Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 314

Frances Dolan’s Digging the past explores agricultural literature and agriculture in literature in the seventeenth century, placing both in dialogue with contemporary discussions of farming that hark back to a supposed pre-industrial golden age. The book is then an attempt to both understand ideas and images in seventeenth-century literature, and to see how they measure up against the way the period is presented by non-historian agricultural practitioners and writers today. In drawing together the practical manuals of Hugh Plat, Thomas Tusser et al., and reading them alongside Shakespeare and the marketing spiel of Californian winemakers, Dolan is doing something unusual and interesting. In the opening pages, it is arresting to see the intellectual agenda being set by the claims made on vineyards’ websites, but this provides a new way of thinking not only about the seventeenth century, but also about its legacies, resonances and imaginaries today. Drawing on this broad conception of what constitutes writing about agriculture Dolan explores four themes in contemporary organic, environmentally-conscious and artisanal agriculture that also preoccupied writers in the seventeenth century: composting, eating local, natural wine and hedges. Within these themes, Dolan pursues ‘persistent metaphors, their inherent contradictions, and the unpredictable cultural work they continue to do’ (p. 11).

The associations, resonances and connections Dolan makes between texts and contexts daisy chain together in four creative and thought-provoking chapters. Chapter 1 uses the compost heap as an extended metaphor for and justification of Dolan’s eclectic and chronologically wide-ranging source material. Here composting is portrayed as a creative process in which the past feeds the present, demonstrating the value of digging around in the muckheap of history to understand where values espoused in contemporary progressive agriculture emanate from. In chapter 2, Dolan explores a variety of forms of local and dislocated eating, in part spurred by contemporary calls to incorporate cover crops into our diet, and a desire to analyse what eating locally meant in English colonies in the early seventeenth century. Chapter 3 focuses on wine and its various adulterations, historical and contemporary, arguing that contemporary calls to make wine in simple or traditional ways belie the ways wine was a product of mixture and migration long before our present. Chapter 4 contrasts contemporary celebrations of the mature hedgerow as a biodiverse habitat with the classic image of the hedge as early modern ‘organic barbed wire’ (in Nicholas Blomley’s phrase) and failed attempts to ‘rebrand’ the hedge as a kind of forageable commons. Rather than offering a set of conclusions, Dolan leaves us with an epilogue that explores how the history of agriculture is presented and forgotten at the ‘Historic Jamestowne’ settlement, an archaeological site and museum complex covering the first English colony in Virginia.

Digging the past draws on some key surveys of early modern agriculture by Joan Thirsk and Mark Overton, but beyond this there is no systematic engagement with agricultural or environmental history. This can be frustrating. Neither the Review nor its American counterpart make an appearance in the references, and we read of ‘Arnold’ Crosby’s Columbian Exchange thesis, for example. But perhaps an environmental historian would always want a book with ‘digging’ in its title to be a little more ‘grounded’ in the history of agriculture, and to be fair to Dolan the book makes no claim to be a work of agricultural history. This is predominantly a work of ecocriticism, written with the wit, incisiveness and élan that characterizes the best of that genre. For a historian, there are places where some more context would have been helpful. Several key authors are drawn on throughout: Walter Blith, Gervase Markham, Gabriel Plattes, and Hugh Plat. But while we are told that reading and doing were two parts of the same agricultural endeavour in the seventeenth century, we learn much more about what was read than who was writing it or what was being done with it. Given the focus on key writers, G. E. Fussell’s Old English Farming Books is a surprising omission, and would have provided some detail, in particular on Markham, who looms large in Digging the past but is never adequately introduced, despite his colourful and varied life as a playwright, tenant farmer, and liberal recycler of others’ agricultural writing.

Due to its interpretive approach and literary source material, Digging the past will be of greatest interest to literature scholars, but there remains interest for historians here too. Historians of the periods either side of the early modern period are keenly aware of how their areas of specialism are presented and manipulated in a variety of contemporary settings: medievalists have the study of ‘medievalisms’ and nineteenth-century historians the study of ‘Neo-Victorianism’. Early modern historians have been less inclined to reflect on what our subjects look like in contemporary discourse (though there are notable exceptions, such as Stefan Hanss’ work on the memory of the 1571 Battle of Lepanto). As Dolan’s book shows us, environmental and agricultural history offer fertile ground for early modern historians to engage with contemporary images of our period. Early modernity looms large in the background of contemporary environmental and agricultural debates – think of the misuse of the Little Ice Age by climate change deniers, the unspecific pasts invoked in ‘re-wilding’, or the effective census year of 1500 used by the UK’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee to determine the nativity or otherwise of species. Dolan’s book points the way to future critical engagement with these ‘persistent metaphors’, tropes and baselines.