How does soil, as an ecological element, shape culture? With the sixteenth-century shift in England from an agrarian economy to a trade economy, what changes do we see in representations of soil as reflected in the language and stories during that time? This collection brings focused scholarly attention to conceptions of soil in the early modern period, both as a symbol and as a feature of the physical world, aiming to correct faulty assumptions that cloud our understanding of early modern ecological thought: that natural resources were then poorly understood and recklessly managed, and that cultural practices developed in an adversarial relationship with natural processes. Moreover, these essays elucidate the links between humans and the lands they inhabit, both then and now.
Author(s): Hillary Eklund (ed.)
Series: Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies
Publisher: Duquesne University Press
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 304
City: Pittsburgh
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Toward a Renaissance Soil Science / Hillary Eklund 1
1. Compost/Composition / Frances E. Dolan 21
2. Richard Carew and the Matters of the Littoral / Tamsin Badcoe 41
3. Visions of Soil and Body Management: The Almanac in 'Richard II' / Bonnie Lander Johnson 59
4. Unsoiled Soil and “Fleshly Slime”: Representations of Reproduction in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity / Lindsay Ann Reid 79
5. Groping Golgotha: Soil Improvement in the Towneley and Chester Shepherds’ Plays / Rob Wakeman 103
6. Winstanley and Postrevolutionary Soil / Keith M. Botelho 117
7. Fertility versus Firepower: Shakespeare’s Contested Soil Ecologies / Randall Martin 129
8. Wetlands Reclamation and the Fate of the Local in Seventeenth Century England / Hillary Eklund 149
9. Manuring Eden: Biological Conversions in 'Paradise Lost' / David B. Goldstein 171
Afterword / Sharon O’Dair 195
Notes 203
Bibliography 253
About the Contributors 285
Index 289
