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10 - Reading Olivier de Serres Circa 1600: Between Economy and Ecology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2020

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Summary

Abstract

Formerly belonging to the literary canon of the French Renaissance, and often associated with the ideology of a return to the country—even to Maréchal Pétain's Travail et Patrie—Olivier de Serres's Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600) remains a keystone in the history of agronomy. Threading the wisdom of ancient authors through his own experience, and staunchly Protestant in vision, Serres sets an agenda for the country gentleman and farmer. At once art and science, it deploys a limpid and vigorous style to argue for economy and productive management of the earth. This essay contends that today, despite its legacy, the work offers a vision and a savoury mode of writing vital to what we can make of ecology in the early modern age.

Keywords: early modern economy and ecology, Olivier de Serres, agronomy, science of gardening, return to the land, solitude

In this collection of essays, the Renaissance is located at the conceptual threshold of the Anthropocene. In French Studies, canonical authors express fears about the future of the planet that, while often set in a millenarian frame, anticipate or chime with ours. In the late chapters of the Quart Livre, the world under the ugly regime of the well-named Messer Gaster is going to seed. In the thick of the Wars of Religion, Ronsard decries the violence that fellow subjects have done both to the Americas and the forests of his homeland. In a celebrated passage of ‘Des coches’, following Lucretius, Montaigne writes tersely and typologically, ‘[l]’univers tombera en paralisie; l’un membre sera perclus, l’autre en vigueur. Bien crains-je que nous aurons bien fort hasté sa declinaison et sa ruyne par nostre contagion’ (‘the universe will fall into paralysis; one member will be shriveled, the other vigorous. I daresay that we will have strongly hastened its decline and ruin by our contagion’). For Montaigne, as if they belonged to a theatrum mundi or world-theatre, rampant depredation and ecological ruin were signs of the end of the world he had known.

Such was the context from which Olivier de Serres (1539–1619) emerged to be read here as a thinker concerned with human reshaping of the planet.

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Chapter
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Early Modern Écologies
Beyond English Ecocriticism
, pp. 223 - 262
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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