While indebted to important studies in agricultural and social history, including monographs by Joan Thirsk, Keith Thomas, and Raymond Williams, among others, the panel departs from these primarily historical and formal analyses to advance a more literary concept of agricultural labor in medieval and early modern thought. We query how literature utilizes, challenges, or reconfigures agricultural labor as a prompt for imaginative cultivation. More recent work on the relationship between literature and agriculture also informs the session’s contributions. Our panel is thus in conversation with Frances Dolan’s forthcoming Digging the Past, the collection Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (ed. Hillary Eklund, 2017), and Charlotte Scott’s Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture (2014). As the session argues, the frameworks cultivated in literary study can offer a critical lens for understanding how premodern individuals conceptualized the resonances among different types of labor.
We will begin the panel with Lisa H. Cooper’s “Feeling and Farming in Humphrey of Gloucester’s On Husbondrie,” a paper which focuses on farming and literary techniques in the fifteenth century. As Cooper shows, between the years 1439 and 1443, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester (1390-1447)—brother of Henry V, uncle of Henry VI, and often called England’s first humanist—commissioned a verse translation of the Latin prose work Opus agriculturae by the Roman author Palladius Taurus Rutilius Aemilianus (late 4th—early 5th century CE), which for centuries stood as the most popular classical agricultural manual in Europe before the popularization of Columella in the early modern period. Cooper’s paper accounts for this curious feat of premodern literary and textual production by examining its representation of agriculture as affective labor and, conversely, its evocation of affect through the (versified) labor of farming. Cooper argues that the most interesting effect of the poem’s form upon the content of the work re-presented in the text—that is, the principal result of rendering Palladius’s prose agronomy into verse—is less a gain or loss of utility than it is a rather significant increase of emotive force, one that goes hand-in-hand with the affective technologies of the late medieval manuscript book. Duke Humphrey, Cooper demonstrates, is invited by the translation made at his behest less to know than to feel what he knows, in—and through—his own vernacular. More broadly, Cooper’s essay suggests that the affect of agricultural work is a crucial component of its textualization in the premodern world.
From Cooper’s emphasis on affect, the panel moves to the questions of rhythm (itself a device evoking affect) in Andrea Crow’s “The Poetics of Agrarian Reform in Early Modern English Lyric.” Crow claims that rhythms and measures structure both lyric and agricultural land. The early modern turn to Greek and Roman literature brought renewed attention to classical agricultural verse like that of Hesiod and Virgil, for whom the biorhythms of seasonal patterns and the divisions and furrows of fields served as models for fashioning poetic works which could, in turn, shape readers’ relationships to husbanding the earth. Crow examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets revived this tradition to articulate models of agrarian reform in response to conditions of scarcity. Crow focuses this investigation on the work of one of the most popular of these writers, the court musician turned small farmer, Thomas Tusser. Crow examines how Tusser’s much-reprinted Fiue hundreth points of good husbandry, an agricultural manual in verse, manipulates lyric form to promote an ethos combining thrift with generosity. His elongated strophes, densely clustered rhymes, and dazzling polyptoton orient the reader towards learning to thrive by producing more out of less, turning sparseness into plenty. Tusser’s verse exemplifies how early modern writers turned to literary form to develop strategies for sustaining their communities against a precarious environment.
The question of form and tradition is extended in Ryan Hackenbracht’s “Shakespearean Sempervirens: The Georgic Posthuman in the Sonnets,” which argues for looking at the “georgic posthuman” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. As Hackenbracht suggests, our modern fascination with replicating and improving the self, as expounded by N. Katherine Hayles, was anticipated centuries ago by Shakespeare, who explored unbounded personhood, embodied cognition, and information systems in the Procreation Sonnets. But Shakespeare’s technology, unlike ours, was horticultural, and his method of preserving a decaying self was gleaned from the georgic mode. Virgil’s Georgics was a valuable literary model, since it provided Shakespeare with a vast array of agrarian techniques for reproducing a desirable crop. Will’s entreaties to the Young Man to procreate are a kind of human horticulture, and lines like “I engraft you new” (So. 15, ln. 14) and “From fairest creatures we desire increase” (So. 1, ln. 1) speak to Will’s skill as a gardener prepared to preserve his crop into perpetuity and thereby cheat “Time’s scythe” (So. 12, ln. 13). Due to the connection Shakespeare draws between procreation and literary legacy, Hackenbract argues, this gardening activity has significant implications for our understanding of Shakespeare’s sense of his own authorship. As georgics, the Sonnets read in such a way that when future readers would imagine their author, they would see Shakespeare, the poet, as a gardener—a literary laborer hard at work to harvest what he could of beauty before time ran out.