Abstract
From an ecocritical perspective, the study of ovine disease in early modern England allows us to call into question the ‘natural’ causes, evolution and consequences of what we contemporarily refer to as ‘natural’ disasters. Not only were epizootics often considered as the manifestation of a religious or superstitious order, but it is also apparent that the high incidence of these diseases was the direct result of human interference with species and ecosystems.
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Notes
- 1.
Many husbandry manuals were written in a somewhat elevated style and include references to classical authors, which suggests that these manuals were generally read by the landed gentry—although McRae notes a gradual shift in readership from the educated elite to ‘the middle and lower orders’ in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (McRae 1990, 145). Despite their varied formats and register, it seems necessary to acknowledge their indebtedness to the georgic tradition. Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (first published in 1557 as A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie) exemplifies this ambivalence. An Elizabethan ‘best-seller’, the manual provides advice for agricultural practices, but also takes the form of a calendar written entirely in verse, and poetically celebrates the labour of husbandmen. Both literary and agrarian historians have long been perplexed by a text that seems to defy classification (McRae 1990, 146).
- 2.
Anthony Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandry (1523) instructs its readers in the rudiments of farm management, while later manuals such as Leonard Mascall’s Government of Cattell (1587) or Gervase Markham’s Cheape and Good Husbandry (1614) give pride of place to the rearing and breeding of livestock. Foreign texts were also translated and imported into England, such as Conrad Heresbach’s Foure Bookes on Husbandry, which was adapted into English by Barnaby Googe and published in 1577, the third book being specifically devoted to the management of cattle. These manuals were frequently revised and republished throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which testifies to their popularity at the time.
- 3.
Rinderpest is defined by the OED as ‘a highly contagious and virulent disease affecting cattle and other ruminants, caused by a morbillivirus and characterized by fever, erosive inflammation of the mouth and gastrointestinal tract, and diarrhoea; also called cattle plague’. Anthrax is ‘an acute, usually fatal disease of livestock characterized by high fever, laboured breathing, staggering or convulsions, and collapse, with oozing of bloody fluid from the body orifices and enlargement of the spleen (now recognized to be caused by infection with the bacterium Bacillus anthracis)’ (OED 2).
- 4.
Swabe uses the notion of ‘veterinary regime’ ‘to describe the social practices and institutionalised behaviours that have emerged in response to the problem of maintaining animal resources and protecting human health and economy. This notion […] is intended to epitomise and encapsulate the growing and increasingly formalised ways in which humankind has sought to deal with the problem of animal health and disease as our dependency on animal resources has continued to increase and intensify throughout the course of human history’ (Swabe 1999, 8).
- 5.
In pastoral literature, see the portrayal of Maudlin in The Sad Shepherd, Ben Jonson’s unfinished play: ‘Thence she steals forth to relief, in the fogs/And rotten mists, upon the fens and bogs,/Down to the drownèd lands of Lincolnshire,/To make ewes cast their lambs, swine eat their farrow,/The housewife’s tun not work, nor the milk churn’ (Jonson 1979, 2.8.24–28). While there is no mention of infectious disease, the ‘unnatural’ behaviour of livestock and the spoiling of farm produce are directly attributed to the old woman.
- 6.
The authors of husbandry manuals also diverged from the works of classical authors in that they intended to ‘speak to the honest English husbandman’ (Markham 1668, 87) and thus displayed an acute sensibility to local particularities. Since the English climate of what we now refer to as the Little Ice Age was nothing like that of Virgil’s Italy, at times, they directly contradicted the advice found in the Georgics. The ‘nationalizing of husbandry’ thus displayed in Markham’s writing and in other manuals ‘contributed to the business of producing national identity in the early modern period’ (Wall 1996, 767).
- 7.
According to the OED, adarces is ‘a salty substance found on plants exposed to salt water, formed as a result of evaporation and used for therapeutic purposes’.
- 8.
‘Not that every soil can bear all types of things’ (Virgil 2006, Book II).
- 9.
The OED defines ‘redwater’ as ‘[a]ny of several diseases or disorders of sheep’, especially diseases that might cause haematuria, the presence of blood in the sheep’s urine (OED 1b). The ‘turning evil’ or ‘turn-sick’ is a ‘disease caused by an encysted worm in the brain of the sheep’ (OED B2).
- 10.
As documented by the OED, ‘wildfire’ is not a term associated with a specific pathogen. It was ‘a name for erysipelas and various inflammatory eruptive diseases, esp. those in which the eruption spreads from one part to another’ (OED 4a). It is possible that ‘wildfire’ might have been a term used by some authors to refer to some type of pox.
- 11.
Whereas some infectious diseases found in human populations seem to share common ancestry with non-human animal diseases, other diseases were, and still are, transmitted directly between humans and animals. These diseases are referred to as zoonoses and can prove fatal to humans and animals alike. Well-known examples of zoonoses include rabies, tuberculosis, BSE or ‘mad cow disease’ and, more recently, possibly coronavirus disease.
- 12.
To confirm this hypothesis, it would be necessary to compare animal husbandry manuals to medical handbooks of the same period, which is beyond the scope of this paper.
- 13.
This practice continues to this day as animal by-products are still widely used in cosmetics. For instance, keratin and collagen proteins are often produced from slaughterhouse waste, even though more recent trends seem to reflect evolving consumer preferences for plant-based alternatives.
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Cordier, M. (2023). Pests, Plagues and Pastoral Husbandry: Representing Ovine Disease in Early Modern England. In: Patel, S., Chiari, S. (eds) The Writing of Natural Disaster in Europe, 1500–1826. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12120-3_4
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