Agricultural Treatises in Eurasia before ca. 1500: The Iceberg Method, a Survey, and a Grand Hypothesis

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.