Abstract

This article analyzes all extant agricultural treatises produced before the sixteenth century throughout Eurasia, in order to highlight their importance for the study of agricultural praxis, their significance for constructing a transnational intellectual history of the medieval globe, and their relevance for the development of pragmatic literacies. Such texts emerged both in China and around the Mediterranean before 200 BCE, and somewhat later in India, but few have been preserved and many are difficult to date. Thereafter, the medieval transmission of agricultural knowledge moved via several different regional trajectories and traditions, with Anglo-Norman England becoming a fourth and largely independent birthplace of the agricultural treatise genre during the thirteenth century. The proliferation of these texts becomes evident throughout Eurasia around 1000 CE and increases further from the fourteenth onward. Throughout this longue durée, the contents of these treatises reflect real changes in agricultural technologies, dominant crops, and climate.

Keywords

intellectual history; economic history; agriculture; agriculturaltreatises; Roman Empire; Byzantium; Islamic world; China; India; medieval Europe; England; pragmatic literacy; manuscript studies; history of the book

Published in

The medieval globe
2020, Volume: 6, number: 2, pages: 1-47

SLU Authors

• Myrdal, Janken

  • Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • Stockholm University

UKÄ Subject classification

History


Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/115585