reverse engineering process. They read seventeenth-century recipe books and then, based on what they found there, planted what colonists might have been used to eating. For gardeners there, as for a researcher like me, textual traces both inspire and limit how we can imagine the past. To my delight, one bed in the vegetable gardens at Jamestown Settlement when I visited featured “turneps.” But as the gardener explained, “no one but me wants to eat them.” Even in a living history museum, docents who are willing to experiment with vegetable dyes and medicinal teas are not so eager to eat turnips. In Chapter 2, we discussed attempts to convince consumers to eat what the soil needs to eat, to pay a debt to the soil through their diet. At the Jamestown Settlement, eating “turneps” might pay a kind of debt to history, but it is a debt even those who live in the past professionally prefer not to pay. At present, there are no plants at Historic Jamestowne, just a few miles from the Jamestown Settlement. Historic Jamestowne distinguishes itself from the Settlement, with its re-creation of the fort and costumed interpreters, by emphasizing the “real” as opposed to the recreated. It is “the original site,” the actual location of the fort and settlement as well as an active archaeological dig. While Jamestown Settlement was created as a tourism site in 1957, the excavations, called “Jamestown Rediscovery,” began in 1994. First funded as a ten-year venture, the Jamestown Rediscovery excavation is now ongoing. What they dig up at Historic Jamestowne gradually leads to revisions at Jamestown Settlement.1

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At Historic Jamestowne, you see a lot of dirt. As my tour guide advised, you need to “read the dirt.” That dirt provides its own kinds of evidence of agriculture. In Chapter 2, I discussed the remains of “Jane,” a victim of cannibalism during the 1609–10 famine, or Starving Time. Her mutilated skull and butchered leg bone ended up in an L-shaped cellar, along with 47,000 other artifacts, when Governor De La Warr arrived at the Jamestown Fort in 1610 and ordered a cleanup—thus producing a rich midden of evidence including what is called “Jane’s kitchen.”2 We might take Jane’s hacked bones as documents of an extreme farming failure. But there is other evidence in the dirt as well, including protected beds outside the fort, probably for gardens, the traces of planting furrows, showing that the settlers were planting barley, wheat, and other food crops, and the early settlers’ bones, showing the herniated disks and stressed vertebrae resulting from hard labor. While this and other archaeological evidence suggests that history as the first colonists lived it was not much fun, the website where one can get tickets for the living history museums at both Jamestown Settlement and the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown has the web address historyisfun.org. It also promises that, at Jamestown Settlement, “agriculture is included in the story of the nation’s beginnings.” Yet, however hard the creators of these sites, virtual and physical, work to draw visitors into history, it can be challenging for a tourist to visualize how central agriculture was to Jamestown’s early struggles or to its ultimate destiny as agricultural fields, after it burned to the ground in the 1670s, and then the seat of government moved to Williamsburg in 1699. My goal in this epilogue is to survey what the surviving evidence, as well as debates among historians and archaeologists, can tell us about agriculture in Jamestown. I am relying on the role agriculture plays in the story of the nation’s beginnings, especially how and why that story is told now, to bring my own story of seventeenth-century agriculture to a close. As this book has demonstrated, how and why we imagine agriculture has material consequences. Seventeenth-century English ways of imagining agriculture shaped the Jamestown enterprise before the ships launched. Promotional texts sold Virginia as a paradise in which one would find abundant food without labor. It would be, then, an Edenic respite from agriculture as the English knew it. Vin Nardizzi contends that such texts attempt to persuade their readers that “there is little excuse to wait for the Golden Age to take root once again in England, because it’s there for the plundering in Virginia.” But all too quickly, as Hillary Eklund puts it, in Jamestown, “the promise of plenty” met “the experience of scarcity.”3 The investors in the

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Virginia Company envisioned Jamestown as a trading post and a center for resource extraction—as a place from which colonists would export wealth back to England––not as a place where settlers’ efforts would focus on producing their own food. As a result, they did not send experienced farmers. Most settlers came to trade and to establish profitable industries of one kind or another. But “Advice for the Colony on Landing,” drawn up by the Virginia Company, stated that a first priority should be “preparing your ground and sowing your corn and roots,” and proposed a complicated scheme for farming on the sly. This proposal acknowledged that the land was not empty; it was already both occupied and farmed by natives the colonists would need to deceive and depend on. “In all your passages you must have great care not to offend the naturals, if you can eschew it, and employ some few of your company to trade with them for corn and all other lasting victuals if you have any and this you must do before that they perceive you mean to plant among them, for not being sure how your own seed corn will prosper the first year, to avoid the danger of famine, use and endeavor to store yourselves of the country corn.”4 The English use of the word “corn” to describe all cereal grains, here both wheat (“your own seed corn”) and maize (“the country corn”), muddies a crucial distinction. The English persistently preferred their wheat to the natives’ maize, although they also traded for maize, tried to grow it, and even stole it. Wheat and corn remain legible markers of the difference between colonists and natives. Tests to determine the identities of those whose remains are found at the Jamestown site rely on “two types of stable carbon isotopes: the C3 isotope, found in the bones of people who primarily eat wheat, and the C4 isotope, found in the bones of people who primarily eat corn.”5 A few years of dietary change do not rewrite these isotopes. So, despite the fact that the settlers’ diet depended on maize, especially in the early years, their bones still test as those of wheat-eaters. Yet that one word, “corn,” also suggests that there were always connections as well as distinctions. “Naturals” grew corn and colonists needed it; both natives’ and settlers’ diets depended on cereal grains and on farming. The Virginia Company placed grain at the foundation of turning “the country” into “your own,” but it did not anticipate how challenging that would turn out to be. Whatever else they hoped to do, colonists needed to plant and till, immediately if covertly, struggling against environmental conditions, including a record-breaking drought and severe winters. The Powhatan people, too, faced scarce food supplies because of environmental conditions and because they

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did not stockpile. But they quickly learned that one of the strategies available to them in their struggle with the English was to cut off their supply of food, as the Powhatans did just before the Starving Time discussed in Chapter 2. Colonists themselves also fought over, and by means of, scarce supplies.6 We might consider food shortages in Jamestown to be a consequence of unrealistic expectations meeting intractable and severe conditions. Yet they have often been blamed on a combination of moral failure and misguided privilege. Some contemporaries complained that the colonists refused to make any effort to feed themselves. A True Declaration of the state of the Colony of Virginia (1610), published to confute “scandalous reports,” describes and decries the settlers’ idleness. “Now, I demand whether Sicilia, or Sardinia (sometimes the barns of Rome) could hope for increase without manuring? A Colony is therefore denominated, because they should be Coloni, the tillers of the earth, and stewards of fertility: our mutinous loiterers would not sow with providence, and therefore they reaped the fruits of too dear-bought repentance. . . . Dei laboribus omnia vendunt, God sells us all things for our labor, when Adam himself might not live in Paradise without dressing the garden.”7 Even God’s bounty, by this logic, is for sale in exchange for the labor of fallen Adams. But while this text enjoins labor, it dodges the question of who precisely is to benefit. The expectation that Virginia should be the barn of London is buried in parentheses and analogy. Not only should the “coloni” recognize that their obligation to farm is installed in the etymology of their very name, but they should understand that their farming is for the benefit of Mother England and not just their own survival. As we will see, the Virginia Company itself did not invest in the equipment the colonists would need to succeed as farmers on the English model. Yet, as early as 1610, this Virginia Company propaganda could turn to etymology to insist that colonists are necessarily and inevitably farmers. (Similarly, in 1618, in the first land patents in the New World, the Virginia Company granted the largest shares of property to “the Ancient Adventurers and Planters” who had come to Virginia at their own expense before 1616 and had stayed for three years. In retrospect, the survivors were planters and were rewarded for that planting with property rights.) As A True Declaration reveals, the issue was not just whether colonists would bestir themselves so that they would not starve but whether they would fulfill their obligation to export food. Those who neither steward nor till are “mutinous loiterers,” failed foot soldiers of empire. John Smith helped propagate this interpretation, casting himself as a hero struggling to convince or compel colonists with class pretensions to feed themselves.8

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This story—of lazy and greedy colonists who tended only tobacco, even if that meant they would starve––has proved tenacious. The Jamestown deadbeats are so captivating, in their way, as compared to the pious Plymouth pilgrims. Both are fictions, of course. Sharper attention both to the expectations and supplies the colonists brought with them and the material conditions they encountered is leading to a more nuanced understanding of what happened in Jamestown. The archaeological discoveries at Historic Jamestowne are fleshing out what settlers were actually doing, as well as the consequences of drought and decaying relations with the Powhatans. The rich archive of the Virginia Company’s records documents the expectations and priorities it exported. Perhaps, my tour guide around the dig suggests, the settlers were not lazy; perhaps their priority was profit not planting, then they encountered farming conditions for which they simply were not prepared. We have discussed the inventiveness with which the English addressed soil amendment, for instance. But their understanding of soil fertility depended on plows, along with draft animals and their manure—none of which native Americans had. Some historians have argued that because of this, settlers saw native women working with hoes and did not recognize them as farmers or their activity as agriculture—even as they coveted the corn they grew.9 But it was a bit more complicated than that. The natives’ use of their land, and their success in feeding themselves from it, also enabled the English to see the land as useful. In an infamous passage, Edward Waterhouse, the secretary for the Virginia Company, insists on the happy result of a Powhatan attack on the colonists, known as the 1622 massacre (the very attack the colonists avenged using poisoned wine, as we saw in Chapter 3): [The colonists’ hands,] “which before were tied with gentleness and fair usage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Savages, not untying the knot, but cutting it.” As a consequence, the colonists can now seize what they view as superior agricultural lands––that is, the native people’s “cultivated places.” Prior to the conflict, the colonists “had possession of no more ground than their waste” and had to solicit the natives’ “contentment” to get access even to that. Now, Providence, in the form of the Powhatan attack, will, Waterhouse promises, allow the English to “possess the fruits of others’ labors” as a right of war. Destroying those who sought to destroy them, they will transform “the laborious mattock into the victorious sword (wherein there is more both ease, benefit, and glory). . . . Now their cleared grounds in all their villages (which are situate[d] in the fruitfullest places of the land) shall be inhabited by us, whereas heretofore the grubbing of woods was the greatest labor.”10 Rightly

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taken as a document of English ruthlessness, this statement also offers insight into how the Virginia Company assessed both colonial and native agricultural labor. Waterhouse simultaneously registers awareness of the natives’ farming success and the settlers’ laborious grubbing. He not only reverses the biblical figuration of peace as beating “swords into plowshares” and “spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:4) but makes a strikingly specific substitution of the “laborious mattock” for the plowshare (or plow blade). Mattocks were picks for breaking up hard, uncultivated ground. The mattock is more like the hoe than the plow and it would be required before a plow could be used (if one were available). The OED even specifies that mattocks were used for “grubbing up trees, etc.” or the “grubbing of woods” that Waterhouse describes as especially onerous. He offers us an insight into the labor colonists had to do—grubbing with mattocks––and their ability to see the natives’ plots not as empty but as enviable because they had already been judiciously chosen, “cultivated,” and “cleared.” While many promoters of the Virginia enterprise touted the fecundity of the soil, the colonists on the ground struggled to till it. In 1619 John Pory was still promising that “we shall produce miracles out of this earth”––but only when it would be possible to perform “the tilth used in Christendom.” Pory makes the Virginia earth’s promise conditional. “Three things there be which in few years may bring this colony to perfection: the English plow, vineyards, and cattle.”11 We have discussed the failed—or at least deferred––promise of vineyards. But Pory was not alone in insisting that agriculture required plows (and English ones) as well as cattle. In Waterhouse’s statement, the plow signifies in its absence. The English, prior to the providential massacre, had been, at best, laboriously digging with mattocks rather than plowing. As we have seen, the English used “manure” as a verb to describe cultivating the soil. While the proposals to amend soil we discussed in the first chapter focused on making compost to supplement or substitute for a lack of animal manure, the absence of animal dung still struck at the foundations of English farming. How exactly might one manure without manure? A letter from Sir Thomas Dale to the Virginia Company addresses just this problem. Dale is most famous as the deputy governor of the Virginia colony who held Pocahontas captive and later accompanied her and John Rolfe to London (in 1616). He is also known for imposing strict laws in 1611, including the death penalty for robbing the common stores, unlicensed slaughter of domesticated animals, taking from “any garden, public or private, being set to weed the same,” willfully plucking up “any root, herb, or

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flower, to spoil and waste or steal the same,” or gathering grapes or ears of corn as they grew, “whether in the ground belonging to the same fort or town where he dwells, or in any other.” Nor were these idle threats. According to one eyewitness account, “some for stealing to satisfy their hunger were hanged, and one chained to a tree till he starved to death.” Dale is also credited with devising the scheme of awarding plots of ground to settlers—the largest to those “Ancient Planters” mentioned earlier––which may have increased agricultural productivity.12 Dale, then, intervened to change the fundamentals of growing, distributing, and conserving food in Virginia, from field to storehouse to table. The letter I would like to focus on here is one he sent from Henrico, the town Dale founded just miles away from Jamestown, and named in honor of James I’s son Henry. (Henrico would be destroyed during the Powhatan uprising of 1622 we have just seen Waterhouse touting as an agricultural breakthrough.) In June 1613, following Prince Henry’s death, Dale writes to complain. His letter has the asperity of the field agent struggling to convey his experience to those at a far remove. He complains that the workers are reluctant even to plant food for themselves and that they would not work unless he compelled them to; some, he says, hope that if they fail the Virginia Company will call them home. Their malingering, then, might be considered strategic. But Dale also wants to complain, bitterly, about the Virginia Company’s provisions. He returns repeatedly to the need for animals. He can get the settlers to grow enough food–– “provided always that we have beast[s] to manure the land, either horses or asses.”13 The Virginia Company has sent some animals, he concedes, but only cows of the worst kind and spayed sows, which, for Dale, are an unspeakable affront (“These things be monstrous!”). Without animals, “our men are constrained to do like so many beasts,” drawing plows (780). (This inversion has now made it into The Real Dirt on Jamestown, the comic book available at Historic Jamestowne, which depicts one farmer thinking: “In England we had animals to do the plowing. But here I am the animal in the field! UGH.”14) In his letter, Dale builds toward an especially memorable outburst: “I dare undertake if your men in England did manure the ground and do all husbandmen’s works only with their bodily labor, as likewise carry timber for buildings, we should have as many exclamations from you as you have from us” (781). You try it, he says. What you censure as moral failing is simply the lack of draft animals. In this letter, Dale suggests that the Virginia Company’s problem is not that they did not imagine what new circumstances would require but that they do not grasp the conditions under which farming succeeds in England. If they really thought about it, they

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would realize that the settlers need only what the English themselves take for granted. The Virginia Company has not taken farming seriously enough to send the needed equipment. Dale turns to an agricultural analogy to explain that the Virginia Company must invest in agriculture if it expects results. “I pray if ground be not fallowed all the winter, whereby the weeds may be killed, that the less labor may be spent in the spring about corn, what harvest may a man expect to have in August? It is even so in this business. For if men’s hearts be not plowed and prepared, in place of good fruits they will bring forth filthy, stinking weeds of their own invention, especially when they have their own ends and not the glory of God” (781). The editor of this letter claims that Dale “writes about husbandry but does not use husbandry language” and that this passage “must answer some specific objection as to why land was left fallow.”15 But this passage is clearly one in which Dale does indeed use husbandry language, not just to describe how they are farming in Henrico but how he and the Virginia Company must husband the colonists themselves. He refers to the practice of fallowing, or leaving a plot of ground unplanted, and, he specifies, plowed to prevent weeds, so that the soil could recover its fertility. While a fallow field is not planted to crops, it is marked as arable land—and as land under someone’s cultivation––by the plow. It is simply waiting for its next crop. The plow is so integral to Dale’s understanding of how one must prepare the ground—or the heart—for any endeavor that he uses it to remind the Virginia Company how planting crops and colonies works. His extended metaphor depends on an understanding of the planting process that he assumes they share even as he also complains they do not since they have not grasped what the settlers will need to farm fruitfully. Although Dale himself complains that the settlers do not work hard enough, his pitch here for agricultural preparation argues for the value of “fallowing” or leaving fields plowed but unplanted and for a guiding hand so as to protect the colonists from the “filthy stinking weeds of their own invention.” If the colonists themselves are the crop, the Virginia Company must be the plow; it must also provide plows and animals. Fallowing would soon be replaced by crop rotation in England. The historian Mark Overton calls fallowing part of a “closed circuit” and “vicious circle” in which it was impossible to increase productivity except by claiming more land. One way out of that conundrum was planting fodder crops such as turnips and clover in rotation with grain crops. This mode of farming, as we have seen in Chapter 2, would soon become standard practice in England. Farmers in Virginia and elsewhere in colonial America, where land seemed

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unlimited, could exhaust land and then move on, rather than investing in its fertility through fallowing or crop rotation. So Dale’s metaphor refers to an agricultural practice in which land is limited; he assumes that soil and settlers must be husbanded rather than exhausted and replaced. He also emphasizes the importance of plowing and then fallowing in preventing weeds. According to Overton, “repeated ploughing during the fallow period was the only way to eradicate persistent perennial weeds.”16 As we have seen, proponents of regenerative agriculture are now challenging this investment in the plow, arguing that we should ditch it. But, for Dale, it is impossible to imagine husbandry without it—and the draft animals to pull it. Although crop rotation had not yet replaced fallowing in Dale’s way of thinking about agriculture, he was already planting turnips. He complains about the kind and quality of the seeds and plant starts the Virginia Company have sent. “They should have sent us in ears corn, as wheat, barley, oats, and plants and seeds. Neither corn nor plants are come as yet. The seeds they have sent have been overdried or the like, so that none almost prosper except turnip[s] and radishes, and these very badly. The fault whereof is not in the ground, for by private experience it is found to be in the seed” (780). Just as the humble turnip came to England from elsewhere, as I discussed in Chapter 2, it traveled to Virginia too. While Dale complains that turnips and radishes were the only crops that grew in Henrico, even if badly, another writer, Alexander Whitaker, included as part of his Good News from Virginia the report that “our English seeds thrive very well here, as pease, onions, turnips, cabbages, coleflowers, carrots, thyme, parsley, hyssop, marjoram, and many other whereof I have tasted and eaten.” The founders of a new settlement in Virginia, the Berkeley Hundred, purportedly the site of the “real” first Thanksgiving in 1619, included “the best seeds for a kitchen garden,” pits of stone fruits, and bare-root fruit trees in the stock of the ship Supply in 1620, among other “materials, tools and implements of husbandry.” They emphasized that the recipients should take “effectual care of them, because a great part of the food of your family must arise from them.17 As in Henrico, farming at Berkeley was understood to require both the “best seeds”––assumed to be “our English seeds” imported from home––and “effectual care.” Corn seems to have been the only crop that the English did not plant from imported seeds or starts. As we have seen, the Virginia Company’s “Advice for the Colony on Landing” distinguished “your own seed corn” from “the country corn.” Even in the case of tobacco, settlers preferred imported cultivars to native strains. The complaints Dale sent from Henrico and the injunctions

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the founders of the Berkeley Hundred sent to Virginia along with their seeds conjoin to suggest how English farming shaped Virginia possibilities. But English seeds and ideas had to flourish in Virginia ground. Planting—as practice and as metaphor––required mixture. In Chapter 1, we saw that agricultural manuals sometimes valued mixture more positively than was the norm in early modern England. In Virginia, the English both depended on mixture and downplayed it. John Pory, for example, reported that soil that had been “worn out” by corn plantings could, nevertheless, “of our grain of all sorts . . . bear great abundance.” He claimed that after reaping their first crop of self-sown “English wheat,” the ground that was so spent that it could “bear no more of their corn” could again support “Indian corn,” the two growing together “upon the same ground.” Indian corn is depleting and English wheat regenerative. But in this version of crop rotation and companion planting, the two coexist: “and so by this means we are to enjoy two crops in one year from off one and the same field.” Pory’s description of the two crops growing in the same field grants English wheat the power to make Indian corn grow again, to replenish the soil’s fertility. Yet English crops and colonists took more from Powhatan people (and their soil) than they usually liked to admit. In the colony’s early years, the colonists seem to have eaten native plants and animals as well as the domesticated animals they had brought with them. The remains of plants and seeds found in a well shaft at Jamestown, whose deposits date from c. 1610–17, “were almost all native varieties. They included maize, pumpkins, squash, blueberries, wild cherries, blackberries, and walnuts.” These mingle with the butchered remains of domesticated European animals the colonists must have brought with them (cows and pigs), as well as deer bones, oyster shells, and fish bones, documenting a diet that was “truly a blending of two worlds.” The English planted beans and squash between rows of corn, as they had seen the Powhatans do—but they added turnips. And as we can see in Dale’s demand for good quality seeds and the caution to take “effectual care” of seeds, the settlers wanted their English seeds to fare well. Joyce Chaplin argues that the fact that many “old world plants and animals had gone native” “reassured the English that they, like their horses and peas, could flourish in the new world.”18 They would flourish largely by learning from their new environment and from the natives. But they kept telling their story with English seeds, English methods and tools, and English wisdom at its center. That same ship carrying seeds, the Supply, also carried books in its cargo, books to which I have often turned as evidence in this study. “Markham’s and Googe’s book of all kind of English husbandry and huswifery, and two others

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for the ordering of silk and silkworms are now sent, which take into your own hands from Thomas Lemis, otherwise you will be defrauded of them.”19 In this stash, we might picture one or several of Gervase Markham’s popular books, and Barnaby Googe’s Four Books of Husbandry. The treatises on silk might have included John Bonoeil’s Observations to be followed, for the making of fit rooms, to keep silk-worms in . . . Published by authority for the benefit of the noble plantation in Virginia, which had just been published in 1620. As we discussed in Chapter 3, Bonoeil himself came to Virginia to oversee the making of wine and silk, and to manage the imported experts who were sent to advise the colonists on these industries. The advice to take these books “into your own hands” suggests that information about specifically “English husbandry” was expected to be so precious that it might tempt thieves. Yet we need to counter this expectation with the report that the colonists scoffed at books on winemaking sent over at around the same time. We should also keep in mind that this “English” wisdom was often “englished,” borrowed or translated from elsewhere. Googe’s popular book, for example, translated and expanded on the German scholar Conrad Heresbach’s Latin Rei rusticae libri quattuor; most early texts on silkworks were translated from the French. Furthermore, the experts the English sent to Virginia were not English. And how relevant would English wisdom have been anyway when the English encountered unfamiliar conditions? As Dale warned, without English livestock and tools, the colonists could not be English farmers. Dale’s letter makes us notice what they do not claim to be sending on the Supply: namely, plows and draft animals. How useful, then, would Markham and Googe be? Jennifer Mylander points out that to understand the value placed on English books in the Atlantic World, we need to expand our conception of utility. English manuals were in many ways impractical, ill-suited to the actual conditions colonists encountered. But, Mylander argues, colonists valued these books not for their practical advice but because they helped them sustain a notion of their own Englishness.20 If English expectations and ideas could get in the way, making it harder for settlers to adapt to their actual conditions, they were also strategic for exactly that reason, Mylander suggests, helping colonists protect themselves against adapting too well to mattocks rather than plows, to being rather than driving animals, to settling and seasoning in this new land. Abandoned as a city or seat of government by 1699, Jamestown would ultimately thrive as a plantation, not for silk or wine, but for tobacco. As the land “slowly reverted to agricultural fields,” it both protected the site from development that would have destroyed “the buried evidence of occupation” and,

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through plowing, “blended the upper foot or so of the heretofore intact layers of seventeenth-century town remains,” making it harder to date finds precisely. Under the agricultural fields, the deepest marks on the land remained undisturbed; but “objects left on the site through the seventeenth century would have been mixed together in the plowzone as one layer, making precise dating difficult.”21 Like fairy tales and compost piles, which, as we have seen, also mix up layers of time, the plowzone jumbles together the remnants of different eras. Whatever the Virginia Company and the early settlers expected, Jamestown set a precedent for planting, settling, and establishing farms both to feed the colonists and to create products for export to England and elsewhere. Karen Ordahl Kupperman depicts Jamestown not as a failure as much as a vexed start-up. Although the colony needed more patience and investment than it received at first, the settlers established the model that subsequent colonies would follow, through trial, error, and improvisation. On the old model, Jamestown would have been “exchanging European manufactured goods for Indian-produced items of value as merchants involved in the Africa, Levant, and East India trades did.” In contrast, the new model “required transplanting populations across the Atlantic to create or grow the commodities that would repay investors and bolster the English economy.” Kupperman’s use of the verbs “transplanting” and “growing” places agriculture at the figural center of this new model. Alison Games describes this new model as “fashioning a new type of overseas settlement, one rooted primarily in English responses to the indigenous economies they found and in the gradual dismantling of prior expectations.” Like Kupperman, she emphasizes the need for settlers to adapt and improvise. “By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Virginia settlement came to be defined by extensive export agriculture and intensive English migration.” The success of this extensive export agriculture would depend on two institutions with long-term social and environmental impact: monoculture plantations and the slave labor that supported them. While this was not what the Virginia Company had anticipated, and would not reach fruition until long after the company failed in 1624, this version of agriculture would ultimately prove to be successful in terms of enriching English investors and colonial landholders, as well as disastrous in its human and environmental costs. In contrast to Kupperman’s and Games’s long view, Kathleen Donegan, focusing on the earliest traumatic years in Jamestown, argues that even for the colonists, who would, in the long term, fare better than native Americans or African slaves, becoming colonial “was an unmaking, it was nonadaptive, and it emerged precipitously as a profound reaction to life in extremis.”22

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Whether we emphasize adaptation or unmaking, ultimate success or harrowing failure, we cannot leave agriculture out of the story. It is always there, even as its meanings are subject to interpretation and contestation. In Chapter 2, we considered cannibalism in the Starving Time as part of a web of associations with eating one’s own that moved across time and oceans. Colonists brought those associations with them as part of the equipment with which they responded to extraordinary circumstances. They quickly taught the Powhatans some of their practices. Donegan recounts how the Powhatans used the corpses of English settlers in Virginia “to send horrific messages back to the settlement”; “their corpses are propped up in the forest like scarecrows with their mouths stuffed with bread.” Donegan’s interpretation that these admonitory corpses are “like scarecrows” assigns the Powhatans an ironic allusion to English agricultural practices, intended or not. In Chapter 2, I also discussed the use of scarecrows, and its relationship to Aaron’s terrifying deployment of corpses in Titus Andronicus. In Chapter 3, we considered attempts to establish grape growing and winemaking in colonial Jamestown, as well as the use of poisoned (and imported) wine to transform apparent fellowship between colonists and natives into an occasion of revenge. Hedges, the focus of my final chapter, are conspicuous in their absence in Virginia. When one Captain Butler claimed in 1622 that he found new arrivals “dying under hedges,” the Virginia planters responded tartly: “As for dying under hedges there is no hedge in all Virginia.”23 That lack was consequential. Since most Native peoples did not enclose their planting plots with fences, walls, or hedges, Englishmen, it has been suggested, did not see those plots as owned. They saw them instead as available for their own possession, and asserted that possession by fencing and planting. In the Virginia Company records, we routinely find references to planting people in the colony. As early as 1613, Alexander Whitaker, the minister at Henrico, claims that the English colony at Jamestown, after the Starving Time and De La Warr’s arrival, “hath taken better root; and as a spreading herb, whose top hath been often cropped off, renews her growth, and spreads herself more gloriously than before.” Whitaker’s simile allows him to cast destruction as a form of improvement. The settlers have not been starved and massacred and ravaged by disease; they have been cropped and renewed. A Virginia Company letter of August 21, 1621, referring to a ship bearing “one widow and eleven maids for wives for the people in Virginia,” advises that “the Plantation can never flourish till families be planted and the respect of wives and children fix the people in the soil.”24 These wives and children were expected to serve as roots, even tethers.

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Patricia Seed wonders “why gardening and agricultural metaphors appealed so strongly to the English (and to them alone).” Her answer is that it was because planting was the peculiarly English means of staking a claim to land. The use of the verb “to plant” to describe establishing settlements as well as sowing crops was also, Seed insists, unique to the English.25 The Virginia Company advised that the colonists keep their plantings a secret at first in part because they understood planting as staking a claim. These metaphors conjoin beginning or flourishing with owning and dominating. But other scholars have reminded us that the process of contact is never that simple. As we have seen throughout this book, England itself was in the process of massive changes in agricultural methods and land tenures in this period. Seventeenth-century English ways of conceptualizing farming were changing and they were indebted to classical sources, observations of the Netherlands, and ongoing experimentation. If they were peculiarly English, they were not exclusively so; they were neither stable nor pure. Nor was Virginia simply clay for the English stamp. It pushed back. Jess Edwards argues that grappling with the specifics of a new land and its places may have helped the English think their way through the conceptual and legal problems bedeviling them at home. English metaphors did not simply express their distinctive and coherent way of viewing land. Instead, these metaphors “forced and fudged the case,” as Edwards puts it.26 If the English brought conceptual tools with them, they were not always the right ones for the job––like the armor and weapons that they had to adapt to suit a hotter climate and a different style of warfare. Yes, the English brought the distinctive ways of imagining and figuring agriculture we have discussed in this book with them when they arrived in Virginia. But that agricultural imaginary shaped and limited how they could farm. While it enabled them to privilege their own planting over that of the natives, it also hobbled their ability to farm or even to use “gardening and agricultural metaphors” in the absence of draft animals. At Jamestown Settlement, the preference for “gardening and agricultural metaphors” to which Seed draws our attention persists. It begins with the History Is Fun website, which invites you to visit the living history museums’ gardens and agricultural fields, “Where History Grows on You.” We are also enjoined to book soon because “it’s the perfect season to explore the roots of American history” so “now’s the time to dig in.” Jamestown Settlement shows an introductory documentary: “1607: A Nation Takes Root.” The quotations showcased on the museum’s walls include many using the verb “to plant,”

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including Richard Rich’s ballad News from Virginia (1610), which attributes these lines to Governor De La Warr: “We hope to plant a nation, / Where none before hath stood.”27 Bentley Boyd’s comic book about the dig at Historic Jamestowne, The Real Dirt on Jamestown, depicts the archaeologist William Kelso reflecting, as he digs, “I’m digging the same dirt that brought the English here! This soil gave hope to all those immigrants who fled an island nation controlled by a few wealthy families.” Their hope, of course, depended both on annexing land from the “naturals” and on the fact that they could achieve free and absolute title to land in Virginia, as it was not yet possible to do in England. Indeed, it was in Virginia that English farmers could first achieve what Peter M. Jones calls “freehold property and individualized holdings—the mantras of Agricultural Enlightenment.”28 But those complexities are outside the purview of The Real Dirt on Jamestown, in which it is all about the dirt—the dirt that brought the English to Jamestown, and the dirt that remains as an archive of the “real dirt” about their experience there. Historic Jamestowne offers constant reminders of how elusive the real dirt can be, as memory, forgetting, and unknowing mix together. The restaurant at Historic Jamestowne is called the Dale House Café (with catering by Carrot Tree Kitchens). In a gruesome turn of events, near where they dug up Jane’s butchered remains, we are offered “homemade BBQ”; under the name of the deputy governor who executed those driven by starvation to steal food, we are offered “light sandwiches along with a variety of soups, salads, and desserts.” There are few buildings on the campus; only this one appears to have been named after a colonist. Thomas Dale is, in some ways, a well-chosen representative of the conundrum of food and farming in Colonial Virginia. It was Thomas Dale’s letter we read earlier about the need for investment in agriculture at Henrico, and it was Dale who rewarded colonists’ endurance with land grants and punished their food theft with death. For some visitors, the distant reminder of starvation and its consequences might add a frisson to lunch. For others, knowing their history might put them off their food. Most visitors, however, will not be able to connect Dale’s name to his complicated crimes and contributions. The website for Jamestown Rediscovery/Historic Jamestowne offers some biographies of luminaries (Pocahontas, John Smith, John Rolfe, Chief Powhatan), but Dale is not among them. It also lists the First Settlers (a group that does not include Dale, who arrived in Jamestown four years after the 104 men and boys who landed in 1607), grouping them by class and occupation, including carpenters and a blacksmith, a barber, a mason,

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and a tailor––but not a farmer. The work of farming probably fell to those in the undifferentiated category “labourer.” Or it was everyone’s work and so no one’s.29 Perhaps this is agriculture’s place in Jamestown’s story. It’s kind of there and it’s kind of not. It is all about the dirt, then and now, and you have to read that dirt, but it’s hard to be sure what it says. Agriculture was the work the colonists were supposed to do upon disembarking—without adequate equipment and preparation. It was a secret the colonists were supposed to keep from the Powhatans, as well as something they would need to learn from them. They would trade for corn, hunger for it, steal it, destroy it, and plant it. A failure for which the colonists continue to be blamed, farming would become the future of Jamestown. But it is also almost invisible to visitors now.

Notes

Introduction 1. Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 258; Darina Allen, Forgotten Skills: The Time-Honored Ways Are the Best—Over 700 Recipes Show You Why (London: Kyle Cathie, 2010); Alexander Langlands, Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 10; Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger Henderson, The Lost Art of Real Cooking: Rediscovering the Pleasures of Traditional Food One Recipe at a Time (New York: Penguin, 2010); Nina Planck, Real Food: What to Eat and Why (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 1–2; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 43. 2. Langlands, Craeft, 12. 3.  Ridge Vineyard, accessed August 5, 2018, https://www.ridgewine.com/about/wine making/; Richard Paul Hinkle, “Full Circle: Grgich Hills Cellar Uses Old World Methods to Create New, World-Class Wines,” NorthBay Biz, August 2007, accessed August 5, 2018, http:// northbaybiz.com/General_Articles/General_Articles/Full_Circle.php, reprinted in a brochure available at Grgich Hills Estate; David Montgomery, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (London: W. W. Norton, 2017), 9. See also Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 8. 4. Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 42; Andrew Hadfield, “The Benefits of a Warm Study: The Resistance to Travel Before Empire,” in A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 101–13; Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Joan Thirsk, “Plough and Pen: Agricultural Writers in the Seventeenth Century,” in Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton, ed. T. H. Aston, P. R. Coss, Christopher Dyer, and Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 295–318, esp. 299; Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015); and Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 5. Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London, 1613), sig. A3r; Gabriel Plattes, A Discovery of Infinite Treasure, Hidden Since the Worlds Beginning. Whereunto all men, of what degree soever, are friendly invited to be sharers with the Discoverer, G. P. (London, 1639), sig. C3v; Walter Blith, The English Improver (London, 1649), sig. a2v; Walter Blith, The English Improver Improved or the Survey of Husbandry Surveyed Discovering the Improveableness of all Lands (London, 1652),

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third impression much augmented, “An Epistle to the Industrious Reader,” sig. c1v (note that signatures are shuffled). The phrase “the Misterie of Improvement,” quoted below, is on sig. c3r. 6.  Lucy Hutchinson, “To the Garden at Owthorpe,” Elegy 7, lines 11–14, 25–28, 10, in Women Poets of the English Civil War, ed. Sarah C. E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 285–86; Abraham Cowley, “Upon Mrs. K. Philips her Poems,” in Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips (London, 1669), sigs. a2v–a3v. Patricia Seed argues that “seventeenth-century Englishmen—Puritan, Catholic, Anglican alike—shared an understanding of Gen. 1:28 as referring to improving the reproductive capacity of land using domestic animals and English farm implements to increase the yield of the soil” (Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 34). When they arrived in the “new” world, they brought this verse, and their understanding of what improving land should mean, with them as inspiration and justification. 7.  Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4, 8, 2. See also Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 8.  On environmental and economic changes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and how they impacted and were reconfigured in literature, see Ken Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral?: Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Robert Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 9. John Milton, “Areopagitica” (1644), in Milton’s Prose Writings (London: Dent/Everyman’s Library, 1958), 179. 10. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor. And Advancement of the English Nation. Promised by Enclosure of the Wastes and Common Grounds of England (London, 1653), sigs. a1r–v. The word “travel” here captures both meanings of “labor, toil; suffering, trouble” (now usually spelled “travail”) and “the action of travelling or journeying” (OED). On the interplay of the two meanings, see Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World, ed. Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Samuel Hartlib, An Essay for Advancement of Husbandry-Learning: or Propositions for the Erecting a Colledge of Husbandry (London, 1651), sig. B1v; A. Moore, Bread for the Poor, sig. G3v; [Gabriel Plattes], A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (London, 1641), sig. B4r; Adolphus Speed, Adam Out of Eden: Or, An abstract of divers excellent Experiments touching the advancement of Husbandry (London, 1659), sig. *2r; Anon., The Reformed Virginian Silk-Worm, Or, a Rare and New Discovery Of A speedy way, and easie means, found out by a young Lady in England (London, 1655), 29; Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 201–42; Edward McLean Test, Sacred Seeds: New World Plants in Early Modern English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019); and Kim F. Hall, Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Race, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). 11. Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8; Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), 13;

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Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), 172. 12.  James Holstun argues that “the Diggers produced the most important seventeenthcentury critique of this transformation [of English agriculture from feudal to capitalist, often called “primitive accumulation,” “the enclosure movement,” or “improvement”] from the point of view of its victims” (377) and cast doubt on “the improver’s unshakeable faith (epidemic from the sixteenth century to the present) that a net increase in production will benefit all classes” (James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution [London: Verso, 2000], 377, 381). See also Gary Fields, Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); and Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1972). 13. Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture. 14.  Marissa A. Ross, “Holy Chardonnay!: California Wine Is Finally Fun,” Bon Appetit, August 2016, 70–73, box on 73; Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 119; Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1060–71, esp. 1061. Malm argues that “ours is, if anything, an epoch of diachronicity” because “climate change is a messy mix-up of time scales” (Malm, Fossil Capital, 8). 15. Blith, English Improver Improved, sig. c3v. Samuel Hartlib His Legacie: or An Enlargement of the Discourse of Husbandry Used in Brabant and Flaunders (London, 1651) concurs that this translation is in “no ways squared or framed for us in England” (sig. P1v). Charles Estienne’s L’agriculture et maison rustique was first published in Paris in 1564; Richard Surflet’s English translation appeared in 1600 as Maison Rustique, Or The Countrie Farme and was reprinted in 1606 and 1616 and then again in the eighteenth century. The book was translated into other languages as well. 16. Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture, 27; David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 120. 17.  Samuel Hartib His Legacie, sigs. I3r–v (the text attributes some content to Richard Weston and some, including this passage, to Robert Childs; see Chapter 2, n.11, below); Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 18. Joan Thirsk, “Making a Fresh Start: Sixteenth-Century Agriculture and the Classical Inspiration,” in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 15–34, esp. 22. 19. Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 61, 46. Similarly, Julian Yates models one way to “travel by trope or by figure” (Julian Yates, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017], 28). 20. See essays in Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, ed. Hillary Eklund (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2017); Anthony Lowe, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); McRae, God Speed the Plough; Preston, Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England; and Wendy Wall, “Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 3 (1996): 767–85. See also the wealth of work on herbals, such as Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 (London: Routledge, 2009), and

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Leah Knight, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (London: Routledge, 2009); cookbooks, including Wall, Recipes for Thought; Hall, Sweet Taste of Empire; and David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and conduct books, which I survey in Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 154–201. 21. Daniel Botkin, The Moon in a Nautilus Shell: From Climate Change to Species Extinction: How Life Persists in an Ever-Changing World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 118, 115, xviii, 129, 327. 22. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” (1938), reprinted in Folk and Fairy Tales, ed. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, 5th ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2018), 344; Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), xix.

Chapter 1 1. David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), xiii. On connections between soil biodiversity and the health of the human microbiome, see Daphne Miller, Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up (New York: William Morrow, 2013). As Hillary Ecklund points out, “We are more like soil than we might suppose” (Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, ed. Hillary Eklund [Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2017], 9). On the relationship between soil health and the nutrient content of foods, see Twilight Greenaway, “No-Till Farmers’ Push for Healthy Soils Ignites a Movement in the Plains,” Civil Eats, February 13, 2018. Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, eds., Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 27; Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (2.1.50–53); Serpil Oppermann, “Compost,” in Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 136–50, esp. 141. 2. Mike Madison, Fruitful Labor: Deep Ecology of a Small Farm (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016), 38 (this self-published book has since been republished as Fruitful Labor: The Ecology, Economy, and Practice of a Family Farm [White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018]); David Montgomery, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (London: W. W. Norton, 2017), 28–29, 68. See also Montgomery, Dirt, 24. 3.  Montgomery, Growing a Revolution, 18. See esp. Montgomery’s chapter, “The Oldest Problem,” in Growing a Revolution, 51–65; Montgomery, Dirt, xii, 23, 24; and Albert Howard, The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (1947; repr., Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2006), xxv, 8, 173. Dan Barber calls Howard “the father of compost” in The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (New York: Penguin, 2014), 88. Joan Thirsk, ed., Chapters from The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 3, Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice, 1500–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 106; Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper, eds., 17th Century Economic Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 128; Leonard Meager, The mystery of husbandry or arable, pasture and wood-land improved (London, 1697), 134. Bacon calls the section on composting in Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1670) “experiments in comfort” and refers also to “fattening” and “helping” ground (sigs. M1v, M2r). He also mentions the “help of ground” that is crucial to conservation agriculture as Montgomery defines it: “the suffering of Vegetables to die into the Ground, and so fatten it” (sig. M2r).

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4. Montgomery, Growing a Revolution, 40, 41, 281, 111, 50, 40, 30, 34, 140. 5. Barber, Third Plate, 268–69. Barber cites here Fred Kirschenmann’s “Spirituality in Agriculture,” which can be found at https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www .google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1011&context=leopold_conf. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1977); and Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006). 6. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperOne, 1990; 1st ed. published in 1980); Evelyn Scott Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Montgomery, Dirt, xiv. 7. Gervase Markham, The Inrichment of the Weald of Kent (London, 1649), sigs. B2v, B3. 8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateauz: Capitalisme et schizophrenie (Paris: Minuit, 1980); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Why Study the Past?,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 1 (March 2012): 8–9; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994); Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 138–73; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 112; Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 60, 61; Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 16; Eve Keller, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 15, 32; Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 7, 8; Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 136–62, esp. 141. 9. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), xxxi, xxx; Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity, 9; Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 31, 32, 57. 10. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 11, 29, 71, 127, 181. 11. Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1; The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longmans, 1857–74), 6:447. 12.  Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (2.2.240); John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel: A Poem (London, 1681), line 12, sig. B1r; Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 201, 206; Benjamin Bertram, “Measure for Measure and the Discourse of Husbandry,” Modern Philology 110, no. 4 (2013): 459–88; Jane Sharpe, The Midwives Book (London, 1671), sig. D1r. Sharpe goes on to insist that the woman “brings seed also as well as the man to sow the ground with” (sig. D). The plow was sometimes associated with social as well as sexual reproduction, the pen as well as the penis. See Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015), 197–98; and Mary E. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 32.

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13. Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures by G. S. [George Sandys] (London, 1632), sigs. A2r–A2v; Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 117; Anthony Lowe, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 138; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 199, 236. 14. Sir Walter Ralegh, Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (London, 1596), sigs. N4v–O1r. Addressing this kind of language in promotions of Virginia, Nardizzi argues that, by one logic, “there is little excuse to wait for the Golden Age to take root once again in England, because it’s there for the plundering in Virginia” (Nardizzi, Wooden Os, 119). In Virgo Triumphans, for example, Edward Williams writes that Virginia’s “unwounded womb full of all those Treasuries which endear Provinces to respect of glory” entitles her to “an affinity with Eden, to an absolute perfection above all but Paradise”—and to a date with a plow (Virgo triumphans, or, Virginia in generall, but the south part therof in particular [London, 1650], sig. H2v). On Ralegh, see Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 10–25; Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen, 1987), 126–54; and Louis A. Montrose, in “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (1991): 1–41. Sir Hugh Plat, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (London, 1594), sig. B3r. Plat is no more daunted by the aged earth than he is by ephemeral fruits, decayed beauties, or rancid wine (as we will see in Chapter 3). He imagines that Mother Earth can achieve “good health and recovery” by means of inventive amendments (B3r). 15.  Gervase Markham, Markhams farewell to Husbandry; or, The inriching of all sorts of Barren and Sterile grounds in our Kingdome, to be as fruitfull in all manner of Graine, Pulse and Grasse, as the best grounds whatsoever (London, 1625), sig. B2r. On this optimism, see the invaluable chapter on husbandry manuals in Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 135–68, esp. 158–59. See also Wendy Wall, “Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 767–85; and Hillary Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015). 16.  John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Second Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 27 and 32; Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 64. Patricia Seed argues that the notion that “planting was the action that best established ownership” is peculiarly English and that Locke’s “labor theory of property” was “not popular outside of England” (American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001], 15). Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, The Manner of Ordering Fruit-trees, trans. John Evelyn (London, 1660), sig. H5r. 17. Madison, for instance, points out that “the farmer may be discouraged from putting funds and labor into soil-building activities, the benefits of which accrue in an indistinct future, if his lease is short term or insecure” (Fruitful Labor, 129). Albert Howard depicts enclosure as a good thing in terms of giving farmers an incentive to care for their own soil and restoring soil fertility (Soil and Health, 50–51). Berry, Unsettling of America, 31, 45. Discussing Gervase Markham, Julia Lupton concludes that, for him, “one dwells upon the land only by ordering and maintaining the complex operations that take place upon it” (Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018], 38). Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 171.

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18.  Matthiason winery, https://www.matthiasson.com/vineyards. This gets repeated as a modern saying by Clare Carver of Big Table Farm: “ ‘There’s no better fertilizer than the farmer’s footsteps’ ” (Katherine Cole, Voodoo Vintners: Oregon’s Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers [Corvallis: Oregon State University, 2011], 168). 19. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, trans. E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd, rev. Jeffrey Henderson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), chap. 12, 499–501. For the origins of this expression and its status as “an axiom among English gentlemen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” see Joan Thirsk, “Plough and Pen: Agricultural Writers in the Seventeenth Century,” in Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton, ed. T. H. Aston, P. R. Coss, Christopher Dyer, and Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 298. 20. Aristotle, Economics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Bollingen Series (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), bk. 1, sec. 6, 2133. 21. Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), bk. 18.43, 217–19. 22. Conrad Heresbach, Foure Bookes of Husbandry, “Newly Englished and encreased by Barnaby Googe, Esquire” (London, 1601), sigs. Aiiv–Aiiir. The margin reiterates: “The best dong for ground is the masters foot.” Robert Herrick, “The Country Life,” in Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, 1603–1660, ed. John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 210–12, lines 23–24. David Goldstein uses these lines from Herrick as the epigraph for “Manuring Eden: Biological Conversions in Paradise Lost,” in Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, ed. Hillary Eklund (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2017), 171–93. 23.  Goldstein discusses the similar way in which “manure” can serve as both noun and verb (“Manuring Eden,” 175–76), as does Keith M. Botelho, “Winstanley and Postrevolutionary Soil,” in Eklund, Ground-Work, 117–28. See also Ayesha Mukherjee, Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2015), 122. On the complex meanings of manure and manuring, see Saskia Cornes, “Milton’s Manuring: Paradise Lost, Husbandry, and the Possibilities of Waste,” Milton Studies 61, no. 1 (2019): 65–85. 24. The quotation is from Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, On Agriculture, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, trans. E. S. Forster and Edward H. Heffner, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), bk. 2, chap. 14, 5–6. Joan Thirsk, “Making a Fresh Start: Sixteenth-Century Agriculture and the Classical Inspiration,” in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 15–34, esp. 22. 25. Ben Jonson, Epicoene (4.3.50–51, 52–54), in The Alchemist and Other Plays, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1995). 26. Columella, On Agriculture, bk.2, chap. 1, 7; bk. 2, chap. 13, 3–4; bk. 10, ll. 423–24 (in this tenth book, Columella attempts to account, in verse, for what Virgil left out of the Georgics). Virgil describes the soil as “exhausted” (9) and “thirsty” (11) in Virgil, Georgics: A Poem of the Land, trans. Kimberly Johnson (London: Penguin Classics, 2009). 27. Markham, Markhams farewell to Husbandry, sigs. I1r, I2r–v, I3r. Markham first added this chapter on “a general way for the enriching of any poor arable ground, either clay or sand, with less charge than formerly,” to the 1625 edition of his text. On the “rag to paper economy,” see Joshua Calhoun, “The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper,” PMLA 126, no. 2 (March 2011): 327–44. On saltpeter, see David Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security, and Vexation in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 212 (August 2011): 73–111; Randall Martin,

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“Fertility versus Firepower: Shakespeare’s Contested Soil Ecologies,” and Goldstein, “Manuring Eden,” in Eklund, Ground-Work, 129–47 and 171–93. According to Donald Woodward, “‘Swords into Ploughshares’: Recycling in Pre-Industrial England,” Economic History Review, n.s., 38, no. 2 (May 1985): 175–91, “Through the provision of night-soil, men, women, and children could join the ever-turning circle of production in agriculture which was so central to the life of pre-industrial society” (189). See also Walter King, “How High Is Too High?: Disposing of Dung in SeventeenthCentury Prescot,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 3 (October 1, 1992): 443–57. 28. See, among many others, Walter Blith, The English Improver Improved or the Survey of Husbandry Surveyed Discovering the Improveableness of all Lands (London, 1652), sigs. V2r–V4r; and John Worlidge, Systema Agriculturae: The Mystery of Husbandry Discovered (London, 1669), sigs. N3r–O4r. For Sir Hugh Plat’s expansive lists, see Plat’s sixty–page text appended to A Jewel House of Art and Nature, with separate pagination, Diverse new sorts of Soyle not yet brought into any publique use, for manuring both of pasture and arable ground (London, 1594); and Mukherjee, Penury into Plenty, 93–144. Adolphus Speed, Adam Out of Eden; Or, An abstract of divers excellent Experiments touching the advancement of Husbandry (London, 1659), sigs. I2r–I5r, esp. I5r. 29.  Howard, Soil and Health, xxv, 26, 27; Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012), 389; Montgomery, Growing a Revolution, 206. 30. John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris. or A Garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up (London, 1629), chap. 9, B6v; John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (London, 1699), sigs. K2v–K3r. 31. Markham, Markhams farewell to Husbandry, sig. I1v; Blith, English Improver Improved, sig. V4r. 32. Plat, Diverse new sorts of Soyle, in Jewel House, sig. B4r. Pits are recommended in John Shaw, Certaine Helpes and Remedies Under God to Prevent Dearth and Scarcitie (London, 1638), which includes a second title page, Soli Gloria Deo: Certaine Rare and New Inventions for the Manuring and Improving of All Sorts of Ground (London, 1636); and in Richard Bradley, Ten Practical Discourses: Concerning Earth and Water, Fire and Air, as They Relate to the Growth of Plants (Westminster, 1727). Howard, Soil and Health, xxv. 33.  Evelyn, Acetaria, sigs. K2v–K3r, K3r; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, in “The Duchess of Malfi” and Other Plays, ed. René Weis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2.1.67, 131–33. In this same scene, attitudes toward grafting align with attitudes toward social mixture, as they do in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. The Duchess praises grafting as “a bettering of nature” (2.1.138), while Bosola emphasizes the mismatch of root and branch: “To make a pippin grow upon a crab, / A damson on a blackthorn” (2.1.139–40). 34.  Markham, Markhams farewell to Husbandry, sig. B2r-v; William Lawson, A New Orchard, and Garden. or, The best way for planting, grafting, and to make any ground good, for a rich Orchard (London, 1618), sig. A3r; Jessica Rosenberg, “Poetic Language, Practical Handbooks, and the ‘Vertues’ of Plants,” in Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching, ed. Jennifer Munroe, Edward J. Geisweidt, and Lynne Bruckner (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 61–69; Elizabeth Spiller, introduction to Seventeenth-Century Recipe Books (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2008), xvi; Jennifer Munroe, “It’s All About the Gillyvors: Engendering Art and Nature in The Winter’s Tale,” in Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 139–54. 35. John Evelyn, A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, Relating to the Culture and Improvement of it for Vegetation, and the Propagation of Plants, &c. as it was presented to the Royal Society, April 29, 1675 (London, 1676), sig. C8v.

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36. Pliny, The Historie of the World. Commonly called, The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), sig. Xx1r. On the particular resources on which London dunghills could draw, see Donald Woodward, “ ‘An Essay on Manures’: Changing Attitudes to Fertilization in England, 1500–1800,” in English Rural Society, 1500–1800: Essays in Honour of Joan Thirsk, ed. John Chartres and David Hey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 251–78, 265; and “The Reverend Richard Baxter’s Last Treatise” (1691), ed. F. J. Powicke, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 10, no. 1 (1926): 21–22, 25–28, 37–39, as reprinted in 17th Century Economic Documents, ed. Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 181–86. Evelyn, Philosophical Discourse, sigs. G1v, E6v. In another moment of registering some unease about soil amendment and cultivation, Evelyn explains that surface mold, “having never been violated by the spade, or received any foreign mixture, we will call the Virgin-Earth” (sig. A7r). Blith, English Improver Improved, sig. T3r; Speed, Adam Out of Eden, sig. I3v. Composting follows the logic of Galenic medicine, by which opposites need to balance each other, rather than that of Paracelsian medicine, by which like cures like. I am grateful to Sarah Neville for pointing this out. Galenic medicine sought a balance of humors in the body, a state of Crasis. According to Kasey Evans, “the medical term itself derived from the Greek for ‘mixture, combination,’ ” and designated the proper balance of humors in the body (Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012], 169). For the reservation about how to “nurse” the earth, see Samuel Hartlib, A Discoverie for Division or Setting Out of Land (London, 1653), sigs. C3v, C4r. In contrast, in Wasteland: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), Vittoria Di Palma argues that the association of mixture with corruption motivated the draining of fens––separating earth from water––as “an act of purification” (95, 107). Steve Mentz explores the persistent unease provoked by “mixed brown materiality” in “Brown,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 193–212, esp. 197. While Mentz announces, unsettlingly, that no one likes brown, among the many to whom brown is beautiful are soil scientists who routinely comment on the rich hue of tilth. 37. Ovid, The Fifteene Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entituled, Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1612),bk. 1, sig.B8r. Sandys translates this as “From striving Fire and Water all proceed; / Discording Concord ever apt to breed” (Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, sig. B1v). 38. For Hutchinson, the earth was orderly when each element kept its place. “But if with their unlike they attempt to mix, / Their rude congressions everything unfix” (277–78)—and chaos is come again. Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), canto 3, lines 263–68, 277–78. 39. William Leigh, Great Britaines, Great Deliverance, from the Great Danger of Popish Powder (London: T. Creede, 1606), sig. E1r; Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 191–210. Discussing Sidney on generic mixture, Masten observes: “Something there is that doesn’t love mixture. Something, that is, in genre criticism at least” (193). But on the mingle-mangle of the drama, see William N. West, “ ‘But This Will Be a Mere Confusion’: Real and Represented Confusions on the Elizabethan Stage,” Theatre Journal 60, no. 2 (2008): 217–33. George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho!, in English Drama, 1580–1642, ed. Charles Frederick Tucker Brooke and Nathaniel Burton Paradise (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1933), 1.2.51–54, 2.1.71–74. 40. Philip Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, in Brooke and Paradise, English Drama, 1580–1642, 4.1.224–27. 41.  Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 5; see also 276n12. On the early modern conceptualization

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of miscegenation, see also Margaret W. Ferguson, “News from the New World: Miscegenous Romance in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Widow Ranter,” in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 151–89; Lara Bovilsky, Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), esp. 43–44; and Barbara Sebek, “ ‘More Natural to the Nation’: Situating Shakespeare in the ‘Querelle de Canary,’ ” Shakespeare Studies 42 (July 2014): 106–21, esp. 115. 42. Laurie Shannon, “Nature’s Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness,” Modern Philology 98, no. 2 (November 2000): 183–210, esp. 186; Ralph Austen, The Spirituall use of an Orchard, or Garden of Fruit-Trees; Set forth in divers Similitudes betweene Naturall and Spirituall fruit-trees, in their Natures, and ordering, according to Scripture and Experience, 2nd impression (Oxford, 1657), sig. A3v (see also “If an European Woman match with an African, common experience shows us, their offspring are a mottled production of what we call tawnies or mulattos, and must we not expect the same in fruit, or any other mixed production?” [S. J.], The Vineyard: Being a Treatise Shewing the Nature and Method of Planting, Manuring, Cultivating, and Dressing of Vines in Foreign-Parts [London, 1727], sig. K8v). Jean E. Feerick, “The Imperial Graft: Horticulture, Hybridity, and the Art of Mingling Races in Henry V and Cymbeline,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 211–27, esp. 225, 213, 217; Evelyn, Philosophical Discourse, sig. F8v. 43.  Wolfram Schmidgen, Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), xi, xiii. 44. Natasha Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On an early modern economy of recycling, see Donald Woodward, “ ‘Swords into Ploughshares’ ”; and Sara Pennell on “the recycling of foodstuffs and meals” (242) in “ ‘Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pye and Baked Clod of Beef ’: Victualling and Eating Out in Early Modern London,” in Londinopolis, c. 1500–c. 1750: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Mark S. R. Jenner and Paul Griffiths (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 228–49. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. William H. Gass (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), pt. 1, sec. 2, mem. 2, 225. 45. All definitions are from the OED; Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500–1760 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006). On the English language itself as a hodgepodge, see Margaret W. Ferguson, “Thomas Nashe: Cornucopias and Gallimaufries of Prose,” in Teaching Early Modern Prose, ed. Susannah Brietz-Monta and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2010), 199–213; Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Masten, Queer Philologies, 191–210; and Marjorie Rubright, Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 56–88. Jean Feerick describes England itself as embracing its identity as a mingle-mangle (“Imperial Graft,” esp. 217–22). 46.  Markham, Inrichment of the Weald of Kent, title page. Markham does not claim to have written The Inrichment of the Weald of Kent but rather to have midwifed it into publication (Thirsk, “Plough and Pen,” 295–318, esp. 303). Similarly, Thomas Tusser’s One Hundred Good Pointes of Husbandrie (London, 1557) eventually expanded to Five hundreth points of good

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husbandry (1573). I am grateful to Hillary Eklund for pointing this out. Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 6. 47. Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 299. Only one of the two “wastebooks” Bacon proposed survives. Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 29, 198 (see also David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], esp. 139–70); Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 42. In contrast, Richard Yeo argues that notebooks were not storage sites but, rather, “prompts for material that should be stored in memory” (“Notebooks as Memory Aids: Precepts and Practices in Early Modern England,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 [January 2008]: 115–36, esp. 117). 48.  Yeo, “Notebooks as Memory Aids”; Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 113–23. 49.  William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 128; Knight, Bound to Read, 8, 13; Patricia Fumerton, “Remembering by Dismembering: Databases, Archiving, and the Recollection of Seventeenth-Century Broadside Ballads,” in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 14–34, esp. 25; “The Renaissance Collage: Toward a New History of Reading,” ed. Juliet Fleming, William Sherman, and Adam Smyth, special issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no. 3 (2015); Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Jessica Rosenberg, “The Point of the Couplet: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie,” ELH 83, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 1–41; Smyth, Autobiography, 128–29, 152, 154. On identity as an assemblage, see also Drew Daniel, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 7; and Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, 11. 50. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–48, 146; Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 196. 51.  Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, “Democritus to the Reader,” 25, 115; Margaret Cavendish, “A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life” (1656), in Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), 59; Walter Charleton, “To the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Dutchess of New-castle” (1676), in Paper Bodies, 309. 52.  Edward Rainbowe, Lord Bishop of Carlile, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honorable Anne, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery (London, 1677), sig. E4r–v. 53.  Other critics have discussed this amazing passage. See esp. Heidi Brayman, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 230–32; Leah Knight, Reading Green in Early Modern England (Abindgdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 17; and Whitney Trettien, “Isabella Whitney’s Slips: Textile Labor, Gendered Authorship, and the Early Modern Miscellany,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no. 3 (2015): 505–21, esp. 513–14. 54. Timothy Rogers, The Character of a Good Woman, Both in a Single and Marry’d State . . . Occasion’d by the Decease of Mrs. Elizabeth Dunton (London, 1697), sig. E4r.

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55. Evelyn, Acetaria, sig. G6r–v; Columella, On Agriculture, bk. 12, chap. 19, 2; William Cavendish, “Love’s Transmigration,” in The Phanseys of William Cavendish Marquis of Newcastle, ed. Douglas Grant (London, 1956), 21 (see Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “ ‘Bake’d in the Oven of Applause’: The Blazon and the Body in Margaret Cavendish’s Fancies,” Women’s Writing 15, no. 1 [2008]: 86–106, esp. 94, on this passage and its relation to Margaret’s bisks and olios); John Milton, Paradise Lost, 5:334–35. See Goldstein’s discussion of postlapsarian manuring in Milton’s Eden as a spiritual practice that both acknowledges the fallenness of creation and works to correct it (“Manuring Eden”). 56.  Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24, esp. 20, 19, 7. 57. According to Bruno Latour, the word “composition” “carries with it the pungent but ecologically correct smell of ‘compost,’ itself due to the active ‘decomposition’ of many invisible agents” (“An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto,” New Literary History 41, no. 3 [2010]: 471– 90, esp. 474). Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 573–91, esp. 578. 58. Berry, Unsettling of America, 86. In those religions Mary Douglas identifies as “composting,” what has been rejected as polluting, as a threat to order, can be transformed and reclaimed, “plowed back for a renewal of life.” Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), with a new preface by the author (London: Routledge, 2002), 207. 59. The first appears in Ephemerides, which is variously described as Hartlib’s unpublished diary or commonplace book (pt. 2, May 1657–December 1657) and the second in a letter from Sir Cheney Culpeper to Hartlib in 1656. Both can easily be found in the Hartlib Papers online, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Hannon, and Michael Leslie, HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2013, http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/hartlib. Oppermann, “Compost,” in Veer Ecology, 138; Katz, Art of Fermentation, 389; Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

Chapter 2 1.  David Montgomery, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (London: W. W. Norton, 2017), 101, see also 70 and 231. 2. Dan Barber, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (New York: Penguin, 2014), 431, 327, 433; Liz Carlisle, Lentil Underground (New York: Avery, 2015), 22. 3. Calendar of Assize Records: Kent Indictments (1649–1659), ed. J. S. Cockburn (London: HMSO, 1989), record #574. Like Henry, Robert is described as a husbandman’s son (son of Robert Bushier, husbandman of Eltham); he might be a boy or young man, still living in his father’s house. The record of the Maidstone Assizes (March 17, 1652, before Richard Aske, judge, and Serjeant John Green) suggests that Bushier was required to present a pardon in court. On the index, see also Luke Wilson, “Renaissance Tool Abuse and the Legal History of the Sudden,” in Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England, ed. Erica Sheen (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005), 121–45. On the “food event,” see Sara Pennell, “The Material Culture of Food,” in The Familiar Past?: Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain, ed. Sarah Tarlow and Susie West (London: Routledge, 1999), 35–50, 45. Thomas and Sarah Miller “quarreled about two or three turnips that were put in the pot” but the Old Bailey Proceedings do not explain why (Old Bailey Proceedings Online [www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, August 12, 2019], June 1742, trial of Thomas Miller [t17420603-17]. Another account of this same crime says only that “his wife and he had

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words about some turnips” (Old Bailey Proceedings Online [www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, August 12, 2019], Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, July 1742 [OA17420712]. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey record an uptick in the theft of turnips in the eighteenth century, suggesting their increasing availability and value. 4. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 102; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 166. 5. Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), B466; cf. W107. See also G. L. Apperson, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases: A Historical Dictionary (London: J. M. Dent, 1929; republished by Gale Research in 1969) for the nineteenth-century proverb “She has given him turnips” meaning “She has jilted him” (652). On stones, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); and Tiffany Werth, “A Heart of Stone: The Ungodly in Early Modern England,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 181–204. 6. In Henry V, Fluellen beats Pistol with a leek and then forces him to eat it (5.1). As Julian Yates travels with an orange and arrives at Titus, so I travel with a turnip and arrive there, too (Yates, “Accidental Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Studies 34 [2006]: 90–122, esp. 97, 98). 7. “Seint illarion th[thorn]e holy monk” (c. 1450), MS. Bodl. 779, in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Litteraturen, ed. Ludwig Herrig (Braunschweig, 1889; Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1980), 335, lines 67–72 (I am grateful to Rebecca Krug for this reference and for alerting me to the turnip’s penitential significance). Randle Holme, A Store House of Armory & Blazon; Containeing all thinges Borne in Coates of Armes Both Forraign and Domestick; With the termes of Art used in each Science (Chester, 1688), describes how to represent a turnip on a coat of arms, but not why one would. The Whole Familiar Colloquies of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, trans. Nathan Bailey (Glasgow: Alexander Bailey, 1877), 220–21; Humphrey Crouch, England’s Jests Refin’d and Improv’d, 3rd ed. (London, 1693), sig. D2r. Note that in the third season of Blackadder (the Regency), a version of this joke reappears. Baldrick spends £400,000 on an enormous turnip (“Well, I had to haggle”), which he refers to as “His Dream Turnip,” and Blackadder later destroys it by crushing it on Baldrick’s head. 8. Jan M. Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), particularly the chapter on “The Wonder of The Turnip Tale (ca. 1200),” 164–99 (this turnip tale joins many other stories about the capacity of turnips to grow to remarkable size); Charles Estienne, Maison Rustique, Or The Countrie Farme, trans. Richard Surflet (London, 1600), sig. R1r; John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris: A Garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up (London, 1629), sig. Vv3r; Durand de Dauphiné, A Huguenot Exile in Virginia or Voyages of a Frenchman Exiled for His Religion with a Description of Virginia & Maryland, ed. Gilbert Chinard (New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1934), 114–21; Pliny,The Historie of the World. Commonly called The Naturall Historie, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), sig. Ccc3v; François Pierre de La Varenne, The French Cook (London, 1673), 3rd ed., sig. I8v. 9. Pliny, Historie of the World, sig. E1v; John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597), sig. M1v; Maison Rustique, sigs. R1r–v, V1v; W.M., The Queens Closet Opened. Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chyrurgery, Preserving and Candying, &. (London, 1683), 8–9; The Countrie Housewifes Garden, appended to William Lawson, A New Orchard, and Garden. or The best way for planting, grafting, and to make any ground good (London, 1618) but with separate pagination, sig. L4r; William Turner, The First and seconde partes of the Herbal of William

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Turner (Collen?, 1568), sigs. T5r–v; Timothy Bright, A Treatise: wherein is declared the sufficiencie of English Medicines, for cure of all diseases, cured with Medicine (London, 1580), sig. E3r; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. William H. Gass (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), pt. 1, sec. 2, mem. 2, 221. 10. Pliny, Historie of the World, 18:8, sig. Ccc3v; Adam Speed, Adam Out of Eden: Or, An abstract of divers excellent Experiments touching the advancement of Husbandry (London, 1659), sig. C3r; Walter Blith, The English Improver Improved or the Survey of Husbandry Surveyed Discovering the Improveableness of all Lands (London, 1652), pt. 2, sig. Mm3r; Francis Bacon, “Of Plantations,” in Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 9th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), vol. A, 1669. 11.  Turner, Herbal of William Turner, sig. T5r; Pliny, Historie of the World, sig. Ccc3v; Gerard, Herball, sig. M1v (on women’s garden labor, see Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003], 108–31, esp. 113); Marjorie Rubright, Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Samuel Hartlib His Legacie: or An Enlargement of the Discourse of Husbandry Used in Brabant and Flaunders (London, 1651), sigs. C2r–v. On Hartlib and the authorship of this text, see Mark Greengrass, “Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Learning,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, 1557–1695, ed. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 304–22, esp. 321; Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 118–21; and Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 97–131. 12. Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 48; Joan Thirsk, “New Crops and Their Diffusion,” in The Rural Economy in England: Collected Essays (1984), 259–85; Malcolm Thick, “Root Crops and the Feeding of London’s Poor,” in English Rural Society, ed. John Chartres and David Hey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 279–96, esp. 288–89, and 293; Sir Hugh Plat: The Search for Useful Knowledge in Early Modern London (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2010), 164; Mark Overton, “The Diffusion of Agricultural Innovations in Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 10 (1985): 205–21, esp. 209; Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 99. For turnip recipes, see John Evelyn, Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets (London, 1699), sig. F4r; Blith, English Improver Improved, pt. 2, sig. Mm3r; and T.P.J.P.R.C.N.B And several other approved Cooks of London and Westminster, The Compleat Cook: Or, The Whole Art of Cookery (London, 1694), sigs. L1r, R8r, S9v. Malcolm Thick argues that roots were disparaged precisely because of their ubiquity and so were “shunned by many who could afford better” (“ ‘Superior Vegetables’: Greens and Roots in London 1660– 1750,” ed. Gerald Mars and Valerie Mars, in Food, Culture and History, vol. 1 [London: London Food Seminar, 1993], 132–51, esp. 140). Margaret Pelling discusses “the positive dislike of the poor for foodstuffs, however nourishing, which were generally categorized as appropriate for lower animals” (46), the disparagement of a vegetable such as the turnip as a “lower-caste vegetable foodstuff” (46), and the implication that it might be better to starve than to eat animal fodder. Margaret Pelling, “Food, Status and Knowledge: Attitudes to Diet in Early Modern England,” in The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998), 38–62. Interestingly, in 1649, a Royalist newspaper disparaged the Diggers as “just a few poor people making bold with a little waste ground in Surrey, to sow a

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few turnips and carrots to sustain their families,” again linking common lands, common people, and the humble turnip (Mercurius Pragmaticus (For King Charles II), April 17–24, 1649), sig. A3v. 13. Regarding the potato and the apple, see Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination,” in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 110–35; Redcliffe N. Salaman’s The History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949); Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2001); and Michael Ziser, “The Pomology of Eden: Apple Culture and Early New England Poetry,” in Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, ed. Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 193–215. Arnold Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, new ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; 1st ed. published in 1986), 148. Crosby also mentions the turnip as part of a gang of plants gone wild when he reports that early writers on Peru described “respectable plants that went wild and defied attempts to keep them out of cultivated fields, citing turnips, mustard, mint, and chamomile as among the worst offenders” (154). 14. William Harrison, The Description of England (1587), ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 264. 15. Parkinson, Paradisi, sigs. Qq4r, Vv3r; Blith, English Improver Improved, sig. Mm3r–v. Weston was probably the author of the manuscript published by Hartlib as A Discours of Husbandrie Used in Brabant and Flaunders, cited in n. 11, which describes the raising of turnips in Holland, and how livestock were trained to eat them. This account appears to be Blith’s source as well. It was also repackaged as [Gabriel Reeve], Directions Left by a Gentleman to his Sonns: For the Improvement of Barren and Heathy Land, in England and Wales (London, 1670). 16. [Samuel Hartlib], A Designe for Plentie, By an Universall Planting of Fruit-Trees: Tendred by some Wel-wishers to the Publick (London, n.d. [1652?]), sig. D1v; Robert S. Shiel, “Improving Soil Productivity in the Pre-Fertiliser era,” in Land, Labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity, ed. Bruce M. S. Campbell and Mark Overton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 51–77, esp. 52–53, 75–76; Mark Overton and Bruce M. S. Campbell, “Productivity Change in European Agricultural Development,” in Land, Labour and Livestock, 1–50, esp. 43; Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 109, 144; Samuel Hartlib, Ephemerides (September 2–December 31, 1653), http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/hartlib/view?file=main/28_02_72&term0=transtext _compost&term1=transtext_compost#highlight; Mark Overton, “The Determinants of Crop Yields in Early Modern England,” in Campbell and Overton, Land, Labour, and Livestock, 284–322, esp. 207. On the introduction of the turnip, see also J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 33, 63, 190, 198–99; and C. G. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1:131–37. 17.  Overton suggests the turnip’s heyday was brief and its impact delayed; in his view, turnips would not really have an impact until after 1750 (“Determinants,” 306–8, 312, 321; Agricultural Revolution in England, 101); Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; 1st ed. published in 1977), 13. 18.  Barnaby Googe, “The Epistle to the Reader,” in Conrad Heresbach, Foure Bookes of Husbandry, “Newly Englished, and encreased, by Barnaby Googe, Esquire” (London, 1601), sig. A3r–v. Heresbach’s text first appeared in 1570 and was first translated by Googe in 1577. See Evelyn, Acetaria, sigs. F7r; cf. C3v.

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19. Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 53; Rubright, Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 62. See also Benedict S. Robinson, “Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2009): 93–122, on endenizenation of flowers such as the tulip and how this process transforms both plant and soil (96–97, 109). 20. Virgil, Eclogues, trans. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 4.18, 37; 8.62; Gabriel Plattes, A Discovery of Infinite Treasure, Hidden Since the Worlds Beginning, Whereunto all men, of what degree soever, are friendly invited to be sharers with the Discoverer, G. P. (London, 1639), sig. I2v. 21.  [Hartlib], Designe for Plentie, sig. D1r. 22. Sir Hugh Plat, The Second Part of the Garden of Eden: Or An accurate Description of all Flowers and Fruits growing in England (London, 1660), sig. D5v; John Evelyn, A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, Relating to the Culture and Improvement of it for Vegetation, and the Propagation of Plants, &c. as it was presented to the Royal Society, April 29, 1675 (London, 1676), sigs. C8v–D1r, H2r. On the uneven process by which oranges made their way onto English pages and tables in the seventeenth century, see Julian Yates, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 179–220. 23. John Bonoeil, His Majesties Gracious Letter to the Earle of South-Hampton, Treasurer, and to the Councell and Company of Virginia heere: commanding the present setting up of Silke-works, and planting of Vines in Virginia (London, 1622), sig. M1v. Holland’s English translation of Pliny also uses the phrase “free denizen” (Pliny, Historie of the World, sig. Hh6r). Bonoeil’s language was picked up by Edward Williams, Virgo triumphans, or, Virginia in generall, but the south part therof in particular (London, 1650), sig. H1v–H2r. We find a similar passage in Lucy Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius. Early humans “found / That all wild plants and fruits by being remoovd, / And prund & drest, their natures much improovd” (The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, vol. 1, The Translation of Lucretius, ed. Reid Barbour and David Norbrook [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], 5.1419–21). 24. Bright, Treatise, sigs. C1v, C2r–v. See also Nicholas Culpepper, The English Physician Enlarged . . . with such things onely as grow in England, they being most fit for English Bodies (London, 1669). For texts on taming, see The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts, ed. Frances E. Dolan (Boston: Bedford, 1996). 25. See references to repatriated crops and the repatriation of “lost cuisine” in Barber, Third Plate, 1, 344, 349; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 1, sec. 2, mem. 2, 232; Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 186; Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Michael A. LaCombe, Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 54–63; Jean E. Feerick, Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 151–52; and Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), esp. 6–9. 26. Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5, 10, 26, 21, 32–33; Bright, Treatise, sig. B3 (see also Samuel Hartlib His Legacie [London, 1651], sig. N3v); and Gervase Markham, The English Housewife (1649), ed. Michael R. Best (Kingston, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 8. Many scholars of food discuss this passage from Markham and

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complicate the opposition Markham draws between familiar and homely Englishness, on the one hand, and the strange ware of markets, on the other. See Best’s introduction (xxv); Kim F. Hall, “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 168–90, esp. 182; Gitanjali Shahani, “The Spicèd Indian Air in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014): 122–37, esp. 125–26; and Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 38–41. On the changing English garden and diet, see Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Kim F. Hall, Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Race and Gender in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming); Leah Knight, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009); Gitanjali Shahani, Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming); Edward McLean Test, Sacred Seeds: New World Plants in Early Modern English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019); and Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 27. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser., rev. ed. (London: Cengage, 2018; 1st ed. published in 1995). All citations to the play will refer to this edition. Bate identifies Titus as one of Shakespeare’s “sourceless” plays. On the play’s relation to sources and precedents, see J. K. Barret, “Chained Allusions, Patterned Futures, and the Dangers of Interpretation in Titus Andronicus,” English Literary Renaissance 44, no. 3 (2014): 452–85; Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 42–84; Jane Grogan, “ ‘Headless Rome’ and Hungry Goths: Herodotus and Titus Andronicus,” English Literary Renaissance 43, no. 1 (2013): 30–61; and Danielle St. Hilaire, “Allusion and Sacrifice in Titus Andronicus,” Studies in English Literature 49, no. 2 (2009): 311–31. On barbarism, see Virginia Mason Vaughan, “The Construction of Barbarism in Titus Andronicus,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 165–80, esp. 177; and Grogan, “ ‘Headless Rome,’ ” 46. Both Noble and Goldstein link what Goldstein calls “the unnatural breakdown of the boundary between others and selves” (53) in the play to its depiction of cannibalism. See Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 35–57; and David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 32–66. In the approach closest to my own, Jean E. Feerick explores how this play and other drama “navigates human difference by reference to botanical discourse,” relating the play to herbals and husbandry manuals (“Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic of Plant Life in Titus Andronicus,” South Central Review 26, nos. 1–2 [2009]: 82–102, 83). Some of the most important recent work on the play has focused on race and rape, concerns that are not neatly separable, and which intersect with my concerns here, although I do not focus on either. See Emily Detmer-Goebel, “The Need for Lavinia’s Voice: Titus Andronicus and the Telling of Rape,” Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001): 75–92; Caroline Sale, “Black Aeneas: Race, English Literary History, and the ‘Barbarous’ Poetics of Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2011): 25–52; Emily Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From “Alcazar” to “Othello” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 65–99; Ian Smith, “ ‘Those Slippery

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Customers’: Rethinking Race in Titus Andronicus,” Journal of Theatre and Drama 3 (1997): 47–58; Tina Mohler, “ ‘What Is Thy Body but a Swallowing Grave . . . ?’: Desire Underground in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2006): 23–44; Sid Ray, “ ‘Rape, I Fear, Was Root of Thy Annoy’: The Politics of Consent in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 22–39; and Kim Solga, Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 29–62. 28. Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 95. On the “fungibility of mouth and vagina,” and the ways in which the earth is depicted as mouth as well as womb, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 98; Marion Wynne-Davies, “ ‘The Swallowing Womb’: Consumed and Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus,” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 129–51, esp. 135 and 136; David Wilbern, “Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus,” ELR 8 (1978): 159–82; and Grogan, who reminds us that “belly” might refer to the womb or the stomach. In “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus,” Critical Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1972): 320–39, D. J. Palmer emphasizes the play’s “reiterative imagery of the devouring mouth” (335). Titus claims he can read Lavinia’s “martyred signs,” which explain that her tears are a kind of local beverage: “She says she drinks no other drink but tears, / Brewed with her sorrow, mashed upon her cheeks” (3.2.37–38). 29.  Tzachi Zamir, “Wooden Subjects,” New Literary History 39, no. 2 (2008): 277–300, esp. 290–91. 30. Ambroise Paré, The Workes of that Famous Chirurgeon, trans. Thomas Johnson (London, 1634), sig. Gggg4r, discussed by Rachana Sachdev, “Of Paps and Dugs: Nursing Breasts in Shakespeare’s England,” English Language Notes 47, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 49–57, esp. 51; William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), sigs. Kk8r–v, Kk8v. On the pelican as an image of the self-sacrificing mother, who feeds her children with her own blood, see Karen Edwards, “Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary P–R,” Milton Quarterly 42, no. 4 (2008): 253–308. A brass medallion of a pelican nipping her own breast to yield blood for her offspring has been found at Jamestown (https://historicjamestowne.org/april-2009-2/pelican -of-piety-medallion/). Popular accounts of the viper and her brood, stemming from Herodotus and Pliny, substitute child aggression for maternal sacrifice, claiming that the viper’s brood gnawed its way out of her, thus killing her. Thomas Browne questions this tradition because it perverts the usual course of maternal nurture (Pseudoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries into Very many received Tenents, And commonly presumed Truths [London, 1646], bk. 3, chap. 16, sigs. S3v–T1r). Amelia Lanyer, in her epistle “To the Vertuous Reader,” says misogynist men “doe like vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred” (Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum [London, 1611), sig. F3r). For one of many references to the viper’s brood, see the riddle in Shakespeare’s Pericles: “I am no viper, yet I feed / On mother’s flesh which did me breed” (1.1.65–67). Father-daughter incest is the riddle’s answer, of course, but it inverts the endogamy of incest. Isn’t it the incestuous parent who eats his own? Thomas Moffett, Healths Improvement: Or, Rules Comprizing and Discovering The Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing all sorts of Food Used in this Nation [London, 1655], sig. T2r–v. On the witch as antimother, see Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 31.  “Mad Mom?: January Jones Eats Her Own Placenta,” abc.com, http://abcnews.go .com/blogs/health/2012/03/26/mad-mom-january-jones-eats-her-own-placenta/; Nancy Redd,

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“I Regret Eating My Placenta,” Motherlode: Adventures in Parenting Blog (March 15, 2012), https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/i-regret-eating-my-placenta/ (see also http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/27/eating-the-placenta_n_1383046.html). The earliest instance of womb-cake in an EEBO-TCP search is Jean Riolan, A Sure Guide, or, The Best and Nearest Way to Physick and Chyrurgery, trans. Nicholas Culpeper (London, 1657), sig. O8v. See also John Pechey, A General Treatise of the Diseases of Maids, Bigbellied Women, Child-bed-Women, and Widows Together With the best Methods of Preventing or Curing the same (London, 1696); John Pechey, The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged (London, 1698); and James McMath, The Expert Midwife (Edinburgh, 1694). On placenta, or afterbirth, as an ingredient in early modern medicines, including the new mother consuming the afterbirth to help stop hemorrhaging, see Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), 80, 254. In general, the new mother eating the placenta appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon. 32. John Smith, A Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), in Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony; The First Decade: 1607–1617, ed. Edward Wright Haile (Champlain, VA: Roundhouse, 1998), 340; Ancient Planters of Virginia, “A Brief Declaration of the plantation of Virginia during the first twelve years, when Sir Thomas Smith was governor of the Company” (1624), in Haile, Jamestown Narratives, 891–911, esp. 895–96. 33. Robert Appelbaum, “Hunger in Early Virginia: Indians and English Facing Off over Excess, Want, and Need,” in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, ed. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 195–216, argues that Indians of the Eastern Seaboard “had no salt, so that they could only preserve their animal products by smoking and drying them” (197); George Percy, A True Relation of the proceedings and occurrents of moment which have hap’ned in Virginia, published in 1624, in Haile, Jamestown Narratives, 505; Donegan, Seasons of Misery, 103–4. Rachel B. Herrmann emphasizes the timing of the surviving accounts—most of which “appeared and circulated during 1624–25” and only one of which was by someone who was present at the time, George Percy. Herrmann also suggests that “collines” might just mean “one of our colonists” rather than a surname (“The ‘Tragicall Historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 1 [January 1, 2011]: 47–74, 52, 54n.18). Percy’s account seems to have been written after John Smith’s General History (1624) (cited in the previous note), although both were published the same year, since Percy responds to Smith. On Percy, see Catherine Armstrong, “ ‘Boiled and Stewed with Roots and Herbs’: Everyday Tales of Cannibalism in Early Modern Virginia,” in The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England: Essays in Celebration of the Work of Bernard Capp, ed. Angela McShane and Garthine Walker (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 161–76, esp. 165, 166–67; and David A. Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation (New York: Vintage, 2005), 128. 34. Thomas Gates, A True Declaration of the estate of the colony in Virginia, with a confutation of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise (published on behalf of the Virginia Council; London, 1610), in Haile, Jamestown Narratives, 473, 474. William Strachey’s account, A True Reportory, which appeared in Purchas, His Pilgrims (1625?), quotes this verbatim (Haile, Jamestown Narratives, 440). The Virginia General Assembly, in “The Answer of the General Assembly in Virginia to a ‘Declaration of the state of the colony in the 12 years of Sir Thomas Smith’s government’ ” (1624), that is, the Ancient Planters’ declaration quoted in n.32, summarizes: “One man out of the misery he endured, killing his wife, powdered her up to eat her, for which he was burned. Many besides fed on the corpses of dead men” and

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one even developed an insatiable appetite for corpses and had to be executed (Haile, Jamestown Narratives, 913). On the food of dearth, see, for example, William Gouge: “When Henry 6 reigned, scarcity and dearness of corn forced men to eat beans, peas, and barley, more than in a hundred years before” (God’s Three Arrows [London, 1631], 171). So even the contents of the hungry husband’s pantry suggest the foods considered beneath contempt (in which turnips were also often included). 35. John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia, 340. 36. James Horn, William Kelso, Douglas Owsley, and Beverly Straube, Jane: Starvation, Cannibalism, and Endurance in Jamestown (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Preservation Virginia, 2013); and William Kelso, Jamestown: The Truth Revealed (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 185–203, 96, 208–9. 37. Kelso, Jamestown, 195, 196. 38. Jeffrey S. Doty, “Shakespeare and Popular Politics,” Literature Compass 10, no. 2 (2013): 162–74, esp. 164; Chris Fitter, Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (New York: Routledge, 2012), 6; Steve Hindle, “Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England: Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607,” History Workshop Journal 66 (2008): 21–61, esp. 26; Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 102; David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 410–12. 39. John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, The Sea Voyage, in Three Renaissance Travel Plays, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 3.1.93–100. This play has inspired some excellent recent readings, including those by Patricia Akhimie, “Travel, Drama, and Domesticity: Colonial Huswifery in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Sea Voyage,” Studies in Travel Writing 13, no. 2 (2009): 153–66; Feerick, Strangers in Blood, 113–36; Gavin Hollis, The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 72–116, which links the play explicitly to Collins’s “powdered wife”; and Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism, 59–88. 40.  Gouge, God’s Three Arrows, 170–71; “The Diggers of Warwickshire to all other Diggers” (1607), British Library, Harleian MS 787, f. 9v, as modernized in The Writing of Rural England, 1500–1800, ed. Stephen Bending and Andrew McRae (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 146–48. In his richly textured analysis of various responses to the Midland Rising of 1607, Steve Hindle discusses this manuscript and its imagery (“Imagining Insurrection,” 27, 36); see also Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 149–53. On this topos, see Appelbaum, “Hunger in Early Virginia,” 213–14. 41.  Du Bartas His Deuine Weekes and Workes Translated . . . by Iosuah Sylvester (London, 1611), sig. Ss2r. 42. Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse: Lately sprung up in America (London, 1650), 12–13; Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), canto 16, lines 308–10; Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, “Nature’s Exercise, and Pastime,” in Poems and Fancies (London, 1653), sig. T2r, lines 5–8. According to Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “Cavendish’s Nature thus is an omnipotent, cannibalistic, all-devouring female figure” (“ ‘Bake’d in the Oven of Applause’: The Blazon and the Body in Margaret Cavendish’s Fancies,” Women’s Writing 15, no. 1 [2008]: 86–106, esp. 93). 43. Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland (1st printed ed. of 1633), ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 66 (the editors’ note says: “This took place

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on 1 July 1577. If it is an eye-witness account, as many commentators allege, then Spenser was clearly in Ireland before he went over with Lord Grey in 1580, probably as part of his service under the Earl of Leicester” [66n47]); Feerick, Strangers in Blood, 72. 44. Thomas Lupton, A Thousand Notable Things of Sundry Sorts, Enlarged (London, 1670), 3.70, sig. D8; sigs. S1v–S2r. The earliest edition of this was in 1579 and it remained in print for more than a century. Burton, in Anatomy of Melancholy, includes consuming the beloved among symptoms of love melancholy (pt. 3, sec. 2, mem. 3, 166–67). In Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s play The Bloody Banquet, the Tyrant forces his wife to eat the corpse of her lover. Julia Gasper emphasizes the important role of knowledge—whether the eater knows his or her food—in this and other stories of eating the beloved, whether lover, spouse, or child (Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007], 637–41). 45. Giambattista Basile, “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” in The Tale of Tales, trans. Nancy L. Canepa (New York: Penguin, 2016), 422–26, 424, 425. 46. The Annotated Brothers Grimm, ed. and trans. Maria Tatar (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 220. First published in 1812, “The Juniper Tree” was written for the Grimms by the painter Philipp Otto Runge. While this tale was commissioned more than collected, it shares with other tales in Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 720 a focus on the cannibal mother or stepmother feeding the child to the father. 47. Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). 48. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, 61, 121; see also Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism, 49–50, 53. 49.  Ovid, The Fifteene Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entitled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1612), sig. L5v (bk. 6) (in Martin Parker’s later popularization of Ovid’s story, The Nightingale Warbling forth her owne disaster [London, 1632], Progne advises Tereus, when he wonders where his son is after eating him, “Nearer than he is now he cannot be” [stanza 51, sig. C3v] and Tereus laments “I have devoured what was begot by me” [stanza 54, sig. C4r]); The Second Tragedie of Seneca entituled Thyestes, trans. Jasper Heywood (London, 1560), 5.3, sigs. D7v, E1r, E2r. Goldstein points out that Heywood adds a final scene, in which Thyestes “meditates on having eaten his children” (Eating and Ethics, 32), thus drawing out the revelation and its impact. 50. Julia Gasper, in her introduction to The Bloody Banquet, argues that Shakespeare joins his contemporaries in this (“In all the vernacular Elizabethan examples of this myth, the banqueter is female, and she is compelled to eat a male victim. In all the classical examples, the banqueter is male, and so also are the victims” [Gasper, Thomas Middleton, 638]). Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, 28 (see also 250–51). A parallel pie appears in Parker’s The Nightengale Warbling forth her owne disaster, 45. Why a pie? As Emily Cockayne puts it: “All kinds of horrors could be concealed in a pie” (Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007], 103). 51. Urvashi Chakravarty, “More Than Kin, Less Than Kind: Similitude, Strangeness, and Early Modern English Homonationalisms,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 14–29, esp. 24. 52.  Gervase Markham, Markhams farewell to Husbandry; or, The inriching of all sorts of Barren and Sterile grounds in our Kingdome, to be as fruitfull in all manner of Graine, Pulse, and Grasse, as the best grounds whatsoever (London, 1625), sig. N3r; Blith, English Improver Improved, sigs. R4r, S1r. 53. John Webster, The White Devil, in “The Duchess of Malfi” and Other Plays, ed. René Weis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 5.1.187–89. 54. Edward Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, or, The Rape of Lavinia (London, 1687), 5.1, 55; Bate, introduction to Titus Andronicus, 52.

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55.  Rudolf Steiner, What Is Biodynamics?: A Way to Heal and Revitalize the Earth; Seven Lectures (Great Barrier, MA: Steiner Books, 2005), 160; see also 169–70, 179. “The general idea behind this macabre practice is that the stench of the death of one’s own species—whether vegetable or animal—will keep newcomers away,” but as one skeptical winemaker says, “ ‘What is this, Spartacus? I don’t want Spartacus in my vineyard!’ ” (Katherine Cole, Voodoo Vintners: Oregon’s Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers [Corvallis: Oregon State University, 2011], 57, 148). 56. Feerick, “Botanical Shakespeares,” 99; Christopher Crosbie, “Fixing Moderation: Titus Andronicus and the Aristotelian Determination of Value,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2007): 147–73, esp. 172 (see also Emily C. Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashioning of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 [1990]: 433–54, esp. 447); Ralph Austen, A Treatise of Fruit-Trees (Oxford, 1653), sig. H4v. 57. Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Page to Stage (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge 2004), 102, 25–26. While the hole is associated with the female body, it is not clear that Lavinia is raped in the pit, which, at the time of the rape, is occupied by her brothers and her husband’s corpse. She is dragged offstage and then wanders back on, “ravished,” rather than being found in the pit. 58. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, 54; Yates, “Accidental Shakespeare,” 112; Crosbie, “Fixing Moderation,” 173. 59. Katherine Rowe, “ ‘Effectless Use’: Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus,” in Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 52–85; Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, 34; Simon C. Estok, “Doing Ecocriticism with Shakespeare,” Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, ed. Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 77–91, esp. 83–84; Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in “Religio Medici,” “Hydriotaphia,” and “The Garden of Cyrus,” ed. Robin Robbins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pt. 1, sec. 37, 40. 60. What is the local? David A. Cleveland, Balancing on a Planet: The Future of Food and Agriculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), points out that the laborers who plant, tend, and harvest “local” food are often themselves “imported” from elsewhere (241). So worker miles should be included in calculations of “food miles.” 61. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 6. 62. Pliny, Historie of the World, sig. D3v; in modern editions, 2.687–88. 63. James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000), 402, 418; Keith M. Botelho, “Winstanley and Postrevolutionary Soil,” in Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, ed. Hillary Eklund (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2017), 117–28; Blith, English Improver Improved, sigs. R3v–R4r. Carolyn Merchant emphasizes Blith’s use of this imagery, especially in his epistle dedicatory in which he describes Agriculture as “the suckling mother of mankind, and ‘the mother and nurse of all other arts’” (The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution [New York: HarperOne, 1990], 55). 64. Catherine Roach, “Loving Your Mother: On the Woman-Nature Relation,” Hypatia 6, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 46–59, esp. 48; Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 173, 180.

Chapter 3 1.  John Locke, Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679, as Related in His Journals, Correspondence and Other Papers, ed. John Lough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 142–43

Notes to Pages 82–85

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(on the importance of this as “an early example of our modern fascination with terroir,” see Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 224); [S. J.], The Vineyard: Being a Treatise Shewing the Nature and Method of Planting, Manuring, Cultivating, and Dressing of Vines in Foreign-Parts (London, 1727), sig. B2r. 2. Paul Lukacs, in Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World’s Most Ancient Pleasures (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), explains: “Derived from the Latin terratorium, it entered the French lexicon during the Renaissance, but at that point it simply meant ‘territory.’ During the nineteenth century it acquired a second meaning as an area of land valued specifically for agricultural properties, but still rarely was employed in connection with wine. Only in the 1900s did it come to be used specifically to designate a vineyard’s natural environment, including geology, soil type, topography, climate, and more. Then it also began to signify a particular feature of wines made with the grapes grown in that environment” (69). Virgil, Eclogues, trans. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 8.62; Charles Estienne, Maison Rustique, Or The Countrie Farme, trans. Richard Surflet (London, 1600), sig. Aaa7v; Jamie Goode and Sam Harrop, Authentic Wine: Toward Natural and Sustainable Winemaking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 17; see also Jon Bonné, The New California Wine: A Guide to the Producers and Wines Behind a Revolution in Taste (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed, 2013), 102. 3. Goode and Harrop, Authentic Wine, 111. They announce this at the start of a chapter called “When Winemakers Intervene: Chemical and Physical Manipulation,” which would seem to contradict this claim. Later in the book, they quote winemaker Ted Lemon arguing that “Winemaking is a human process and not a ‘natural’ one” (148). 4. Popular idealizations of the premodern, and suspicion of the early modern, bear little relationship to the vexed scholarly contestations over when we might locate shifts from premodern to early modern to modern, and evade the question of whether we have ever been modern. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), and, as but one example, the special issue of Modern Language Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2001) on “Periodization: Cutting Up the Past,” ed. Marshall Brown. The popular notion of the premodern also ignores proposals to reimagine history in environmental terms, with the emergence of the “Anthropocene” as a crucial turning point, as one example, or Jason Moore’s notion of the “capitalocene,” beginning in the sixteenth century, as another. See the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369, no. 1938 (2011) on “The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?”; and Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015). 5. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 6.  Goode and Harrop, Authentic Wine, 2–4, 235; Patrick E. McGovern, Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 27, 269. Tom Standage, in A History of the World in Six Glasses (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), calls beer “a liquid relic from human prehistory” (10–11). 7. Old and new are, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Christy Campbell, The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2006), 269–71. Domaine de Vassal in France maintains a living archive of grape varieties in sandy soil where phylloxera cannot develop. 8. McGovern, Uncorking the Past, 180. In Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), McGovern hypothesizes paleolithic

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winemaking and documents neolithic winemaking, speculating that humans and wine coevolved because one of the drivers in the development of human civilizations was the quest to get reliably intoxicated (27). McGovern documents an ancient history of transporting not only wine but vines, and he suggests that “we recapitulate that history every time we pick up a glass of wine and savor the fruit of a Eurasian plant that has been cloned, crossed, and transplanted again and again from its beginnings in the Near East more than 7000 years ago” (299). 9.  Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 73–74. 10. William Vaughan, Directions for Health, Both Naturall and Artificiall (London, 1617), sig. C4v; Richard Sutton, A True Relation of the Cruelties and Barbarities of the French upon the English Prisoners of War (London, 1690), sigs. B3v, C1v; Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Piero Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood (New York: Continuum, 1996); Barbara Sebek, “ ‘More Natural to the Nation’: Situating Shakespeare in the ‘Querelle de Canary,’ ” Shakespeare Studies 42 (July 2014): 106–21, esp. 107, 116; and Robert C. Braddock, “The Rewards of Office-Holding in Tudor England,” Journal of British Studies 14, no. 2 (1975): 29–47, esp. 45. On the social distinctions carried by beverage choice, see Joshua Scodel, Excess and Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 200. On imports, see C. G. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:121–63. 11.  See Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 73–74, on the conceptual connections between blood and wine. On urine and white wine, see William Turner, A new Boke of the natures and properties of all Wines that are commonlye used here in England (London, 1568), sigs. B8r, C4r. Tobias Whitaker, discussed below, also considers the relationship between urine and white wine. 12. Richard Bradley, New Improvements of Planting and Gardening (London, 1726): “The Sap of Plants and Trees Circulate after the Same manner as the Fluids do in Animal Bodies” (11). On blood and sap, see also Jean E. Feerick, “Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic of Plant Life in Titus Andronicus,” South Central Review 26, nos. 1–2 (2009): 82–102, esp. 98; Eve Keller, “ ‘That Sublimest Juyce in Our Body’: Bloodletting and Ideas of the Individual in Early Modern England,” Philological Quarterly 86, nos. 1–2 (2007): 97–122; and Margaret Healy, “Was the Heart ‘Dethroned’?: Harvey’s Discoveries and the Politics of Blood, Heart, and Circulation,” in Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700, ed. Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2018), 15–30. 13. William Harvey, “The Second Anatomical Essay to Jean Riolan,” in The Circulation of the Blood: Two Anatomical Essays by William Harvey, ed. and trans. Kenneth J. Franklin (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1958), 38–39. 14. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 73 (where she discusses the Harvey passage cited above) and 87. 15.  [S. J.], Vineyard, sig. C5v; Sir Hugh Plat advises that if you prune vines “when the sap is up,” you should cover the cut with turpentine to “stay bleeding” (Hugh Plat, Floraes Paradise [London, 1608], sig. L3r); John Worlidge extends this advice to warn that trees from which sap has been extracted will not yield fruit: “You must expect no fruit from the tree out of which you thus extract its blood” (John Worlidge, Vinetum Britannicum: Or a Treatise of Cider, And other Wines and Drinks extracted from Fruits Growing in this Kingdom [London, 1691], sig. C2r). On taboos about menstruation, see Patricia Crawford, “Attitudes Toward Menstruation

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in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 91, no. 1 (1981): 47–73, esp. 59 (this advice might still be repeated in the seventeenth century: “Those persons, which do press the grape, must look their hands, feet and body be clean washed, when as they go to press the grape, and that no woman be there having her terms” [Thomas Barker, The Country-mans Recreation (London, 1654), sig. N1v]); Hugh Plat, Floraes Paradise (London, 1608), sig. L3r; Hugh Plat, The Jewel House of Art and Nature (London, 1653), sig. V2; inside Jewel House, see also Diverse new sorts of Soyle (separately paginated), sigs. H1r–H2v, where Plat says that “I have heard the blood of beasts commended in high terms, for the forwarding and prospering of all poor and backward vines,” but warns that the blood must be tempered with lime lest it “engender” worms “in the earth, which would in time consume all the sap and marrow, that lies in the roots, and in the end destroy both the root and the vine”; John Evelyn, A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, Relating to the Culture and Improvement of it for Vegetation, and the Propagation of Plants, &c. as it was presented to the Royal Society, April 29, 1675 (London, 1676), sig. H7v. 16. John Webster, The White Devil in“The Duchess of Malfi” and Other Plays, ed. René Weis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3.2.184–88. 17. Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 3rd ed., revised by F. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), W461; Tobias Whitaker, The Tree of Humane Life, or, The Bloud of the Grape, proving the possibilitie of maintaining human life from infancy to extreame old age without any sicknesse by the use of wine (London, 1638), sig. C7v; Tobias Whitaker, The Blood of the Grape, Republished and enlarged by the Author (London, 1654), sig. C1v; Whitaker, Tree of Humane Life, sigs. C2v, B3r; Whitaker, Bloud of the Grape, sig. E6v. Whitaker writes “women or breasts,” but corrects this in the list of errata at the end of the text. It is a telling error. He does not make this statement in the earlier version of this text. 18. Worlidge, Vinetum Britannicum, sig. D3r–v. On the medical uses of wine, see Louise Hill Curth, “The Medicinal Value of Wine in Early Modern England,” Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 18 (2003): 35–50; Louise Hill Curth and Tanya M. Cassidy, “ ‘Health, Strength and Happiness’: Medical Constructions of Wine and Beer in Early Modern England,” in A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Adam Smyth (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 143–59. Using wine as a solvent is an ancient tradition; see McGovern, Uncorking the Past, 267. 19. [S. J.], Vineyard, sig. I3v; [John Beale], Nurseries, Orchards, Profitable Gardens and Vineyards (London, 1677), sig. C3v; Nicholas Sutton, The Vintner’s Mystery Display’d: Or, the Whole Art of the Wine Trade Laid Open (London, c. 1717–33), sig. C2v; and Plat, Jewel House, sigs. I3v– I4r. For other extensive lists, see A True Discovery of the Projectors of the Wine Project, out of the Vintners owne orders made at their Common hall (London, 1641), 27–28; Walter Charleton, “The Mysterie of Vintners,” in Two Discourses (London, 1675); and The Art and Mystery of Vintners and Wine-Coopers Containing Approved Directions for the Conserving and Curing all manner and sorts of Wines (London, 1682). A broadside advertises “Jaropton” as a panacea for all beverages and explains that a two-ounce bottle costing one shilling “will be sufficient to correct many gallons of drink” (Jatropoton, Or, A most Grateful and Wholesome Corrective of all Noxious Aigre [sourness]; too Sharp and Flat Drink, Viz. Wines, beers, Cyders, &c. [London, c. 1700]). See Sebek, “ ‘More Natural to the Nation,’ ” on bastard and “balderdash—an inferior beverage that mixes different ingredients” (115). 20. Plat, Jewel House, sigs. I3v–I4r (elsewhere, Plat accuses coopers of “sleights, sophistications, and parellings” and directs readers to his unpublished manuscript, Secreta Dei pampinei [Floraes Paradise, sigs. E6v–E7r]); John Evelyn, Sylva, Or a Discourse of Forest-Trees . . . To which is annexed Pomona (London, 1679), sig. Xx4r (N. Sutton, The Vintner’s Mystery Display’d, repeats

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Evelyn’s terms for the cheats of the wine trade [sigs. D6v–E1r]); In Vino Veritas: Or, A Conference Betwixt Chip the Cooper, and Dash the Drawer, (Being both Boozy) Discovering some Secrets in the Wine-brewing Trade (London, 1698), 21–22. 21. Michael R. Best, introduction to Gervase Markham, The English Housewife, ed. Michael R. Best (Kingston, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), xxv. 22. In Vino Veritas, 16, 24. Vintners’ transubstantiations might even be seen to promote Catholicism. In one of several satires on vintners (The Search after Claret; or, A Visitation of the Vinters [London, 1691], canto 1, stanza 8), Richard Ames writes: Sure Popery will now be the a-la-mode fashion, When the vintners can swallow transubstantiation, And the wine that was French about six months ago, Has quite changed its nature, and’s no longer so. 23. True Discovery of the Projectors of the Wine Project; Richard Ames, The Bacchanalian Sessions; Or The Contention of Liquors: with A Farewell to Wine (London, 1693), sig. G1v (the OED explains that poison antidotes called “mithridate” were “usually in the form of an electuary compounded of many ingredients” and that “Lumber pies” included numerous ingredients as well); Richard Haines, Aphorisms Upon the New Way of Improving Cyder, or Making Cyder-Royal, Lately Discovered for the Good of those Kingdoms and Nations That are beholden to Others, and Pay Dear for WINE (London, 1684), sig. D2r; The Phanseys of William Cavendish Marquis of Newcastle, ed. Douglas Grant (London, 1956), 21; Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, W462. 24.  Barbara Sebek, “Canary, Bristoles, Londres, Ingleses: English Traders in the Canaries in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2013), 279–93; Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in “Religio Medici,” “Hydriotaphia,” and “The Garden of Cyrus,” ed. Robin Robbins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), Pt.2, sec. 1, 63. On geohumoralism, see also Ken Albala, “Food and Nation,” in Eating Right in the Renaissance, 217–40; Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 116–56; Kasey Evans, Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Jean E. Feerick, Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); Hillary Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015); Susan Scott Parrish, “English Bodies in America,” in American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for Omohundro Institute, 2006), 77–102; Gitanjali Shahani, “The Spicèd Indian Air in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014): 122–37; and Elizabeth Spiller, Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 25. Maison Rustique, sig. Fff2r. 26. William Hughes, The Compleat Vineyard: Or A most excellent Way for the Planting of Vines: Not onely according to the German and French way, but also long experimented in England (London, 1665), sig. A3r; [D. S.], Vinetum Angliae: Or, A new and easy Way to make Wine of English Grapes and other Fruit, equal to that of France, Spain, &c with their Physical Virtues (London, 1700), 2. On the nationalism of such arguments, see Vittoria Di Palma, “Drinking Cider in Paradise: Science, Improvement, and the Politics of Fruit Trees,” in A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Adam Smyth (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer,

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2004), 161–77. Sebek complicates claims about the natural/national beverage: “Confounding simple oppositions between local/global and native/foreign, humoral discourse is potentially at odds with the claim that beverages are ‘natural to’ a whole nation, since varied humoral bodies comprise that nation” (“ ‘More Natural to the Nation,’ ” 113). 27. [D. S.], Vinetum Angliae, 2; Urvashi Chakravarty, “More Than Kin, Less Than Kind: Similitude, Strangeness, and Early Modern English Homonationalisms,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 14–29, esp. 23. 28. A Narrative of a Maid Lately burnt to death in a strange and wonderful manner . . . Also A True Relation of a sad Accident that happened on three Persons . . . being lately kill’d with drinking of adulterated White-Wine (London, 1678), 6; Worlidge, Vinetum Britannicum, sig. D1r (Worlidge also advises that if one must drink wine, then “our English grape,” that is, a grape grown in England, will produce a drink that “may be more acceptable to our palates, and more healthy, pleasant, and profitable than those foreign wines many are so fond of ” [sig. D5r]); [Samuel Hartlib], A Designe for Plentie, By an Universall Planting of Fruit-Trees: Tendred by some Wel-wishers to the Publick (London, n.d. [1652?]), sig. B4r–v; see also [D. S.], Vinetum Angliae, 2. Rachel Crawford explores how these arguments for apple cider as the drink best suited to English bodies persist into the eighteenth century (Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 114–37). 29.  William Camden, Britain, or A Chorographicall Description of the Most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1637), sigs. Z2r, Gg3r–v (see also Conrad Heresbach, Foure Bookes of Husbandry, “Newly Englished, and encreased, by Barnaby Googe, Esquire” [London, 1601], sig. A3v); John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris. or A Garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up (London, 1629), sig. Zz6v. 30. [S. J.], Vineyard, sigs. A4v, A8v. 31. Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, sig. Aaa1r. 32.  Morgan Kelly and Cormac O’Grada, “The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44, no. 3 (Winter 2014): 301–25. One of their sources supporting a collapse of Medieval English wine production is Isabelle Chuine, Pascal Yiou, Nicolas Viovy, Bernard Seguin, Valerie Daux, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Historical Phenology: Grape Ripening as a Past Climate Indicator,” Nature 432, no. 7015 (2004): 289–90, which focuses on Burgundy and does not address England. Sam White, “The Real Little Ice Age,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44, no. 3 (Winter 2014): 327–52, esp. 337, 344. White acknowledges some evidence that cold summers did affect grape harvests (337). See also Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Doubleday, 1971), especially the chapter on wine harvests (23–79); and James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 23. 33. Sir Hugh Plat, The Second Part of the Garden of Eden (London, 1660), sigs. E5v–E6r. Plat’s kinsman, Charles Bellingham, prepared this work for the press based, he says, on Plat’s unfinished notes (Malcolm Thick, Sir Hugh Plat: The Search for Useful Knowledge in Early Modern London [Devon: Prospect, 2010], 370–71). Hughes repeats Plat’s formulation without attribution (Compleat Vineyard, sig. A2v). Also compare William Harrison, The Description of England (1587), ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 435, 264; Camden, Britain, sig. Gg3r–v; and Samuel Hartlib His Legacie: Or An Enlargement of the Discourse of Husbandry Used in Brabant and Flaunders (London, 1651), sigs. E3v–E4r.

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Notes to Pages 99–103

34. Plat, Floraes Paradise, sigs. O8v, E8r–v, E7v. Plat’s use of “race” corresponds to the term “typicity”: “the way a wine displays characteristics shared among wines from this particular location” (Goode and Harrop, Authentic Wine, 13). “Racy” is still used as a wine descriptor, but it has only gradually moved from meaning tasting of the earth or tasting of its own sap or spirit to meaning, more generally, lively or sprightly wine. On Plat, see Thick, Sir Hugh Plat; Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 211–53; and Ayesha Mukherjee, Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2015), 63–93, 175. 35.  Googe, “Epistle to the Reader,” in Heresbach, Foure Bookes of Husbandry, sig. A3v (Googe mentions two men as well, but he points out that the wines they produce are not “right good” because of “the malice and disdain peradventure of the Frenchmen that kept them,” rather than any fault of soil or situation. The gentlewoman he mentions seems to have avoided this pitfall by doing the work herself ); Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London, 1613), sigs. M4r, S1v. Joan Thirsk, in Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), includes several invaluable pages on grape growing as, ultimately, a failure (135–39). 36. Samuel Hartlib His Legacie (London, 1651), sigs. E4r-v; William Coles, Adam in Eden: or, Natures Paradise (London, 1657), sig. X1r. Hartlib’s text includes a discussion of orchards and fruit growing, titled A large letter concerning the defects and remedies of English husbandry. The letter is addressed to Hartlib, and he frames it as a work he first commissioned and then amended and augmented. Written in the first person, it is often attributed to Robert Child, who attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish a vineyard in Massachusetts in the 1640s. On Child, see Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America: From the Beginnings to Prohibition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 29–30; and Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 244–68. On Child’s responsibility for this text, see Chaplin, Subject Matter, 236–38. 37. John Smith, A Map of Virginia (Oxford, 1612), sig. B2r. John Chamberlain says of John Pory, who became secretary to the colony: “No question but he will become there a sufficient sober man, seeing there is no wine in all that climate” (David A. Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation [New York: Vintage, 2005], 191). A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie of Virginia, With a confutation of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise. Published by advise and direction of the Councell of Virginia (London, 1610), in Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, ed. Peter Force (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), 3:23; The Records of the Virginia Company of London, 1606–26, ed. Susan M. Kingsbury (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906–35), 3:646–47. 38. Robert Johnson, Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent fruites by Planting in Virginia (London, 1609), sig. C3v. 39. Pinney, History of Wine in America, 5, 24, 25, 21. 40. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:116; Edward Williams, Virginia: More especially the South part thereof, Richly and truly valued. . . . Also The Dressing of Vines for the rich Trade of making Wines in Virginia (London, 1650), sigs. C4r–C5r; The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, ed. William Waller Hening (New York: R&W&G Bartow, 1823), 1:161; Pinney, History of Wine in America, 22. See Allison Margaret Bigelow, “Gendered Language and the Science of Colonial Silk,” Early American Literature 49, no. 2 (2014): 271–325, on Williams’s proposal for inducting

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indigenous people into grape cultivation and winemaking (308–10). On the colonists’ reliance on and distrust of experts, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Love-Hate Relationship with Experts in the Early Modern Atlantic,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9, no. 2 (2011): 248–67. On the link between sugar and slavery, see Kim F. Hall, Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Race and Gender in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). 41.  John Bonoeil, His Majesties Gracious Letter to the Earle of South-Hampton, . . . commanding the present setting up of Silke-works, and planting of Vines in Virginia (London, 1622); Captain Butler, “The Unmasked face of our Colony in Virginia as it was in the Winter of ye yeare 1622,” presented at a London hearing about the colony (April 23, 1623), in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 2:375; “The Answer of divers Planters that have long lived in Virginia,” in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 2:384. 42. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:166 (the penalty for picking grapes was on the books as early as 1611 and was also imposed on those who picked food crops; see For the colony in Virginea Britannia: Lawes divine, morall, and martiall, &c. [London, 1612], 14–15, discussed in the Epilogue); Hening, Statutes at Large, 1:470. I depend here on Thomas Pinney’s wonderfully detailed account of the “promise of Virginia wine” (Pinney, History of Wine in America, 12–29). 43.  Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 2:384; Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia (London, 1705), 40–41; Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 143. On the poisoning, see Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown, 218; Alden T. Vaughan, “ ‘Expulsion of the Salvages’: English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622,” William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 1 (January 1978): 57–84, esp. 77; and James Horn, The Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 270. This poisoning appears in most accounts of English-native relations in the period. 44.  Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 4:220–21. Kingsbury’s index includes “Sack, Indians poisoned with.” The one source everyone cites for this notorious incident is Robert Bennett’s letter of June 9, 1623, to his brother, Edward Bennett. Other accounts of this event lack the detail of poisoning sack, referring only to “a successful stratagem” (Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 2:482, 486) and “this exploite” (2:483). 45. See April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Games, Web of Empire. 46. Amanda Greene, “Foods That Look Like Body Parts They’re Good For,” accessed August 16, 2019, https://www.womansday.com/health-fitness/nutrition/g2503/foods-that-look-like-body -parts-theyre-good-for; Thomas Wright, William Harvey: A Life in Circulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 164–65; John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the ReCreation of Paradise (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 62–65; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 17–45; Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 35; Robert Turner, Botanologia: The Brittish Physician. Or, The Nature and Vertues of English Plants (London, 1664), sig. A5v. 47. Nicholas Joly, Biodynamic Wine Demystified (San Francisco, CA: Wine Appreciation Guild, 2008), 3; Goode and Harrop, Authentic Wine, 25 (see also 177); Bonné, New California Wine, 46, quoting Ted Lemon of Littorai Wines; “Is terroir like a quantum field?,” La Clarine Farm, accessed August 16, 2019, https://www.laclarinefarm.com/farming.html. 48.  Rudolf Steiner, What Is Biodynamics?: A Way to Heal and Revitalize the Earth; Seven Lectures (Great Barrier, MA: Steiner Books, 2005).

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Notes to Pages 110–114

49. Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, trans. Catherine E. Creeger and Malcolm Gardner (Kimberton, PA: Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening Association, 1993), 17 (Lecture 1), 56 (Lecture 3), and 87 (First Discussion); Goode and Harrop, Authentic Wine, 58; “Viticulture,” Bonny Doon Vineyard, accessed August 16, 2019, https://www .bonnydoonvineyard.com/about/viticulture/. 50. Dry Creek Valley Sonoma Wine Country, “Picture-Perfect Itinerary,” accessed July 2, 2018, https://www.drycreekvalley.org/itineraries/picture-perfect-itinerary/; and “Winemaking & Biodynamics,” Benziger Family Winery, accessed August 16, 2019, https://www.benziger.com /winemaking-biodynamics/. 51. “Viticulture,” Bonny Doon Vineyard (similarly, Littorai vineyards claims that their philosophy of winegrowing “has evolved into one founded on a modern day synthesis of traditional, agro-ecological and biodynamic principles,” accessed August 16, 2019, http://www.littorai.com /our-vineyards/); and Katherine Cole, Voodoo Vintners: Oregon’s Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers (Corvallis: Oregon State University, 2011), 50, 127. 52. Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10, 8; Mark Shepard, Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers (Austin, TX: Acres USA, 2013); and Regeneration International, accessed August 16, 2019, http://www.regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative -agriculture/. 53.  Steiner, What Is Biodynamics?, 134, 125; Joly, Biodynamic Wine Demystified, 102, 104; Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012), 392; Cole, Voodoo Vintners, 67; Goode and Harrop, Authentic Wine, 65; Joly, Biodynamic Wine Demystified, 145; “Viticulture,” Bonny Doon Vineyard; “The Role of the Farmer,” La Clarine Farm. Emphasizing that one must “accept the uncertainties” of farming and winemaking, Hank Beckmeyer has moved in the direction of low intervention or “do nothing” farming, based on Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution (New York: New York Times, 2009). But as Beckmeyer’s reflections make clear, this does not remove the farmer or the winegrower from the equation but rather embeds him or her more deeply. 54. Cole, Voodoo Vintners, 8, 16–17, 22, 24, 59, 94; Joly, Biodynamic Wine Demystified, 4–5, 11, 23, 64, 65. 55. Demeter Association website, accessed August 15, 2019, https://www.demeter-usa.org /about-demeter/; Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); Adam Smyth, “Almanacks and Annotators,” in Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 15–56; Wendy Wall, “Temporalities: Preservation, Seasoning, and Memorialization,” in Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 167–208; Plat, Floraes Paradise, 9. 56. Charles Cotton, The Planters Manual: Being Instructions for the Raising, Planting, and Cultivating all sorts of Fruit-Trees (London, 1675), sig. E1r; [S. J.], Vineyard, sig. F6r. 57. As Bonné puts it: “The buried cow horn became sceptics’ rallying symbol” (Bonné, New California Wine, 44); Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2011); Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 80–92; Gervase Markham, Markhams farewell to Husbandry: or, The inriching of all sorts of Barren and Sterile grounds in our Kingdome, to be as fruitfull in all manner of Graine, Pulse,

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and Grasse, as the best grounds whatsoever (London, 1625), sigs.I2r, P1r. This text went through at least seven editions from 1620 to 1668. After 1620, each was “revised, corrected, and amended.” 58. Thomas Langley, Prognostication for this yeare of our Lord God, 1641 (London, 1641), sig. B4v (but signatures are confused). See Capp, English Almanacs, 63, 211. 59. Locke’s Travels in France 1675–1679, 144 and 144n1; and John Locke, Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives [London, 1766], 7 (sig. B4r). Richard Yeo’s Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) led me to Locke’s “Q” (199). 60. “Winemaking,” Bonny Doon Vineyard, accessed August 16, 2019, https://www.bonny doonvineyard.com/about/winemaking/; surtitle, A personal journey into the new (but centuries old) world of natural wine, at the top of the cover of Alice Feiring, Naked Wine: Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2011); Goode and Harrop, Authentic Wine, 117; Bonné, New California Wine, 105; Joly, Biodynamic Wine Demystified, 42, 47; Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “Making Up Representation: The Risks of Femininity,” trans. Katherine Streip, Representations, no. 20 (Fall 1987): 77–87; Joly, Biodynamic Wine Demystified, 5; Goode and Harrop, Authentic Wine, 5. 61. Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, Of Husbandry (London, 1745), bk. 12, 525, which is quoted at the start of Goode and Harrop, Authentic Wine, 111. I have added in the original Latin phrasings from Columella, On Agriculture, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, trans. E. S. Forster and Edward H. Heffner, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), bk. 12, chap. 19, 2. “Suapte” means “its very own.” This is the book addressed to the bailiff’s wife. Books 3 and 4 address viticulture and winemaking more generally. 62. Plat, Jewel House, sig. L1r–v; Plat, Floraes Paradise, sigs. E6v–E7r; and Evelyn, Sylva, sig. Xx4r. 63.  See, for example, the appendix to Feiring, Naked Wine, which lists “U.S.-Approved Additives and Processes for Wine” (207–8). According to Bonné, the grape concentrate Mega Purple was “devised by a division of Constellation [Wines] as a way to add color and sweetness to generally cheap red wines—although it is also added to more than its share of expensive bottles” and is “one of those not terribly scrupulous additives that is widely used but never discussed” (New California Wine, 97–98). Alison Sim describes the use of turnsole in Food and Feast in Tudor England (London: Palgrave, 1998), 65; Megan Krigbaum, “What a Wine Label Won’t Tell You,” Food and Wine, March 4, 2015. 64.  Certified biodynamic growers are allowed to use copper and sulphur as fungicides. They defend these as “traditional” chemicals (Goode and Harrop, Authentic Wine, 58) and also say that the longer they farm biodynamically the less they need them. The homepage of Bonny Doon Vineyard announces that it is “on a spirited adventure to make naturally soulful, distinctive, and original wine” (accessed August 16, 2019, https://www.bonnydoonvineyard.com/). The clear listing of ingredients in the wine and used in the winemaking process, which distinguishes Bonny Doon from most other wineries, appears on the label and on the retail site for the 2018 Le Cigar Volante, under Other Notes, accessed August 16, 2019, https://shop.bonnydoonvineyard .com /product /2018 -Le -Cigare -Volant -Cuvee -Oumuamua ?pageID = 6C283D98 -96C6 -14A4 -826A -A1E83DFBF311 & sortBy = DisplayOrder & maxRows = 100 & & productListName = Red & position=1. Plat, Jewel House, sig. L1r. 65. Lukacs, Inventing Wine, 311 (see also 299); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 43; Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

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2008), esp. Robert N. Proctor, chap. 1, “Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study),” 25; and Eggert, Disknowledge. 66.  Virginia Wine, https://www.virginiawine.org/, accessed July 2, 2018 vs. August 16, 2019. See esp. “The Roots of Virginia Wine,” accessed August 16, 2019, https://www.virginiawine .org/about/history. See also “History of UK Vineyards and Wine Industry” on the Wines of Great Britain website, accessed July 2, 2018, https://www.winegb.co.uk/visitors/history-of-the -industry/. 67.  Much of this research is happening at the University of California, Davis, where I work. I take this list of pressing concerns from Elizabeth Forrestel’s lecture, “Germplasm and Genetic Diversity: Key Resources to Protect the Future of Wine,” Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, May 14, 2019; Lee Hannah, Patrick R. Roehrdanz, Makihiko Ikegami, Anderson V. Shepard, M. Rebecca Shaw, Gary Tabor, Lu Zhi, Pablo A. Marquet, and Robert J. Hijmans, “Climate Change, Wine, and Conservation,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 17 (2013): 6907–12; David Gelles, “Falcons, Drones, Data: A California Winery Battles Climate Change,” New York Times, January 5, 2017; Rowan Jacobsen, “Saving Our Food Supply in the Face of Climate Change,” including wine on a list of “10 Foods Threatened by Climate Change,” Eating Well, May/June 2018, 96; Bryce Oates, “In Farm Country, Grappling with the Taboo of Talking About Climate Change,” Civil Eats, July 11, 2018, https://civileats .com/2018/07/11/in-farm-country-grappling-with-the-taboo-of-talking-about-climate-change/, which suggests that many winegrowers discuss soil health as a way of acknowledging and trying to defend against climate change without directly addressing it. 68. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222, esp. 206, 197. See also Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Chapter 4 1. Sam Earnshaw, Hedgerows for California Agriculture: A Resource Guide (Davis, CA: Community Alliance of Family Farmers, 2004); Terry Shistar, Hedgerows for Biodiversity; a Beyond Pesticides Fact Sheet, https://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/.../Hedgerows Fall2014.pdf. See also, John Wright, A Natural History of the Hedgerow and Ditches, Dykes and Dry Stone Walls (London: Profile Books, 2016), 123; Robert Macfarlane’s glossary of terms for “edges, hedges, and boundaries” in his Landmarks (New York: Penguin, 2015), 251–52; and the profiles of farmers on the American Farmland Trust website (http://stewards.farmland.org/), which often include information on how farmers have established hedgerows on their properties as a key feature of stewardship. 2. Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, On Agriculture, trans. E. S. Forster and Edward H. Heffner, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), bk. 11, chap. 3, 3; Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 60; Ecotone Magazine editorial statement, https://ecotonemagazine.org /about/. The term “ecotone” was coined by F. E. Clements in 1904; see OED, s.v. “ecotone.” Susan Walker, J. Bastow Wilson, John B. Steel, G. L. Rapson, Benjamin Smith, Warren McG. King, and Yvette H. Cottam, “Properties of Ecotones,” Journal of Vegetation Science 14 (2003): 579–90. 3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 123, 115.

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4. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 7 (Levine defines “affordances” as “the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs” [6], and Julia Rheinhardt Lupton also borrows this term from design theory [Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 31–42]); Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1060–71, esp. 1064. 5.  Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 3rd ed., rev. by F. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), H364; Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 42; Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 108. On proverbs and aphorisms, see also G. L. Apperson, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases: A Historical Dictionary (London: J. M. Dent, 1929; republished by Gale Research in 1969); Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950); and Frances E. Dolan, “One Head Is Better Than Two: The Aphoristic Afterlife of Renaissance Tragedy,” in Laureations: Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson, ed. Roze Hentschell and Kathy Lavezzo (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2012), 91–110. 6. E. Pollard, M. D. Hooper, and N. W. Moore, Hedges (New York: Taplinger, 1975), 23, 24, 17 (the Latin word for hedge is “saepes” and it too has a verb form: “saepio, saepire”); D. Morgan Evans, “Hedges as Historic Artefacts,” in Hedgerow Management and Nature Conservation, ed. Trudy A. Watt and G. P. Buckley (London: British Ecological Society Conservation Ecology Group, Wye College, University of London, 1994), 107–18, esp. 107; Wilson, Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, N109, F209; Gervase Markham, The Second Booke of the English Husbandman (London, 1614), L3v. Oliver Rackham challenges assumptions that hedges are especially English, artificial, or date from the enclosures. He wants to emphasize that they can “arise” spontaneously (The History of the Countryside [London: J. M. Dent, 1986], 181–204). 7. Another interesting example of “hedge” as a verb indicating prohibition appears in the play Arden of Faversham, when the ambitious Mosby says: “The way I seek to find where pleasure dwells / Is hedged behind me, that I cannot back, / But needs must on, although to danger’s gate” (English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington et al. [New York: W. W. Norton, 2002], 8.20–22). This use of the verb “hedge” links it to other verdant enclosures as entrapments. In Henry VI, Part 1, for example, Talbot laments that he and his troops are “parked,” “bounded,” and “mazed” (Henry VI, Part 1, 4.2.45–47). 8.  Edward Bond, Bingo (Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 1976), 7. The documents that inspired Bond’s play are now available at http://www.shakespearedocumented.org /exhibition/document/thomas-greene-s-notes-progress-proposed-enclosures-welcombe-include -five; Kevin A. Quarmby, “ ‘Bardwashing’ Shakespeare: Food Justice, Enclosure, and the Poaching Poet,” Journal of Social Justice 5 (2015): 1–21; Richard Wilson, “ ‘Like the Old Robin Hood’: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 1–19; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Bloomsbury/Arden, 2001), 261–62. 9. Chris Fitter, Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (New York: Routledge, 2012), 184. Edgar twice refers to hawthorns in King Lear: “Through the sharp hawthorn blows the cold wind” (F3.4.40–41) and “Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind” (F3.4.86). These lines also appear in the Quarto version. 10. Alan Everitt, “Common Land,” in The English Rural Landscape, ed. Joan Thirsk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 210–35, esp. 216. On notions of the common, see Jean Howard

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Notes to Pages 130–132

and Paul Strohm, “The Imaginary Commons,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 3 (2007): 549–77; Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 36–37; and Melissa Mowry, The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). On the slippage between the terms “commons” and “waste,” see Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 25. 11.  R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, 1912), 152; Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500–1640,” in Chapters from the Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 3, Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice, 1500–1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. 109; de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 124–25. For helpful overviews of enclosure legislation, see Pollard, Hooper, and Moore, Hedges, 38–39; J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450–1850 (London: MacMillan, 1977); J. R. Wordie, “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 36, no. 4 (1983): 483–505; and T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Christopher Hill emphasizes the shift from 1597, which “saw the last Act of Parliament against depopulation,” to the Parliament of 1621, which “had seen the first general bill facilitating enclosure” (18), to the Parliament of 1656, which rejected a bill that “for the last time attempted to check enclosures” (Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 [New York: W. W. Norton, 1961], 149). See also Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1972), 41–45, 290. Patricia Seed argues that “fixing a boundary, such as a hedge around fields, together with some kind of activity demonstrating use (or intent to use, i.e., clearing the land),” was a distinctively English way of establishing “a legal right to apparently unused land”; “Englishmen shared a unique understanding that fencing legitimately created exclusive private property ownership in the New World” (Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 19–20). See also Gary Fields, Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Jess Edwards argues that English ideas and practices regarding land were more internally fissured, in flux, and strategically vague than Seed suggests (“Between ‘Plain Wilderness’ and ‘Goodly Corn Fields’: Representing Land Use in Early Virginia,” in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, ed. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005], 217–35). 12.  William C. Carroll, “ ‘The Nursery of Beggary’: Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart Period,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 34–47, esp. 35–36. 13. Sir Thomas More, Utopia, translated into English by Ralph Robynson (London, 1551), sigs. C6v–C7v. 14. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor. And Advancement of the English Nation. Promised by Enclosure of the Wastes and Common Grounds of England (London, 1653), sigs. D3r, F3v. Moore was not the only one to propose that enclosure would supply rather than take away work. For example, see “A Debate on Enclosure, 1607,” in 17th Century Economic Documents, ed. Joan Thirsk and J. Cooper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 107. 15. Gerard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush: The Spirit Burning, Not Consuming, but Purging Mankind (London: 1650), sigs. A6v, F3v–F4r. Christopher Hill discusses this imagery in World Turned Upside Down, 81, as does Roger G. Manning, in Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular

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Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 29–30. For Milton, however, the hedge, like sex and work, precedes the fall; Milton’s paradise is bounded by a “verdurous wall” (4.143). It is the fallen world that is “fenceless” (10.303). In his paraphrase of Psalm 80 (1648), Milton describes God’s wrath in terms of leaving the vine he brought from Egypt unprotected: “Why hast thou laid her hedges low / And broken down her fence, / That all may pluck her, as they go, / With rudest violence?” (80:12). 16. Jane Bennett, Vital Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 21, 53; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 23, 33, 151; Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 31, 33. 17. John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 19; Briony McDonagh, “Making and Breaking Property: Negotiating Enclosure and Common Rights in Sixteenth-Century England,” History Workshop Journal 76 (Autumn 2013): 32–56, esp. 37; Manning, Village Revolts, 23 (see also 30); Roger B. Manning, “Patterns of Violence in Tudor Enclosure Riots,” Albion 6, no. 2 (1974): 120–33, esp. 132. According to Tawney, “the earliest levellers get their name because they raze not social inequalities but quickset hedges and park palings” (Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, 338). See also Ken Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral?: Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 125; and Nicholas Blomley, “Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges,” Rural History 18, no. 1 (2007): 1–21, esp. 14. 18. McDonagh, “Making and Breaking Property,” 39; Briony McDonagh and Carl J. Griffin, “Occupy!: Historical Geographies of Property, Protest and the Commons, 1500–1850,” Journal of Historical Geography 53 (2016): 1–10, esp. 6; Manning, “Patterns of Violence,” 123, 121. 19. Thomas Tusser, Fiue hundreth points of good husbandry (London, 1573), sig. Q2r (compare the 1672 edition, sig. N2v); Steve Hindle, On the Parish?: The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 43–48; Timothy Nourse, Campania Foelix: Or, a Discourse of the Benefits and Improvements of Husbandry (London, 1700), sig. E6r. 20. Columella, On Agriculture, bk. 11, chap. 3, 7; Blomley, “Making Private Property,” 12, 8; Alan Krell, The Devil’s Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 15–18; Manning, Village Revolts, 26, 29; de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 127; Bennett, Vital Matter, 60. 21. Garrett Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 118; Jean E. Feerick, “Groveling with Earth in Kyd and Shakespeare’s Historical Tragedies,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 231–52, esp. 237. For excellent readings of the scene from Richard II, see Hillary Eklund, “Kingship and Husbandry in Richard II,” in Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 139–40; Bonnie Lander Johnson, “Visions of Soil and Body Management: The Almanac in Richard II,” in Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, ed. Hillary Eklund (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2017), 59–78; Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, “On a Bank of Rue: Or Material Ecofeminist Inquiry and the Garden of Richard II,” Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014): 42–50. 22. William Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare: Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), note to 5.2.41–54 (267). Taylor’s edition was first published in 1982. 23. Julius Caesar, The Gallic War, trans. H. J. Edwards, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 2.17; Virgil, Georgics: A Poem of the Land, trans. Kimberly

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Notes to Pages 137–139

Johnson (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), bk. 2, lines 371–90. The seventeenth-century translation by Thomas May urges the reader to “make strong hedges” (Virgil’s Georgicks Englished by Thomas May [London, 1628], sig. E4r). 24. Markham, Second Booke of the English Husbandman, sig. L3r. Countering the erasure of labor he finds in many accounts of the countryside, such as the country house poem, Raymond Williams draws attention to how he learned the skill of planching: “I have had the luck to . . . hedge and ditch, after long neglect, and to see from skilled men how the jobs should be done” (The Country and the City [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973], 302). Alexander Langlands includes plashing as a “craeft” in Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 112. 25. James R. Siemon, “Landlord Not King: Agrarian Change and Interarticulation,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 17–33, esp. 19. Charlotte Scott uses the compound “hedge-prisoner” (Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 99). Edith Snook, “Beautiful Hair, Health, and Privilege in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 22–51, esp. 33. Barbers and mowers were related conceptually and sometimes actually (Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003], 26). Later in the century, hair would become a kind of hedge dividing Republican from Cavalier. 26. Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 108, 122–23; Edward J. Geisweidt, “Horticulture of the Head: The Vegetable Life of Hair in Early Modern English Thought,” Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 19, no. 6 (2009): 1–24, esp. 6, discussing Thomas Gibson, The anatomy of humane bodies epitomized (London, 1682), sigs. V8r–v. Columella repeatedly uses the word “coma” to name human hair, animal fleece, and plant leaves. 27. Annabel Patterson, “Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 19 (1988): 29–62, and Gary Taylor’s introduction to the Oxford edition, esp. 12–26; Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature, 100, 98. 28. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1587), vol. 6, sec. 14, 553. On human/plant entanglements, see various essays in Feerick and Nardizzi, Indistinct Human; and esp. Jean E. Feerick, “The Imperial Graft: Horticulture, Hybridity, and the Art of Mingling Races in Henry V and Cymbeline,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 211–27, esp. 218, 217. 29. A Hedgerovv of Busshes, Brambles, and Briers: or, A Fieldefull of Tares, Thistles and Tine; of the vanities and vaine delightes of this worlde, leading the way to eternall damnation (London, 1598), sig. A3r. In the King James bible, the hedge is both protection and entrapment, the careful work of the good husbandman and the thorny path of the slothful. At the beginning of the Book of Job, Satan points out that God has protected Job: “Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land” (KJV, Job 1:10). In contrast, the Book of Hosea includes the warning, “I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and make a wall, that she shall not find her paths” (2:6). The entangled sheep suggests that this “multispecies” assemblage might include animals as well. I borrow the concept of the “multispecies” from Julian Yates, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).We again see the conjoining of animal, human, and hedge into an agentic assemblage in

Notes to Pages 140–148

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references to the hedgehog, a creature whose spines were called thorns and who was described as wearing “a sharp and quick-thorned garment on his back” (Edward Topsell calls the hedgehog’s spines “thorns” in The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects [London, 1608], sigs. U1v–U2r; John Maplet, A Greene Forest, or A Naturall Historie [London, 1567], 89). Shakespeare often invokes the hedgehog as a thorny, wounding obstacle that can follow you around (Richard III 1.2.100; Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.2.10; Tempest 2.2.10). While the hedgehog usually seems to be a thorny or difficult person, in heraldry “the hedgehog signifies a man expert in gathering of substance, and one that providently lays hold upon proffered opportunity, and so making hay (as we say proverbially) whilst the sun doth shine, prevents future want” (John Guillim, A Display of Heraldry [London, 1660], 207). The word “hay” puns on the French word for hedge (“haie”) and its English usage (“hay”). 30. Charles Perrault, “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” trans. Angela Carter, in Folk and Fairy Tales, ed. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, 5th ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2018), 85. Perrault uses the words “haie” (hedge or barrier) as well as “des épines” (thorns) and “des arbres” (trees) to describe this hedge. 31. The Annotated Brothers Grimm, ed. and trans. Maria Tatar (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 242. 32. To point to just one deadend, Katherine Howard, whom Henry VIII called his “rose without a thorn,” will fall to the ax, another nipped bud; Katie Wales, “An A–Z of Rhetorical Terms,” in Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Lynette Hunter, Lynne Magnusson, Ann Thompson, and Katie Wales (London: Bloomsbury/Arden, 2001), 299–300. 33. Tatar, Annotated Brothers Grimm, 242–44. 34. Tatar translation in Annotated Brothers Grimm, 242; Ralph Manheim translation in Folk and Fairy Tales, ed. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, 5th ed. (Petersborough, ON: Broadview, 2018), 61; Sleeping Beauty, screenplay by Erdman Penner, directed by Clyde Geronomi (Los Angeles: Disney, 1959); Maleficent, directed by Robert Stromberg (Los Angeles: Disney, 2014). 35. Bennett, Vital Matter, 62. 36. Tatar, Annotated Brothers Grimm, 239; Giambattista Basile, “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” in The Tale of Tales, trans. Nancy L. Canepa (New York: Penguin, 2016), 422–26. 37. On the hortus conclusus, see Christina Malcolmson, “The Garden Enclosed/The Woman Enclosed: Marvell and the Cavalier Poets,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 251–69; Elizabeth Sauer and Lisa M. Smith, “Noli me tangere: Colonialist Imperatives and Enclosure Acts in Early Modern England,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 141–58; and A. Moore, Bread for the Poor, sig. A2r. 38. Richard Broughton, Ecclesiastical Historie of Great Britaine (London, 1633), sig. M3r–v; Leah Knight, “Writing on Trees,” English Literary Renaissance 41, no. 3 (2011): 462–81, esp. 480; Alexandra Walsham, “The Holy Thorn of Glastonbury: The Evolution of a Legend in PostReformation England,” Parergon 21, no. 2 (2004): 1–25, esp. 15; Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 492. Walsham discusses the thorn in a chapter on “Invented Traditions: Legend, Custom, and Memory,” 471–554. We have seen this notion of an invented tradition before, in the chapter on wine. 39. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 99; Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The

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Notes to Pages 148–154

Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976); Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 67, 74. 40. Juliet Fleming, “How to Look at a Printed Flower,” Word and Image 22, no. 2 (2006): 165–87; Juliet Fleming, “How Not to Look at a Printed Flower,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 345–71, 359, 347, 350. 41.  Fleming, “How Not To,” 347; John Henderson, “Columella’s Living Hedge: The Roman Gardening Book,” Journal of Roman Studies 92 (2002): 110–33, esp. 110 (see also Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007], on framing not as a cordoning or boxing off but as informing, shaping, and conjuring); J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” (1938), reprinted in Folk and Fairy Tales, ed. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, 5th ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2018), 363n2; Samuel Hartlib, A Discoverie for Division or Setting Out of Land (London, 1653), sigs. C1v–C2r. 42. Fleming, “How To,” 171; Tom Williamson, “Enclosure and the English Hedgerow,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain, vol. 6, Romantics and Early Victorians, ed. Boris Ford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 263–71, esp. 269; Evans, “Hedges as Historic Artefacts,” 114, 116. 43. Kenneth Robert Olwig, Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 100–101. See also R. Williams, Country and the City, 124. 44. Earnshaw, Hedgerows for California Agriculture, n.p. 45. A. Moore, Bread for the Poor, sig. C2r; Fleming, “How Not To,” 348. 46. John Anderson (Hedgerow Farms), “Wildlife Habitat and Clean Farming Compatible,” in Bring Farm Edges Back to Life!, by Paul Robins, Rebecca Bresnick Holmes, and Katherine Laddish (Yolo County Resource Conservation District, 2002), 3, downloaded August 18, 2019, from http://www.yolorcd.org/nodes/resource/publications.htm; Mike Madison, Fruitful Labor: Deep Ecology of a Small Farm (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016), 122 (since republished as Fruitful Labor: The Ecology, Economy, and Practice of a Family Farm [White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018]; David Montgomery, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (London: W. W. Norton, 2017), 21, 30–31, 68, 100; Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 178, 179. 47. A. Moore, Bread for the Poor, sig. D3v; Blomley, “Making Private Property,” 11; Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 9; John Taylor, Praise, Antiquity, and Commodity of Beggery, Beggers, and Begging (London, 1621), sig. C1r; John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (London, 1699), sig. B3r. 48.  William Coles, Adam in Eden: or, Natures Paradise (London, 1657), sigs a(1)r, a(2)r, Cccc3r, Rr1r; Robert Turner, Botanologia. The Brittish Physician: Or, The Nature and Vertues of English Plants (London, 1664), sigs. B6v, X1v. 49. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 27, 36; John Pitcher’s Arden edition, The Winter’s Tale, 3rd ser. (London: Methuen/Arden, 2010), note to 4.4.830–31, 310. The third edition of the Norton Shakespeare glosses “look upon a hedge” as “slang for ‘relieve myself ’ ” (4.4.804–5, 3190n3). Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare-Lexicon: A Complete Dictionary of All the English Words, Phrases and Constructions in the Works of the Poet (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1874), 2 vols., 1:529, under “hedge,” glosses Autolycus’s line as meaning “ease myself, make water.” This link between the hedge and urination persists into revisions of this dictionary, but it does

Notes to Pages 154–158

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not appear in Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), although Williams does have entries on the hedge, focusing on its association with “roadside sex” and particularly “hedge-whores” and on the “hedge-sparrow” or cuckold whose wife has a bastard (656–57). Catherine Richardson shows the association of the hedge with illicit sex in “Canterbury, 1560: Slander and Social Order in an Early Modern Town,” in A Sourcebook of Early Modern European History, ed. Ute Lotz-Heumann (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 46–48. 50. James Howell, Paroimiographia Proverbs (London, 1659), 13; and Walter Pope, Moral and Political Fables (London, 1714), 85. 51. Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 233. See also Mary Thomas Crane, “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2009): 4–22. 52. Taylor, Praise, Antiquity, and Commodity of Beggery, sig. B2r; A. B., Learn to lye warm, or, An apology for that Proverb Tis good Sheltring under an old Hedge: Containing Reasons Wherefore a Young Man should Marry an Old Woman (London, 1672). On sheltering under hedges, see William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 64; Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 27; and A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), who argues that “in the country a favorite place to sleep rough was under hedges” (84). 53. I am grateful to Tiffany Stern for alerting me to all the hedges in the play and for her edition, A Jovial Crew, ed. Tiffany Stern, Arden Early Modern Drama (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), to which all citations here refer. The beautiful cover of the edition places the viewer on a road vanishing into the distance. Garrett Sullivan (Drama of Landscape) discusses the play as a kind of road comedy. Julie Sanders, too, links the play to networks of transportation—roads and inns (Julie Sanders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011]). None of this is wrong. It is just that the image of the road can divert us from the edges of the road, the hedge, which I emphasize here. 54.  Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 45; Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 270, 272; Catherine Richardson, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The Material Life of the Household (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 37; Sanders, Cultural Geography, 145 (cf. 141), 279, 143, 109; Taylor, Praise, Antiquity, and Commodity of Beggery, sig. C2r. 55. Helen Ostovich, “Hospitality,” para. 27, in “A Jovial Crew: Critical Introduction,” by Richard Cave, Brian Woolland, Helen Ostovich, and Elizabeth Schafer, Richard Brome Online, accessed August 18, 2019, https://www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/viewOriginal.jsp?play=JC&type= CRIT; Sullivan, Drama of Landscape, 191; Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 274. For Butler, the world of the beggars is presented too realistically to be idealized; “the threat of the whip is perpetually present” (272). 56. Richard Cave and Brian Woolland, “A Jovial Crew: Dramaturgy, Performativity and Metatheatricality,” para. 3, in online edition of the play cited in previous note; Fumerton, Unsettled, 53, 54 (Sanders calls a neighborhood “a site of juxtaposition, encounter, possibility, and production” [Cultural Geography, 212]). 57. John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597), sig. Nnnn4r. This passage also appears in the 1633 edition, lib. 3, chap. 101, Gggggg2r. Nardizzi, Wooden Os, 11–15.

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Notes to Pages 159–163

58. Walter Blith, The English Improver Improved or the Survey of Husbandry Surveyed Discovering the Improveableness of all Lands (London, 1652), sig. Q1r, repeated on sig. R3v; Moses Cook, The manner of raising, ordering; and improving forest and fruit-trees (London, 1679), sigs. O3v–O4r; [Samuel Hartlib], Designe for Plentie, By an Universall Planting of Fruit-Trees: Tendred by some Wel-wishers to the Publick (London, n.d. [1652?]), sig. C1v. 59. John Gerard, Herball (1597 edition), sig. Nnnn4r (This also appears in the 1633 edition, lib. 3, chap. 101, sig. Gggggg2r); Thomas Carew, “To Saxham,” in Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, 1603–1660, ed. John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 300–301, lines 57–58; Arthur Standish, The Commons Complaint. Wherein is Contained Two Speciall Grievances (London, 1611), sig. F4v. As William Lawson elaborates, “It shall hardly avail you to make any fence for your orchard, if you be a niggard of your fruit. . . . liberality I say is the best fence” (A New Orchard, and Garden. or, The best way for planting, grafting, and to make any ground good, for a rich Orchard [London, 1618], sig. B8v). See also Ralph Austen, A Treatise of Fruit-Trees (Oxford, 1653), sig. A3r. Hedgerow Harvest, accessed August 18, 2019, https://www .hedgerow-harvest.com/ (the Ministry of Food pamphlet no. 5, Hedgerow Harvest, was first published in 1943, but the version I am quoting is from July 1946). On planting fruit trees in the middle of fields, see Leonard Meager, The mystery of husbandry or arable, pasture and wood-land improved (London, 1697), 136. On utopian fruit trees, see esp. Vittoria Di Palma, “Drinking Cider in Paradise: Science, Improvement, and the Politics of Fruit Trees,” in A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Adam Smyth (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 161–77; and Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 222–36. 60. Earnshaw, Hedgerows for California Agriculture, n.p. 61. John T. White, Hedgerow (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1980), 7; Wright, Natural History of the Hedgerow, 107, and 125 on the hedge as “a reservoir of species.” Ancient hedgerows might be called “relict hedgerows” (see N. R. Banister and T. A. Watt, “Hedgerow Management: Past and Present,” in Hedgerow Management and Nature Conservation, by Trudy A. Watt and G. P. Buckley, 7–15, esp. 11). A much-discussed and contested method of dating a hedgerow by counting its species and adding a century per species is called Hooper’s rule (Pollard, Hooper, and Moore, Hedges; and White, Hedgerow, 43). It is challenged in Richard Muir, The New Reading the Landscape: Fieldwork in Landscape History (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 84–89. Even those who challenge the equation called Hooper’s rule agree that biodiversity is a gauge of age, although a somewhat unpredictable one. 62. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (New York: Signet Classics, 2012), 4; Over the Hedge, directed by Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick (Los Angeles: DreamWorks, 2006); and de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 129.

Epilogue 1. Historic Jamestowne, https://historicjamestowne.org/. 2. My guide was Mark Summers, manager of Public and Educational Programs at Historic Jamestowne, in May 2018. The interpreter who guided me through the gardens at Jamestown Settlement was Pat Leccadito. William Kelso, Jamestown: The Truth Revealed (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 234.

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3. Rachel B. Herrmann, “The ‘Tragicall Historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 47–74; Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 57, 119; Timothy Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 14, 26; Hillary Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 170. For how the quest for corn quickly supplanted the quest for gold, see Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy, 182; Mary Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Narratives of Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 94; and Robert Appelbaum, “Hunger in Early Virginia: Indians and English Facing Off over Excess, Want, and Need,” in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, ed. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 195–216. 4. “Advice for the Colony on Landing,” in Edward D. Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London, with Letters to and from the First Colony Never Before Printed (Albany, NY, 1869), 10, 11. 5.  Kelso, Jamestown, 135. 6.  On the effects of the Little Ice Age and drought, see Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy, 166; and Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 166, 176, 223, 251, 303. 7.  A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie of Virginia, With a confutation of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise. Published by advise and direction of the Councell of Virginia (London, 1610), in Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, ed. Peter Force (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), 3:15. In hindsight, Virginia might be seen as a paradise that had not required effort. The historian of Virginia Robert Beverley, writing in 1705, claimed that the first colonists “seemed to have escaped, or rather not to have been concerned in the first curse, of getting their bread by the sweat of their brows . . . living without labor, and only gathering the fruits of the earth when ripe, or fit for use” (Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia [London, 1705], 4). 8. Virginia Company, “Instructions to George Yeardley,” in The Records of the Virginia Company of London, 1606–26, ed. Susan M. Kingsbury (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906–35), 3:98–109, esp. 100. On John Smith, see Fuller, Voyages in Print, 85–140; Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy, 159–91; Kupperman, Jamestown Project, 227–28; and David A. Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation (New York: Vintage, 2005). For Price, Smith is a hero, averting the disaster created by lazy colonists with unrealistic expectations. This follows Smith’s own account, which Eklund, Fuller, and Kupperman assess more skeptically. 9. On the gendering of natives’ labor, see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 25, 42–74; Patricia Seed, American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 45–56; and Kupperman, Jamestown Project, 280. 10. Edward Waterhouse, A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia. With a Relation of the Barbarous Massacre in the time of peace and League, treacherously executed by the Native Infidels upon the English, 22 March last (London, 1622), sigs. D3v–D4r. See Peter

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Notes to Pages 167–172

Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 137–73; and Jess Edwards, “Between ‘Plain Wilderness’ and ‘Goodly Corn Fields’: Representing Land Use in Early Virginia,” in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, ed. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 217–35, esp. 231. 11. John Pory to Sir Dudley Carleton, September 30, 1619, in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:219–22, esp. 221, 220. 12. For the colony of Virginea Britannia. Lawes divine, morall and martiall, &c. (London, 1612), 5–6, 11, 14–15. While these laws are sometimes called “Dale’s,” Dale administered them but did not conceive them from whole cloth; Dale enlarged upon laws first put in place by Sir Thomas Gates. Ancient Planters of Virginia, “A Brief Declaration of the plantation of Virginia during the first twelve years, when Sir Thomas Smith was governor of the Company” (1624), in Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony; The First Decade, 1607–1617, ed. Edward Wright Haile (Champlain, VA: Roundhouse, 1998), 891–911, esp. 900 (note that the planters Dale rewarded with land grants are the ones who left this record of his cruelty). The most gruesome description of an execution for food theft comes from “The Answer of the General Assembly in Virginia to a ‘Declaration of the state of the colony in the 12 years of Sir Thomas Smith’s government,’ ” in Haile, Jamestown Narratives, 912–16, esp. 913: “others were forced by famine to filch for their bellies, of whom [one] for stealing 2 or 3 pints of oatmeal had a bodkin thrust through his tongue and was tied with a chain to a tree until he starved.” While this text does not expressly blame Dale for imposing this punishment, subsequent accounts, in histories and fictions, often do. 13. Thomas Dale, letter from Henrico, June 10, 1613, in Haile, Jamestown Narratives, 758–83, esp. 780. Subsequent citations to this letter appear in parentheses and refer to the modernized edition provided after the transcription. Although I follow Dale in calling this site “Henrico,” it is now preserved as Henricus Historical Park; details are available at http://henricus.org/. 14. Bentley Boyd, The Real Dirt on Jamestown (Richmond: Preservation Virginia, 2017), 15. Craig Muldrew emphasizes the high number of calories required to fuel the industriousness of agricultural laborers (Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011]). In Virginia, they had to work harder and with less food. They particularly lacked the triumvirate of beer, bread, and meat, which Muldrew calls “the petrol of the early modern economy” (2). 15. Haile, Jamestown Narratives, 759, 781n1. 16. Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2–3, 17, 108. 17. Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613), sig. I4r; Richard Berkeley and John Smyth, “A Commission to George Thorpe for the Government of the Plantation” (September 10, 1620), in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:397–400, esp. 398, 400. 18. John Pory to Sir Dudley Carleton, September 30, 1619, in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:220–21; Kelso, Jamestown, 231, 233; Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 211, 202, 151. See also Scott L. Fedick, “Indigenous Agriculture in the Americas,” Journal of Archaeological Research 3, no. 4 (1995): 257–303. 19. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:400. Joan Thirsk, “Plough and Pen: Agricultural Writers in the Seventeenth Century,” in Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton, ed. T. H. Aston, P. R. Coss, Christopher Dyer, and Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 295–318, esp. 306.

Notes to Pages 172–177

221

20.  Jennifer Mylander, “Early Modern ‘How-To’ Books: Impractical Manuals and the Construction of Englishness in the Atlantic World,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2009): 123–46. 21. Kelso, Jamestown, 50. 22. Kupperman, Jamestown Project, 8, 282; Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 128, 143; Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 9. 23. Donegan, Seasons of Misery, 96. See also Michael A. LaCombe, Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 52. “The Virginia Company Planters’ Answer to Captain Butler,” in Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London, 397. 24.  Whitaker, Good Newes, sig. G2r; “Company’s Letter of August 21, 1621, Sent in the Marmaduke,” in Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London, 234. 25. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27. 26. Edwards, “Between ‘Plain Wilderness’ and ‘Goodly Corn Fields,’ ” 234. See also Appelbaum, “Hunger in Early Virginia,” 198. 27.  Jamestown Settlement and American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, description of 2017 Historical Gardens Package, accessed May 25, 2019, https://www.historyisfun.org/virginia -vacation-getaways/historical-gardens/; description of gardens at both sites, accessed May 25, 2019, http://www.historyisfun.org/jamestown-settlement/gardens/; Richard Rich, Newes from Virginia (London, 1610), in Haile, Jamestown Narratives, 377. 28.  Boyd, Real Dirt on Jamestown, 9. Kelso tells the story of coming to this realization, and linking “landless English immigrants’ ” and archaeologists’ investments in “dirt,” in Jamestown, 6–7. He concludes that “the land itself turned out to be the gold” (250) that the Virginia Company sought. Edwards, “Between ‘Plain Wilderness’ and ‘Goodly Corn Fields’ ”; Charles J. Reid Jr., “The Seventeenth-Century Revolution in the English Land Law,” Cleveland State Law Review 43 (1995): 221–302; David J. Seipp, “The Concept of Property in the Early Common Law,” Law and History Review 12, no. 1 (1994): 29–91; Peter M. Jones, Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature, 1750–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 93. 29. Jamestown Rediscovery/Historic Jamestowne, History, accessed August 19, 2019, https:// historicjamestowne.org/history/; and Dale House Café, accessed August 19, 2019, https://historic jamestowne.org/visit/shopping-dining/dale-house/.

Index

Adam (biblical), 14, 130 Adam in Eden: or, Nature’s Paradise (Coles), 100 Adam Out of Eden (Speed), 33 affordances, 124, 154, 211 n.4 agency, 47, 60, 64, 92; from biological to geological, 120–21; of hedges, 127, 132, 139, 140, 145, 147, 148; historical agency of words, 5; human, 152; of terror, 82, 109; of turnips, 49 “agnotology,” 119 agriculture, 2, 74, 177; alternative, 6, 7, 8, 10, 44; biodynamic, 3, 113; book history and, 37; centrality to Jamestown colony, 163; debates over, 3; export, 173; future of, 13; hedgerows and, 122; industrialization of, 7, 16; innovation in, 3, 10; magic and, 44; preindustrial practices, 17; revolutions in, 16, 17; sustainable, 17; transformation of, 9. See also regenerative agriculture agroecology, 1, 15, 19 Alaimo, Stacy, 80 alchemy, 44, 92, 108 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865), 161 Allen, Darina, 1 Alternative Agriculture from the Black Death to the Present Day (Thirsk, 1997), 1 American Farmland Trust, 1, 210 n.1 analogy, 11, 169; anatomy of humans and of plants, 87; blood and breastfeeding, 63; blood and wine, 87; composting as digestion, 29–30; of sex with plowing, 20, 22 anaphora, 144 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 39, 199 n.44 animals, 64, 110, 167; colonists’ need of draft animals, 168, 172, 175; droppings used for compost, 27, 29, 30; hedges and, 214–15

n.29; labor of draft animals, 19, 20; native North American, 171; turnips as fodder for, 51–54, 192 n.12; waste products from, 28 Anne of Denmark, 147 “Anthropocene” epoch, 201 n.4 anthropocentrism, 25, 112 Appelbaum. Robert, 74 “Arca Studiorum” indexing system (Harrison), 38 Arden of Faversham, 211 n.7 Aristotle, 25, 26 Arneil, Barbara, 24 assemblage, 37, 38, 160, 214 n.29 Austen, Ralph, 35 Authentic Wine: Toward Natural and Sustainable Winemaking (Goode and Harrop), 116 Bacon, Sir Francis, 17–18, 37; Sylva Sylvarum, 182 n.3; “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” 20; on turnips, 50–51 bacteria, 29, 30, 87 “balderdash,” 34, 91, 203 n.19 Barad, Karen, 132 Barber, Dan, 17, 45–46 Barthes, Roland, 39 Basile, Giambattista, 71, 146 Bate, Jonathan, 76 beauty, 27, 151; of crops, 151; hedges as objects of, 136, 148, 150, 151, 160; metaphors of, 44. See also Sleeping Beauty fairy tales Beckmeyer, Hank, 112, 208 n.53 beer, 83, 86, 201 n.6, 220 n.14 bees, 5, 50 Benjamin, Walter, 125 Bennett, Jane, 132, 145, 147 Benziger Family Winery, 110 Berry, Wendell, 24–25, 43–44, 152 Bettelheim, Bruno, 148

224 Beverley, Robert, 104, 219 n.7 Bible: Deuteronomy, 82; Genesis, 5, 14, 55, 70, 82, 130; Hosea, 214 n.29; Isaiah, 167; Job, 214 n.29 Bingo (Bond, 1976), 127–28 biodiversity: biodynamic viticulture and, 110; hedgerows and, 13, 122, 123, 145, 152, 160; soil vulnerability and, 14 biodynamic viticulture, 3, 12, 76–77, 108–16, 118, 200 n.55, 209 n.64; emphasis on human winegrower, 120; farm envisioned as single organism, 10; farmer’s knowledge and, 25. See also wine Blith, Walter, 3–4, 5, 9, 20; on earth as mother, 80, 200 n.63; English Improver (1649), 3, 5; The English Improver Improved (1652), 3–4, 5, 30, 159; on mixture, 33; on scarecrows and the Crucifixion, 75; on turnips, 53 Blomley, Nicholas, 134 blood: children fed with mother’s blood, 63, 196 n.30; homogeneality of blood-wine affinity, 89, 90, 106; mother’s milk and, 62; resemblance of wine to, 12, 70; soil fed with, 55; wine as blood of the grape, 86–108 Bloody Banquet, The (Dekker and Middleton), 199 n.44, 199 n.50 Bon Appetit magazine, 8 Bond, Edward, 127–28 Bonné, John, 116, 209 n.63 Bonny Doon Vineyard, 109, 110–11, 112, 118, 209 n.64 Bonoeil, John, 57, 103, 172 Book of Husbandry, The (Fitzherbert), 8 books: commonplace, 37–44; as flowers in a library, 40–41; sent by ship to Virginia, 171–72. See also herbals; notebooks; treatises Botanologia (Turner, 1664), 107, 154 botany, 10, 51, 60, 195 n.27 Botkin, Daniel, 11 boundaries, 111, 119, 122, 135, 154, 210 n.1 Boyd, Bentley, 176 Bradstreet, Anne, 69 branding, 111 Brayman, Heidi, 40 Bread for the Poor (Moore, 1653), 131, 151 breasts/breast milk, 50, 62, 64, 70, 203 n.17 Bright, Timothy, 57, 59 Bring Farm Edges Back to Life! (manifesto), 152 Brome, Richard, 13, 156–58

Index Broughton, Richard, 147 Browne, Thomas, 78, 93–94, 196 n.30 brown revolution, 15, 16 Burgundy, Duke of, 135, 137–38, 139, 148 Burne-Jones, Edward, 141 Burton, Robert, 36, 39, 58, 199 n.44. See also Anatomy of Melancholy Bushier, Robert, 46–47, 53, 190 n.3 Butler, Captain, 103, 104, 174 Butler, Martin, 156, 157, 217 n.55 Caesar, Julius, 136 Cain (biblical), 55 Calendar of Assize Records (Cockburn), 46 California, biodynamic viticulture in, 110 Camden, William, 96 Campania Felix (Nourse), 133–34 cannibalism, 10, 12, 31, 73, 78, 111; butchered remains of “Jane,” 67, 163, 176; cannibal mothers, 44, 55, 66, 69–70, 72–74, 199 n.46; in folktales, 71–72, 199 n.46; in theater and literature, 67–71; in Titus Andronicus, 59–60, 78–79, 195 n.27; in Virginia colony, 64–67, 174, 197 nn.3–34 capitalism, 129, 137, 150 Carew, Thomas, 159 Carlisle, Liz, 46 Carroll, William C., 130 Catholicism, 92, 147, 204 n.22 Cato, 9 cattle, 27, 30, 74, 75, 167; blood of, 77; enclosure and, 131; turnips as fodder for, 53–54 Cavendish, Margaret, 39–40, 70, 190 n.55 Cavendish, William, 42, 93 Certeau, Michel de, 124, 130, 161 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 120–21 Chakravarty, Urvashi, 74, 95 Chamberlain, John, 206 n.37 Chaplin, Joyce, 171 Chapman, George, 34 Charleton, Walter, 40 chefs, 45 Childs, Robert, 99, 206 n.36 Christianity, 147 Chronicles (Holinshed), 139 cider, 5 “clean farming,” 152 Clifford, Lady Anne, 40–41 climate change, 5, 7, 12; brown revolution and, 16; as crisis of historical understanding, 121; Little Ice Age (LIA) and,

Index 97–98; soil health and, 14–15; viticulture experiments and, 85; winemaking and, 120, 210 n.67 Cockayne, Emily, 199 n.50 Cockburn, J. S., 46 Cole, Katherine, 112 Coles, William, 100, 153–54 Collins, Henry, 65–66, 70 colonialism, 58 “Columbian exchange,” 52 Columella, 9, 12, 28, 31, 214 n.26; De re rustica (On Agriculture), 10, 27, 55; on hedges, 123, 134; soil figured as hungry, 10, 46; on turnips, 47; on wine, 42, 116–17 Commons Complaint, The (Standish, 1611), 159 common lands, 5, 122, 146, 193 n.12. See also enclosures commonplace books/commonplacing, 37–44 Complete Vineyard, The (Hughes, 1665), 94–95 composting, 3, 11, 15, 111, 173; Bacon on, 182 n.3; commonplace books and, 37–44; composition and, 32, 37, 40, 43, 190 n.57; compost as pabulum (food) for soil, 28; creative reassembly and, 42; digestion analogy, 29–30; early modern conceptions of, 26–32; “preparations,” 111–12; religions identified with, 190 n.58; treatises advocating for, 18–19; wine amendments and, 93 conservation agriculture, 1, 15, 45. See also regenerative agriculture Cooper, Alix, 59 Cooper, Henry, Jr., 46–47, 79 Cotton, Charles, 113–14 “Country Life” (Herrick, 1648), 23 cover crops, 15, 30, 45, 46, 47 Cowley, Abraham, 4 Crawford, Rachel, 205 n.28 Cromwell, Oliver, 3 crop rotation, 15, 30, 54, 79, 169–70 crop yields, 18 Crosbie, Christopher, 77, 78 Crosby, Arnold, 52 Crucifixion, the, 75 Culpeper, Nicholas, 113, 119 cultivation, 4, 14, 43, 187 n.36; climate change and, 97; fallen landscape of thorns and, 130; fallowing and, 169; as labor of love, 24; no-till, 15, 19; transplanting and, 57, 105 Dale, Sir Thomas, 167–70, 171, 172, 176, 220 nn.12–13

225 Darwin, Charles, 30 Dauphiné, Durand de, 50 decomposition, 10 n.57, 38, 39; bacterial, 19, 30; compost as fruit of, 29; microbes as “invisible agents” of, 43 Defense of Poesy, A (Sidney), 125 Dekker, Thomas, 199 n.44 De La Warr, Governor, 67, 163, 174, 176 Deleuze, Gilles, 111 Demeter Association, 3, 110, 113 denizens/“denizening,” 55–56, 59, 121, 194 n.23. See also endenization depopulation, 24, 129, 130, 212 n.11. See also enclosures Description of England (Harrison, 1587), 52 design theory, 124 diaries, 10 Diggers, 7, 69, 133, 181 n.12, 192 n.12 Dimock, Wai Chee, 8, 125 dirt, 15, 27, 43, 176, 177, 221 n.28; “reading the dirt,” 163; transfer from dirt to glass, 82 Discordant Harmonies (Botkin, 1981), 11 dispossession, 25, 128, 130, 146, 161 distillation, 39 Donegan, Kathleen, 65, 173, 174 Douglas, Mary, 190 n.58 Drake, Sir Francis, 86 drought, 14, 164 Dryden, John, 22 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester and of Essex, 86 dung, 26, 27, 29 dunghills, 18, 29, 30, 37; as reservoirs of future fertility, 31; theft from, 39 Dunton, Elizabeth, 41 Early English Books Online (EEBO), 154 Earnshaw, Sam, 151 earth: as cannibal mother, 55, 66, 69–70, 72–74, 108; feminized, 23, 61, 196 n.28; humans’ premodern relationship with, 83; Mother Earth metaphor, 79–80; in Titus Andronicus, 60–61 “Earth” (Bradstreet), 69 earthworms, 30 Eastward Ho (Chapman, Jonson, and Marston, 1605), 34 Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (Broughton, 1633), 147 ecocriticism, 11

226 Economics (Aristotle), 25 ecotone, 123–24, 210 n.2 Edwards, Jess, 175 Eklund, Hillary, 163 Elizabeth I, 86 enchantment, 142, 147–48, 150 enclosures, 5, 13, 24, 157, 158, 181 n.12; depicted in favorable terms, 146, 184 n.17; fairy tales and, 146–47; gleaning and, 153; hedges and, 122, 123, 124, 127–28, 151, 153; parliamentary acts and, 129, 151, 212 n.11; promoted as solution to economic problems, 131, 212 n.14; rights of common usage limited by, 128–34; symbolism of plow and, 20. See also common lands; depopulation; hedgerows endenization (acclimatizing of transplants), 49, 54–59, 74. See also denizens/“denizening” England, 3, 8, 12, 175; as birthplace of fossil economy, 7; civil wars in, 4; commercialization of farming in, 54; as “compiling culture,” 38; culture and language as a mixture, 36–37; debates over Eucharist, 64; emphasis on improvement in, 5; hedge history in, 128–34; Netherlands and English identity formation, 51; as potential new world, 6; resource extraction from colonies, 164, 165; Roman Britain, 96; as rural society, 22; winemaking and vineyards in, 81, 83, 85, 87, 94–101, 100, 119–20; wine market in, 83, 86 Enrichment of the Weald of Kent, The (Markham, 1649), 18 environmental humanities, 11 environmentalism, 79, 80 Epicoene (Jonson), 27–28 epistrophe, 144 Erasmus, 49 erosion, 13, 15, 45, 122 Estienne, Charles, 181 n.15 Eucharist, debates over, 64 Eve (biblical), 130 Evelyn, John, 24, 30, 31, 32–33; Acetaria: A Discourse of Salads, 42; on blood as soil enrichment, 88; on endenization, 57; Pomona, 91; on salads from hedges, 153; on soil amendment as matchmaking, 35; on wine versus cider, 91–92 Everitt, Alan, 129 Exquisite Mixture (Schmidgen), 35

Index “Fabulous Banquet, The” (Erasmian colloquy), 49 fairy tales, 10, 12, 146–47, 148, 173; enchanted forest as defining landscape, 150; thorny hedge trope, 13. See also Sleeping Beauty fairy tales Fall, biblical, 33, 42, 55, 130, 131 fallowing, 169, 170 famine, 68, 69, 159, 164. See also food shortages farmers, 45, 112; enclosures and small farmers, 130; intimate knowledge of the land, 25; as small holders, 24 farmers’ almanacs, 114 farming, 9, 37, 79, 166, 168–69; ancient wisdom merged with modern science, 3; biodynamic, 109; changes in, 1, 175; “clean farming,” 152; colonial relationship and, 165, 171; commercialization of, 54; envisioned as future of Jamestown, 177; factory farms, 7, 17, 54, 111; industrialized, 47, 85, 108, 116; mechanized, 17; of natives and settlers, 164, 167; organic, 111; plow and, 20; tripartite class structure and, 7; vocabularies provided by, 4–5; winemaking conjoined with, 102. See also agriculture; planting Feerick, Jean E., 35, 77, 135, 139, 195 n.27 Felski, Rita, 8, 43, 148 feminism, 80 fermentation, 29–30, 85, 90, 114 fertility, soil, 26, 31, 165; colonists’ versus native Americans’ practices and, 166; comparison with human fertility, 27; crop rotation and, 171; as gift from the gods, 16; mixture and, 33; nutrients, 55 fertilizers: blood as, 88; chemical, 7, 16, 45, 54, 85; shift in meaning of, 27; wine as fertilizer for human health, 89. See also composting feudalism, 129 figure/figuration, 10–11, 80, 167, 181 n.19; anthropomorphizing of the earth, 15; compost pile as, 42; figural historiography, 11; generative, 19, 21–23; of hedges/hedgerows, 124, 139; temporality and, 18–19 Fire in the Bush (Winstanley), 131 Fissell, Mary, 22 Fitter, Chris, 128 Fitzherbert, John, 8 Fleming, Juliet, 148, 151

Index Fletcher, John, 68 flowers: books as, 40–41; printed edges on title pages as, 148 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 93 folktales, 50, 71–72 food, 16, 58, 60, 114; connection with excrement, 31; degeneration toward cannibalism, 64–65; food safety and security, 1; hedgerows as source of, 158–60, 218 n.59; histories of, 8; local, 7, 12; mixture/mixing and, 36, 40; produced without labor in paradise, 163, 219 n.7; production and distribution of, 1; punishment for theft of, 167–68, 176, 220 n.12 food shortages, 5, 52, 164–65. See also famine fossil fuel economy, 7, 16 Foucault, Michel, 107 France, 56, 100, 101, 138, 159; decaying fertility of, 135; famine staved off by fruit trees, 159; Locke in, 81, 115; terroir in, 81, 97; wine exported to England, 96–98, 101, 104–5, 108; wine of, 94, 99 Freccero, Carla, 11 French Cook, The (early modern cookbook), 50 Fumerton, Patricia, 158 funeral sermons, 40–43 Galenic medicine, 33, 187 n.36 Games, Alison, 104, 173 garden plots, 3, 76 Gasper, Julia, 199 n.44, 199 n.50 Gates, Sir Thomas, 65–66 Geisweidt, Edward, 137 gender, 4, 66; cannibalism and, 73; earth/ nature gendered as feminine, 32, 61, 69 genetically modified crops, 7 geohumoralism, 93 Gerard, John, 51, 158–59 ghost metaphor, 19 Gibson, Thomas, 137–38 Girard, René, 65 gleaning, 153 Golding, Arthur, 73 Goldstein, David, 73, 78, 199 n.49 Goode, Jamie, 116, 117 Good News from Virginia (Whitaker), 170 Googe, Barnaby, 26, 55, 99, 171–72, 193 n.18, 206 n.35 Gouge, William, 62, 69 grafting, 35 Grahm, Randall, 112

227 Grgich Hills Estate winery, 2 Grimm, Brothers, 71–72, 140–41, 144–45, 146 Guattari, Félix, 111 Guiana colony, 22, 23 Haines, Richard, 93 Hall’s Chronicle, 141, 142 Haraway, Donna, 19, 132 Harkness, Deborah, 39, 55–56 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 84 Harrison, Thomas, 38 Harrison, William, 52–53 Harrop, Sam, 116, 117 Hartlib, Samuel, 6, 9–10, 44; Ephemerides, 53, 190 n.59; Samuel Hartlib His Legacy (1652), 99–100, 206 n.36; on turnips, 53–54 Harvey, William, 87–88 hawthorn, 54, 125, 126, 128, 147 health, human, 4, 14, 58; blood as nourishment for, 63, 89; food resembling body parts, 106; wine and, 90, 91, 93, 94, 108, 205 n.28 Health’s Improvement (Moffett), 62–63 Hedgerow Harvest, 159 Hedgerow of Bushes, Brambles, and Briars, A (pamphlet, 1598), 139, 141, 148, 149 hedgerows, 7, 13; beauty of farms enhanced by, 151; as common resource, 153–61; empty farmland margins versus, 151–52; as experimental spaces for biodiversity, 152; of hawthorn and ash, 54; hedges in relation to, 122–23, 161 Hedgerows for California Agriculture (Earnshaw), 151 hedges, 13, 88; in Brome’s A Jovial Crew, 156–58, 217 n.53; distinctions blurred by, 123–24; as edge habitats, 123; enclosure and, 122, 123, 124, 127–34; etymology of, 125, 211 n.6; hawthorn, 125, 126, 128; hedge-breaking as form of protest, 132–33, 161, 213 n.17; hedgerows in relation to, 122–23, 161; hedge tropes, 13, 124, 134–48, 141–43; in King James bible, 214 n.29; planching (pleaching) of, 136–37, 136; in proverbs, 125, 127, 155; purpose of edges, 148, 149, 150–52; in Shakespeare’s plays, 127, 135–36, 153, 154, 155, 211 n.7; in Sleeping Beauty fairy tales, 140–42, 141, 142, 144–46; urinating on, 154–55, 216 n.49 Heise, Ursula K., 111 Henry IV, 52

228 Henry V, 139 Henry VIII, 52, 215 n.32 Herbal (Gerard, 1597), 48, 126, 158 herbals, 10, 57, 195 n.27; native versus outlandish, 59; turnips in, 47, 48, 50 Heresbach, Conrad, 26, 55, 172, 193 n.18; Four Books of Husbandry, 26, 55, 99, 172; Rei rusticae libri quattuor, 172 Herodotus, 196 n.30 Herrick, Robert, 26 Herrmann, Rachel B., 197 n.33 Hilarion, Saint, 49, 79 Hildegard von Bingen, 113, 119 Hill, Christopher, 212 n.11 Historic Jamestowne, 13, 105, 163, 166; Jamestown Rediscovery excavation, 162, 176; The Real Dirt on Jamestown comic book, 168, 176. See also Jamestown Settlement history, 43, 119; natural history, 8; periodization of, 201 n.4; of soil, 15, 16; tropes and, 135 History Is Fun website, 163, 175 Holinshed, Raphael, 139 Holstun, James, 80, 181 n.12 home gardeners, 19 homogeneality, of blood-wine affinity, 89, 90, 106 horns (cow), used in biodynamic viticulture, 112, 114–115 housewives: as compiling composers, 39–40; as wine amenders, 92; winemaking and, 100–101, 106 Howard, Sir Alfred, 15, 31, 184 n.17 Howard, Katherine, 215 n.32 how-to guides, 10, 23, 109 Hughes, William, 94–95 humus, 14, 15, 16, 25 Hundred Good Points of Husbandry, A (Tusser, 1570), 9, 188 n.46 husbandry, 3, 4, 10, 20, 74, 109; biblical sanction for, 5; labor expended on, 25–26; manuals, 11; of soil, 16; as work in progress, 138 Hutchinson, Lucy, 4, 33, 187 n.38, 194 n.23. See also Order and Disorder Hyman, Trina Schart, 141 immigrants, 51–52, 55 improvement, 3, 5–7, 138, 180 n.6; destructive, 17, 174; disputed, 32; enclosure associated with, 24; hedges and, 161; plow as, 23; soil amendment as, 23

Index incest, 196 n.30 industrialization, 16 Industrial Revolution, 2 insects, beneficial, 110, 122, 160 invented tradition, 119, 147, 215 n.38 Invention of Improvement, The (Slack), 5 In Vino Veritas (1698), 92 Iron Age, 22 irrigation, 7, 110, 119 James I, 49–50, 57, 103, 120, 147, 168 Jameson, Fredric, 47 Jamestown colony, 13, 172; conflict with Powhatans and Pamunkeys, 104–5, 164–65, 166, 168, 207 nn.43–44; as model for other colonies, 173; “starving times” in, 12, 64–67, 163, 165, 174. See also Virginia, colonial Jamestown Settlement, 13, 175–76; creation as tourist site (1957), 162; failed winemaking recalled in, 105–6; website of, 163. See also Historic Jamestowne Johnson, Robert, 101–2 Joly, Nicholas, 109, 112, 116 Jones, January, 63 Jones, Peter M., 176 Jonson, Ben, 27–28, 34 Joseph of Arimathea, 147 Jovial Crew, A (Brome), 13, 156–58, 217 n.53 “Juniper Tree” (Brothers Grimm, 1812), 71–72, 199 n.46 Katz, Sandor, 44, 112 Kelly, Morgan, 97, 98 Kelso, William, 67, 176, 221 n.28 Knight, Jeffrey, 37 Kolodny, Annette, 79 Korda, Natasha, 36 Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, 173 La Clarine Farms, 112 land, claiming of, 24, 184 n.16 landowners, 25, 128, 133 Langlands, Alexander, 1, 2 Latour, Bruno, 10 n.57, 43, 47 Lawson, William, 32, 218 n.59 leftovers, 11, 18, 19, 36, 40 “Legend of Briar Rose, The” (Burne-Jones paintings, 1892), 141, 141 legumes, 45 Lemon, Ted, 201 n.3

Index Lentil Underground (Carlisle), 46 letters, 10, 70–71, 174, 206 n.36; Bennett on massacre of Pamunkey with poisoned wine, 104–5, 207 n.44; Dale’s letter to Virginia Company, 167–72, 176, 220 n.13 Levelers, 7 Levine, Caroline, 124 literary criticism, 8 Little Ice Age (LIA), 97–98 local, the, 49, 79, 200 n.60; local food, 7, 111; local knowledge, 49; mixed with soil amendments from elsewhere, 32–33; native-imported distinction and, 97; sliding scale of, 100–101; terroir and, 120 Locke, John, 23–24, 81, 115, 184 n.16 Lucretius, 194 n.23 Lukacs, Paul, 119 “Lumber pies,” 93, 204 n.23 Lupton, Julia, 19, 184 n.17, 211 n.4 Lupton, Thomas, 70 machinery, heavy, 7 Madison, Mike, 152, 184 n.17 magic, 3, 43, 44, 114; blood and wine, 106, 107; decline of, 116; terroir and magic of place, 82 Maison Rustique [The Country Farm] (Estienne, 1564), 9, 50, 94, 181 n.15 maize (“country corn”), 67, 105, 166, 170, 171, 177 Malcolm, Noel, 38 Maleficent (Disney film, 2014), 145 Malm, Andreas, 7 Manning, Roger, 133 manure/manurance/manuring, 23, 190 n.55; absence of, 166, 167; compost in relation to, 26, 31; of draft animals, 166; “green manure,” 45, 46, 49, 54–55; vineyards and, 82 Maris, Emma, 25 Markham, Gervase, 3, 18, 23, 93, 171–72, 184 n.17; The English Housewife, 59; Farewell to Husbandry, 28, 114–15, 185 n.27; on hedges, 127, 137; on nature as feminine, 32; on scarecrows, 75; on soil amendment, 28–29, 30; on winemaking as upper-class activity, 99 marriage, 24, 34–35, 36, 66, 156 Marston, John, 34 masculinity, 22 Massinger, Philip, 34, 68 mastery, 19, 22, 23, 26

229 mattocks, 166–67, 172 McDonagh, Briony, 132, 133 McGovern, Patrick, 84, 201–2 n.8 McRae, Andrew, 20 mechanization, 16, 17 medicine, 57, 58, 60, 114; hedgerows and, 158; humoral, 87, 95, 205 n.26; wine as carrier for, 90 Mega Purple grape concentrate, 117–18, 209 n.63 memory, 38, 40, 41, 176, 189 n.47; collective, 18; history and, 43; myth functioning as, 2, 119; notebooks as memory aids, 38; relation to time, 42–43 Merchant, Carolyn, 200 n.63 metaphors, 11, 39, 44, 139, 171, 175; Mother Earth, 79–80; for past-present relationship, 19; of the thorn, 134 microbes, 14, 29 microbiome, human, 14 microorganisms, 30 Middleton, Thomas, 199 n.44 Milton, John, 6, 42, 70, 80, 190 n.55, 213 n.15; on destruction of mother earth, 80; on “verdurous wall” enclosing paradise, 150 mixture/mixing, 23–24, 32–37, 171; clothing and, 36; composting and, 27; culinary, 40; marriage and, 34, 36; miscegenation, 34, 95; wine and, 34, 86, 91, 93, 118, 203 n.19; with and without human intervention, 29 Moffett, Thomas, 62–63 monarchy, 3, 4 monocultures, 6, 7, 13; hedgerows planted to break up, 122; industrial, 79 Montague, James, 147 Montgomery, David, 3, 15, 17, 182 n.3; on conventional and alternative agriculture, 17–18; on green manure, 45; on microbes, 29 Moon in a Nautilus Shell, The (Botkin), 11 Moore, Adam, 6, 131, 146, 151, 153, 212 n.14 Moore, Jason, 7, 201 n.4 More, Sir Thomas, 130, 131, 132 muckheaps, 18, 30, 31, 37 mulch, crop residue as, 15 Muldrew, Craig, 220 n.14 Mylander, Jennifer, 172 myths, 2, 10, 147 Nardizzi, Vin, 139, 163 native peoples (Amerindians), 24, 173; agricultural practices, 164, 166–67; colonists’

230 native peoples (Amerindians) (continued) refusal to recognize labor of, 24, 166. See also Pamunkey people; Powhatan people nature, 24, 32, 57; as cannibalistic female figure, 198 n.42; human dominion over, 17; maternal cannibalism and, 72; as nonmaternal feminine subject, 80; as a system, 11 Nature’s Economy (Worster), 54 Netherlands, 9, 51, 175 New California Wine, The (Bonné), 116 News from Virginia (Rich, 1610), 176 New Way to Pay Old Debts, A (Massinger, 1625), 34 niche marketing, 111, 151 Nightingale Warbling forth her owne disaster, The (Parker, 1632), 199 n.49 nitrogen, 12, 30, 54 Noble, Louise, 114 Nora, Pierre, 42–43 notebooks, 10, 38, 189 n.47 Nourse, Timothy, 133–34 Observations to be followed (Bonoeil, 1620), 172 O’Grada, Cormac, 97, 98 “On the Beauty and Fertility of America” (Dauphiné, 1687), 50 Oppermann, Serpil, 14, 44 orchards, in hedgerows, 159, 160, 218 n.59 Order and Disorder (Hutchinson), 33, 70, 187 n.38 Oregon, biodynamic viticulture in, 110, 112, 113, 120 Orlin, Lena, 155 Ostovich, Helen, 157 Over the Hedge (animated film, 2006), 161 Overton, Mark, 6–7, 51–52, 169, 193 n.17 Ovid, 22, 33, 60, 61; on earth gendered as mother, 69; Metamorphoses, 22, 33, 73–74, 91, 199 n.49; as source for Titus Andronicus, 72, 73, 74 paleo diet, 2 palimpsest, 19 Pamunkey people, 104–5, 166, 207 nn.43–44 parables, 147 Paré, Ambroise, 62 Parker, Martin, 199 n.49 Parker, Patricia, 34 Parkinson, John, 30, 50; in climate and winemaking, 97; on turnips, 53; on vineyards in England, 96

Index Paster, Gail Kern, 87–88, 154 Pasteur, Louis, 30 Pelling, Margaret, 192 n.12 Percy, George, 65, 197 n.33 Perrault, Charles, 140, 146, 215 n.30 pesticides: chemical, 7; “clean farming” and, 152; dependence on, 85 phylloxera epidemic (1860s), 84–85 phytosynthesis, 16 Pitcher, John, 154 placenta, as food, 63–64, 197 n.31 Planck, Nina, 1 plantations (colonies), 4, 6, 51, 105, 172–73 Planters Manual (Cotton, 1675), 113–14 planting, 10, 56, 165, 173; archaeology of Historic Jamestowne and, 163, 166; of colonies and colonists, 4, 174, 175; companion planting, 171; enclosure and, 174; fallowing and, 169; of fruit trees, 80, 159; of grape vines, 96, 99, 101–2, 103, 110; of hedgerows, 13, 122–23, 158; monocultures and, 110; moon and, 114; ownership claim established through, 175, 184 n.16; in Titus Andronicus, 77; of turnips, 169, 170 plants, 5, 9–10, 41; biodynamics and, 110; composting and, 43, 44; domestication of, 20; endenizing (acclimatizing) of, 49, 55–57; human bodily organs resembled by, 106–7; humus and, 16; imported, 6; medicinal properties, 57–58; native North American, 171; plant and human anatomy compared, 87; soil conservation and, 45; sourcing of, 42; strange and familiar, 55 Plat, Sir Hugh, 23, 31, 98–99, 118, 184 n.14; on blood and winemaking, 88, 202–3 n.15; on endenization, 56; Floraes Paradise, 99, 113; on natural wine, 117; on “race” in winemaking, 99, 206 n.34 Plattes, Gabriel, 3, 4, 6, 55 Pliny the Elder, 9, 12, 25–26, 32–37, 60, 114; on earth gendered as mother, 69, 79–80; Natural History, 50, 113; on turnips, 47, 50, 51; on viper’s brood, 196 n.30 plots, 3, 10–11, 71; biodynamic practices and, 76; fallowed (unplanted), 169; hedges and, 150, 156, 161; terroir and, 82, 111 plow, 15, 19–20, 21, 22–23, 172; “God speed the plow” prayer, 20; Jamestown colonists and, 166, 167, 169; masculine associations of, 20, 22, 183 n.12 Plutarch, 60 Pocahontas, 167, 176

Index poems/poetry, 4, 10, 124 Poilane, Lionel, 2 pollinators, 13, 122, 160 polyculture, 46, 79 “poor commons,” 52–53 Pory, John, 167, 171, 206 n.37 Powhatan, Chief, 176 Powhatan people, 104–5, 164–65, 166, 171, 174, 177 premodern, the, 83, 201 n.4 privacy, hedges and, 155 private property, 13, 123, 137, 212 n.11; hedges and, 150, 160; private property rights, 7 privatization, 160 Proctor, Robert N., 119 “Profane Banquet, The” (Erasmian colloquy), 49 proverbs, 13, 124; on blood, 87–88; on hedges, 127, 150, 154, 155; as linguistic hedges, 125; on turnips, 49, 191 n.5; on wine, 89, 92 race, 4, 76, 195 n.27; blood and, 95; miscegenation, 95; mixed marriage, 34, 188 n.42; as terroir, 95, 99; wine and, 99, 206 n.34 Rackham, Oliver, 211 n.6 radishes, 45 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 22–23 rape, 22, 24, 195 n.27; human dominion over nature as, 17; Sleeping Beauty fairy tales and, 146; in Titus Andronicus, 77, 200 n.57 Ravencroft, Edward, 76 Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Planck), 1 recipe books, 8 recycling, 36, 37, 38 Redd, Nancy, 63 Reformation, 64, 147 regenerative agriculture, 1, 15; biodynamics and, 111; cover crops and, 45; “ditching the plow” and, 22–23. See also conservation agriculture Religio Medici (Browne), 93–94 Renaissance, 2, 16–19, 35, 92, 181 n.15 rhizome, 19 Ricard, Sir Peter, 99 Rich, Richard, 176 Richardson, Catherine, 156, 217 n.217 Ridge Vineyards, 2 Roach, Catherine, 80 Rogers, Timothy, 41–42 Rolfe, John, 167, 176 Rollison, David, 9

231 Rosicrucians, 92 Rubright, Marjorie, 51, 56 Sacheverell, George, 95 salads, as mixtures, 42 Sanders, Julie, 156–57, 217 n.53, 217 n.56 Sandys, George, 22 scarecrows, 75, 76, 77, 174 Schiebinger, Londa, 119 Schmidgen, Wolfram, 35 science, 3, 5; elite and vernacular, 8; notebooking and, 39; scientific revolution, 17 Scott, Charlotte, 138, 214 n.25 Scott, James C., 20 “seasoning,” 58 Sea Voyage, The (Fletcher and Massinger, 1622), 68–69 Seed, Patricia, 180 n.6, 184 n.16, 212 n.11 Sendak, Maurice, 72 Seneca, 61, 72, 74 settling/settlements, 25 sexuality, 4, 34, 35, 213 n.15; analogy with plowing, 20, 22, 183 n.12; hedges and, 217 n.49 Shakespeare, William, 10, 13, 14, 127–28, 199 n.50; Antony and Cleopatra, 22, 46, 153; As You Like It, 92; Hamlet, 127; Henry IV, Part 2, 89; Henry V, 135–36, 137, 138–39, 148, 191 n.6; Henry VI, Part 1, 211 n.7; Henry VI, Part 2, 155; Henry VI, Part 3, 144; Julius Caesar, 127; King Lear, 128, 211 n.9; The Merchant of Venice, 95; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 127; Much Ado About Nothing, 155; Pericles, 68, 69, 196 n.30; Richard II, 88, 89, 135, 139; Richard III, 144; Sonnets, 70; Twelfth Night, 155; The Winter’s Tale, 32, 74, 154–55, 186 n.33. See also Titus Andronicus Shannon, Laurie, 34–35 Sharp, Jane, 22, 183 n.12 Sheil, Robert, 54 Sherman, William, 38 shipwreck metaphor, 18 Sidney, Sir Philip, 33–34, 125, 187 n.39 Siemon, James, 137 silkworms, 5, 40, 57, 103, 172 similes, 39–40, 95, 139 skills, forgotten, 1, 2 Slack, Paul, 5 slaves/slavery, 19, 102, 173 Sleeping Beauty (Disney film, 1959), 145 Sleeping Beauty fairy tales, 71, 140–42, 142, 144–46, 152

232 Smith, John, 64, 101, 165, 167, 176, 219 n.8 Smith, Sir Thomas, 197 n.34 Smyth, Adam, 37, 39 Snook, Edith, 137 social justice, 1 Socrates, 25 soil, 5, 12, 14–16; biodynamics and, 110; “clean farming” and, 152; compost added to, 26; conservation of, 45; depleted, 10, 15, 110; erosion of, 13, 15, 45, 122; feeding of, 55; life and death in, 43–44, 88; reimagined during the Renaissance, 16–19; terroir of wine and, 81–82, 201 n.2 soil amendment, 7, 19, 23, 37, 95; as artful collection, 32; compost in relation to, 27; endenization and, 54–59; generative body parts and, 114–15; as matchmaking, 35; recycling and, 15–16; turnips and, 49. See also mixture/mixing Speed, Adolphus, 6, 29, 33 Spenser, Edmund, 70, 199 n.43 Standish, Arthur, 159 Steiner, Rudolf, 76–77, 109–10, 113 Stern, Tiffany, 77, 217 n.53 Sullivan, Garrett, 135, 157–58, 217 n.53 “Sun, Moon, and Talia” (Basile, 1636), 71, 146 Surflet, Richard, 9, 94, 181 n.15 symploce, 144 talismans, 114 Tawney, R. H., 129 Taylor, Gary, 135 Taylor, John, 153, 155, 157 temporality/time, 19, 26; biodynamics and, 112–13; memory and, 42–43; past-present relationship, 19, 43; usable pasts in service of alternative futures, 108; winemaking and, 84–86, 92, 119 terroir, 95, 116, 120; agency and voice attributed to, 109; etymology of, 81, 201 n.2; “race” of wine and, 99, 206 n.34 theater costumes, 36 Theophrastus, 25 Thick, Malcolm, 51, 52, 192 n.12 Third Plate, The: Field Notes on the Future of Food (Barber), 45–46 Thirsk, Joan, 1, 7, 10, 17; on Columella’s influence on English composters, 27; on enclosure, 129; on turnips, 51, 52 thorns, 44, 123, 124, 139, 140; barbed wire inspired by, 134; Holy Thorn of

Index Glastonbury, 147; thorny hedge trope, 13. See also hedgerows; hedges Thorn Wire Hedge Company, 134 timber, 5 time-knot, 19 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 12, 46, 49, 78–79, 174, 191 n.6, 195 n.27; agriculture engaged in, 74–78; comparison with turnips, 59–64; maternal cannibalism in, 72–74 Tolkien, J. R. R., 12, 150 “To Saxham” (Carew), 159 trade organizations, 10 transplantation, 26, 57–58, 173; of grape vines, 85, 96; of soil, 56 transubstantiation, 92, 106, 108, 119, 204 n.22 travel narratives, 8 treatises, 5, 10, 53, 55; compost promoted in, 11; didactic, 8 Tree of Human Life, or, the Blood of the Grape, The (Whitaker), 89 trope: cannibalism as, 66, 68; hedge as, 13, 124, 134–48, 136, 141–43, 153, 161; plow as, 20 True Declaration of the estate of the colony in Virginia, A (Gates, 1610), 65–66, 165 Tucker, Captain, 104–5 Turner, Robert, 107, 154 Turner, William, 51 turnips, 30, 45, 46–47, 48, 49–54, 193 n.17; as green manure cover crop, 47, 49, 169; history of, 48, 51; at Jamestown Settlement, 162; in literature and popular culture, 49–50, 191 nn.7–8; low status of, 52, 192 n.12; medicinal uses for, 50; soil amendment and, 54–55; Titus Andronicus and, 59–60; violent death caused by, 46–47, 79; in Virginia colony, 50, 170, 171 “Turnip Tale, The” (medieval folktale), 50, 191 n.8 Tusser, Thomas, 9, 133, 188 n.46 Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (Hall, 1550), 141, 142 United States, 84 Unsettling of America, The (Berry), 43–44 urine, white wines associated with, 87 Utopia (More, 1516), 130 Varro, 9 View of the State of Ireland, A (Spenser), 70 vignerons (grape vine cultivators), 102–3, 104, 109

Index vine, agricultural improvement and, 138 vinets (printed borders), 148, 149, 150 Vinetum Angliae (Hughes), 94 Vinetum Brittanicum: Or a Treatise of Cider (Worlidge, 1678), 90, 96, 205 n.28 Virgil, 9; Eclogues, 55, 81–82; Georgics, 137, 185 n.26 Virginia, colonial, 3, 12, 57, 165, 184 n.14; Berkeley Hundred settlement, 170, 171; cannibalism in, 64–67, 70–71; plow used in, 20; promoted to potential colonists as paradise, 163; slavery in, 102; tobacco cultivation in, 103, 104, 105, 170, 172; turnips grown in, 50, 170; winemaking in, 83, 85, 101–6, 108, 119–20. See also Jamestown colony Virginia Company, 66, 165, 166, 173; “Advice for the Colony on Landing,” 164, 170; agricultural labor viewed by, 167; Dale’s letter to, 167–72, 176, 220 n.13; His Majesties Gracious Letter to the Earl of Southampton, 103; on planting of families in Virginia, 174; winemaking promoted by, 101, 102, 103–4 Virginia Wine Marketing Office, 120 viticulture. See biodynamic viticulture Voodoo Vintners (Cole), 112 Waldorf Schools, 109 Wales, Katie, 144 Wall, Wendy, 37 Walsham, Alexandra, 147, 215 n.38 Walter, John, 132 Warner, Marina, 12 War of the Roses, 141 water, contamination of, 86 Waterhouse, Edward, 166–67 Wear, Andrew, 58 Webster, John: The Duchess of Malfi, 31; The White Devil, 75–76, 88–89 weeds, 4, 138, 169; “clean farming” and, 152; hedgerows and control of, 122; turnips and control of, 54 Weston, Richard, 51, 53

233 wheat, 52, 163; coexistence with “Indian corn,” 171; as “corn” distinguished from maize, 81, 164; in diet of “Jane,” 67 Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak), 72 Whitaker, Alexander, 170, 174 Whitaker, Tobias, 89–90, 203 n.17 Williams, Edward, 102–3 Williams, Raymond, 2, 119, 214 n.24 Williamson, Tom, 150 wine, 2, 5; additives in, 117–18, 118, 209 nn.3–64; biodynamics and, 108–16; blood associated with, 86–108; English dependence on French and Spanish imports, 96–97, 101, 104–5, 108; French wines as gold standard of quality, 97; idealization of, 12; industrialization of, 85; “international” style of, 82; mixed with other beverages, 34, 91, 203 n.19; natural, 7, 42, 108, 116–21; Pamunkey people poisoned in Virginia with, 104–5, 207 nn. 43–44; preservation and improvement of, 90–93; time and decay in relation to, 84–86; used for watering plants, 30; viticulture in Roman Britain, 96; Vitis vinifera grapes, 102; winemaking in Virginia colony, 83, 85, 101–6, 108; winery websites, 10, 25, 109, 110. See also biodynamics, viticulture and Winegrowers of Dry Creek Valley, 110 Winstanley, Gerard, 80, 131–35 wisdom, preindustrial/premodern, 3, 8 witchcraft, 112, 114, 116, 137 World’s Olio, The (Cavendish), 40 Worlidge, John, 90, 96, 202 n.15, 205 n.28 worms, 30 Worster, Donald, 54 writing, 4, 6, 8; creative assembly of commonplacing, 39; memory and, 38, 41; “weaving” of hedges associated with, 137 Xenophon, 9, 25, 26 Yates, Julian, 78 Yeo, Richard, 38, 189 n.47

Acknowledgments

This book has been inspired and sustained by living in Davis, California, shopping at its farmers’ market, and talking to the farmers there (especially Mike and Dianne Madison), and working at the University of California, Davis, once known as the university Farm and now home to the “Aggies” and a hotbed of research on agriculture and viticulture. The University offered not only a grounding location but other forms of substantive support as well, including the UC Davis Prize, which granted me the funds to conduct some of the research. Many trips to visit farms and wineries throughout Northern California provoked me to link the seventeenth century to what I was seeing all around me and to turn urgent concerns in the present into questions to ask of the past. If Davis is one terroir of this project, then the Huntington Library is another. There, as a Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellow, I had the luxury of reading determinedly but also promiscuously through the library’s amazing collections on agriculture. Conferences large and small helped me test out my ideas. I am especially grateful to the Shakespeare Association of America and the Renaissance Society of America. At the earliest stages of my project, I presented fledgling ideas in sessions organized by Wendy Wall, Megan Heffernan and Jessica Rosenberg, and Tiffany J. Werth, who would ultimately, to my great good fortune, become my colleague at UC Davis. When she was president of the Modern Language Association, Margie Ferguson invited me to participate in a presidential panel that spurred me to consider the compost heap as a site where memory is negotiated. I have been lucky to have the opportunity to present my work in keynote addresses at a range of conferences. I list here those conferences and those who invited me: the “Attending to Women” conference (Merry Wiesner-Hanks); the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society Conference (Amy [Eliza] Greenstadt and Heather Easterling Ritchie); the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies (Michelle Tsuan); the Oxford Blood Conference (Bonnie Landers Johnson and Eleanor Campbell); the

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Columbia University “Early Modern Futures” conference (Rachel Dunn, Ben VanWagoner, and Seth Williams); the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University conference, “Shakespeare’s Futures: On the Arts and Sciences of Looking Ahead, 1500–1800” (Carla Mazzio and Kathleen Wilson); the Huntington Library conference on “Early Modern Literary Geographies” (Garrett Sullivan and Julie Sanders); the Huntington Library conference on “Shakespeare and the Social Depth of Politics” (Chris Fitter); the North American Conference on British Studies (Kate Kelsey Staples); and the Pacific Oecologies Conference (Vin Nardizzi and Tiffany Werth). The Oecologies network has provided a community both local and far-reaching that has inspired me to think more deeply about audience, purpose, and place. Invitations to speak at various campuses offered me the chance to have more sustained conversations with colleagues and to try out ways of addressing a wide range of audiences. Again, I want to single out those who invited me to the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities (Caitlin McHugh); Loyola University New Orleans (Hillary Eklund); Ohio State University (Graeme Boone); the University of California, Merced (Susan Amussen); the University of Maryland, Baltimore Dresher Humanities Forum (Kathryn McKinley); the University of Miami (Jessica Rosenberg); and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Taylor Cowdery and Helen Cushman). I was honored to deliver the Kingsley Weatherhead Shakespeare Lecture at the University of Oregon (Lara Bovilsky), and the Laird and Dorothy Barber Lecture at the University of Minnesota–Morris (Julie Eckerle). I am grateful to everyone who attended these talks, asked questions, resisted my claims, and suggested ideas and references. I can’t do justice to all of the help I received, but I am acutely aware of and grateful for it. Those conversations have made this process enormously enjoyable. I particularly want to thank Owen Williams for inviting me to lead a seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library on writing and seventeenth-century agriculture, scheming with me to include a field trip to a working farm as part of that seminar, and gathering a fabulous group of participants with whom I could share texts and ideas and from whom I learned a great deal. At Historic Jamestown, Mark Summers was an informative guide and an inspiring teacher. Parts of two chapters appeared previously. “Compost/Composition,” in Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, ed. Hillary Eklund (Duquesne University Press, 2017), formed the kernel of Chapter 1 but has been substantially revised and expanded here. “Blood of the Grape,” in Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700, ed. Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp (University of Pennsylvania

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Press, 2018), and “Biodynamic Viticulture, Natural Wine, and the Premodern,” in Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Imagination, ed. Vin Nardizzi and Tiffany Jo Werth (University of Toronto Press, 2019), both cover material that also appears in Chapter 4 but has been reframed, revised, and expanded. I am grateful to the presses for allowing me to reuse this material and to the editors of each of these collections for helping me develop my ideas and sharpen my thinking and writing. In addition, Gina Bloom, Hillary Eklund, Vin Nardizzi, and Jessica Rosenberg all read drafts and provided invaluable suggestions. Margaret Ferguson went above and beyond, reading most of the manuscript, including some pretty undigested bits, and offering sage counsel. Over the years I have been working on this project, I have benefited from the help and advice of my graduate students, including Elizabeth Crachiolo, Jessica Hanselman Gray, Ashley Sarpong, Cara Shipe, Samantha Snively, and Christopher Wallis. To my delight, Katrin Tchana, Etienne Meneau, and Jude King generously offered permissions for crucial illustrations. I feel lucky to be publishing my third book with the University of Pennsylvania Press and especially for having Jerry Singerman as my editor and friend. I appreciate Jerry’s sharp eye, critical mind, and commitment to scholarly publishing and early modern studies. He selected anonymous readers for the manuscript who helped me see it in new ways and improve it through revision. Erica Ginsburg shepherded the project through the press. Karen Carroll copyedited the manuscript with careful attention and patience; Alexander Trotter prepared the index; and John Hubbard designed the cover. I am very fortunate in my colleagues at the University of California, Davis. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of English and the Early Science Workshop; to Provost Ralph Hexter for inviting me to share my work with colleagues across the campus; to the staff at the library, especially Roberto Delgadillo and Kevin Miller; to Andrew Waterhouse, director of the Mondavi Food and Wine Institute, for convincing me that humanists might have something of value to say to oenologists and winemakers; to Jessica Chiartas for sharing her work on soil; and to Elizabeth Forrestel for a timely talk on wine and climate change. I have learned from conversations with Gina Bloom, Margie Ferguson, Claire Goldstein, Tobias Menely, Elizabeth Miller, Margaret Ronda, Carl Stahmer, Matthew Stratton, Anna Uhlig, Tiffany Werth, and Michael Ziser. One of Tiffany Werth’s gifts to our community was brokering a subscription to the Early English Books Online-Textual Creation Partnership at the time I was checking notes for this book; now I don’t know how I ever lived without it and I feel lucky every time I use it.

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Dympna Callaghan has been a friend since the very start of my career; we can always pick up where we left off and I look forward to our dinners and spa dates. I depend on conference dinners with Wendy Wall and Valerie Traub to sort out life and work. Many a comment or question from them has pushed me in a new direction or inspired a fresh thought. Karen Haltunnen and Deborah Harkness fed my body and spirit when I was just starting this project and shared their writing retreat with me as I was concluding it. They are always a tonic. In Claire Goldstein, I discovered the joy of a new friend. My weekly conversations with Robyn Muncy energize my scholarship, lift my spirits, balance my humors, and keep me from starting a riot—as they have for decades now. My partner, Scott Shershow, nudged this project into being by whispering in my ear on our visits to wineries: “Are you writing this down? You have to do something with this.” He is always right. For that encouragement, blind tastings, almost daily bread, the poetry jukebox, comic poets at home, our visit to Jamestown, and the continuing conversation that is our domestic resurrection circus, I thank him.