ALTERNATIVE AGRICULTURE: A HISTORY by Joan Thirsk ( 9780198208136 )

Item Details

Title:

ALTERNATIVE AGRICULTURE: A HISTORY
FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO THE PRESENT DAY

By:

Joan Thirsk

Format:

Paperback

List price:

£63.00

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£55.13

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12.5% off

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£7.87

ISBN 10:

0198208138

ISBN 13:

9780198208136

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Publisher:

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

2 March, 2000

Pages:

384

Description:

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. Yet crops from the past like flax, hemp, and woad, are gradually reappearing in our modern countryside, which may in the past have looked at the same time both more and less familiar than we imagine. Joan Thirsk reveals how the forces which drive our current interest in alternative forms ofagriculture - a glut of mainstream meat and cereal crops, changing eating habits, the needs of medicine - have striking parallels with earlier periods of our history, emphasizing that we can still find solutions to todays problems in the experience of people from the past.

Synopsis:

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. However, that countryside may have looked both more and less familiar than we imagine. Take todays startling yellow fields of rapeseed, seemingly more suited to the landscape of Van Gogh than Constable. They were, in fact, thoroughly familiar to fieldworkers in seventeenth-century England. At the same time, some features that would have gone unremarked in the past now seem like oddities. In the fifteenth century, rabbit warrens were specially guarded to rear rabbits as a luxury food for rich mens tables; whilst houses had moats not only to defend them but to provide a source of fresh fish. In the 1500s we find Catherine of Aragon introducing the concept of a fresh salad to the court of Henry VIII; and in the 1600s, artichoke gardens became a fashion of the gentry in their hope of producing more male heirs.The common tomato, suspected of being poisonous in 1837, was transformed into a household vegetable by the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to cheaper glass-making methods and the resulting increase in glasshouses. In addition to these images of past lives, Joan Thirsk reveals how the forces which drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture a glut of meat and cereal crops, changing dietary habits, the needs of medicine have striking parallels with earlier periods in our history. She warns us that todays decisions should not be made in a historical vacuum: we can find solutions to our current problems in the experience of people in the past.

Illustrations:

26 halftones

Publication:

Imprint:

Oxford University Press

Returns:

Non-returnable

Some other items by this author:

ALTERNATIVE AGRICULTURE: A HISTORY (HB)

CHAPTERS FROM THE AGRARIAN HISTORY OF ENGLAND AND WALES: VOLUME 3, AGRICULTURAL CHANGE: POLICY AND PRACTICE, 1500-1750 (PB)

CHURCH AND SOCIETY IN MEDIAEVAL LINCOLNSHIRE (PB)

ENGLISH PEASANT FARMING