The Classical Tradition in West European Farming: The Sixteenth Century

Abstract

T HE invention of printing in the fifteenth century very quickly put the surviving Latin textbooks on farming more freely at the disposal of anyone who was interested and who was sufficiently literate to read them. Whether these printed editions were read as guides to farming or as representative of the ancient learning is a difficult question to answer; but these sources were certainly freely, and somewhat uncritically, used by the writers of the new Latin and vernacular handbooks that were produced in increasing numbers as the sixteenth century advanced.2 From classical times, Italy had been unable to supply itself with grain. The growth of the city states necessarily led to the growth of commerce and to seagoing trade with other Mediterranean countries, as well as with Asiatic lands, by way of long-established routes. Italian trade with Byzantium must always have included the transfer of manuscripts from the East to the West, and it is well known that there was some transmission of ancient learning (with Arabic additions and commentaries) from the Arabic world to the countries of western Europe. There was never any real interruption of classical studies in the centuries that passed before the so-called New Learning: but the real change was a change in the aims of the student of ancient texts. Medieval man, with learning confined very largely to ecclesiastical institutions, had his mind directed to considerations of advancement in a future life, rather than to understanding the world in which he lived and died. Being usually a farmer, he could not avoid some contact with and understanding of nature and its phenomena. That is what he had to deal with; yet much of his interpretation was fantastic and mythical. With the new angle of appreciation, the classics were studied for their attempts to understand and analyse their natural environment, both inanimate and animate, in what has come to be called scientific investigation. This was not altogether unknown in the Middle Ages, as is demonstrated by the work of the encyclopedists, the most eminent of whom was Albertus Magnus. It is possible, though perhaps unlikely, that the tentative interest in the external world exhibited by some of the great men of the Middle Ages would have become more intense without the stimulus of the fourteenthand fifteenth-century manu-