The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1350-1850

by Mauro Ambrosoli

Overview

This book describes the spread of new agricultural practice in the half millennium after 1350, and reconstructs a neglected part of Europe's agricultural past: the introduction of fodder crops, and the continuous reorganization of traditional botanical inputs within a new system of farming. It breaks entirely new ground by showing the distant historical origins of a major transformation in land potential and farm productivity. A vast range of evidence is cited from Italy, France, England and elsewhere to produce in effect an economic, social and cultural history of Europe in which the focus is on the long-distance consequences of the "agricultural revolution".

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521108812
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/12/2009
Series:	Past and Present Publications
Pages:	504
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.14(d)

Table of Contents

Foreword Joan Thirsk; Preface; Introduction; 1. Translations and classification of the natural environment from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century; 2. From medieval agronomy to Renaissance agriculture; 3. Lucerne in Italy; 4. Forage crops in France: diffusion and retreat; 5. Tradition and innovation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England; 6. The new crops and English agriculture; 7. From theory to seed production: England and continental Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Conclusions.

Editorial Reviews

"...a most original work of scholarship." Eric Jones, American Historical Review

From the Publisher