Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science. Hillary Eklund, ed. Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2017. viii + 296 pp. $70.

Abstract

Cornwall participates in a mode of writing that flourished in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in which, as Wall observes, "real dirt meets a glorified georgic headon." 10 For Carew, this means tracing shared material concerns between local spaces, exemplified perhaps by the pleasure of managing a much-beloved saltwater pond at Antony, his ancestral home, and their national equivalents, where soil and saltwater interact on grander scales. From microcosm then, a pond that "doth th'Ocean captive make," to macrocosm, in which a sea surrounds and shapes a nation, Carew's focus moves freely between county and country, offering models of correspondence and modulating harmony that delight in the correlation between aesthetics, matter, and the imagination. 12 Carew rarely moralizes his landscape, but he finds within it a series of narratives that associate cultivated and inhabited land with the progress and development of civility and culture; for Carew, as for many others during the early modern period, "the cultivated landscape becomes the supreme expression-national, political, and religious-of the 'country,' and the most powerful figuration of the cultivation of the human spirit." 13 The impulse to ameliorate, aestheticize, and theorize the soil, which Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor describe as "terracultural thinking," manifests in Carew's work in the way that he is attentive not only to founding myths but also to the quotidian, practical tasks involved in the work of husbandry. 14 After envisioning a once uncivilized place ill governed by Titans, where the "earth groan'd at the harmes / Of these mount-harbour'd monsters," he goes on to explain how Cornwall gradually came to be cultivated, connecting trade routes and the movements of merchants to the way that resources are managed in regional terms. 15 An interest in writing the surveyed county into a national economy, networked by occupations and industries, is tempered by an attention to the environmental integrity of local places,