Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture. Frances E. Dolan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 238 pp. $59.95

Ranging back and forth between England and the Jamestown colony, with a wide range of reference in literary and historical texts, Dolan demonstrates that ideas about agriculture represent an often overlooked but omnipresent substrate in early modern English culture, one whose influence can be seen in places that range from Shakespeare's plays to the substantial literature about agriculture, cooking, and householding, to twenty-first-century discourses around organic farming and wine production. After a short introduction that defends “hold[ing] different time frames in tension” (2), her first chapter explores the practices of composting and soil amendment. Composting, in her persuasive reading, becomes a pungent metaphor for the process that it physically describes, a literal decomposition that also entails “systematically collecting, ripening, and using” (39) decayed matter.