An Agrarian Guide to Health and Happiness

The Tacuinum Sanitatus (Almanac of Health) is one of the most richly illustrated fourteenth century Herbals though it is based on an earlier compendium written by the renowned Arab physician Ibn Buṭlān in the eleventh century and translated into Latin. The book  focuses on prevention rather than cures, and is based on the traditions of ancient Greek and Roman medicine. But the works of Hippocrates (c. 460-377 BC) and Galen (129-200 AD) had disappeared in the Latin West after the fall of Rome. In this way Ibn Buṭlān reintroduced Europeans to their own medical heritage. Although relating understandings from Antiquity, Tacuinum was a popular manual of practical guidance for a healthy, happy life with advice on diet, exercise, regulation of temperament, and other topics. The five illustrated versions that survive were created for wealthy Italian patrons and are remarkable for their magnificent illuminations, a term from the Latin expression “light up.” These present a window into daily life during the early Renaissance with depictions of farming, food preparation, and other activities. Considerable attention is devoted to grains, pulses, vegetables, fruits, and other culinary staples.

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Above: Silago (Cutting Rye) and Spelta (Flailing Spelt), Tacuinum Sanitatus (c. 1400); Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome; Wikimedia Commons

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 The Tacuinum depictions of Estes (Summer) show a peasant couple mowing with sickles as a young man stands behind them wearing a crown and belt of wheat and holding up sprays of grain as a likely personification of summer. In Silago a man wielding a broad sickle grasps a handful of rye to cut, while Spelta shows a barefoot couple threshing grain with flails before a shelter of stacked sheaves. Heads of various types of crops are prominently featured, even if the stands appear to be sparse, and also include Furmentum (wheat), Ordeum (barley), Milium (millet), Avena (oats), Rizum (rice), Lenta (lentils), Cicera (chickpeas), Melega (sorghum), and Faxioli (flax).

Tacuinum’s agrarian depictions significantly contributed to the magnificent Cycles of the Months frescos (c. 1400) that decorate Trento, Italy’s Castello del Buonconsiglio. Probably the work of a Bohemian artist commissioned by the temporal ruler of the diocese, the colorful panels show the affairs of both peasant and privileged. The August scene is devoted to the wheat harvest and shows a phalanx of sickle-wielding reapers followed by binders and a stacker. Both men and women share in these tasks. In the foreground a man leads a wagonload of sheaves to a shed where another worker pitches the bundles into an open upper window. A woman carrying pitcher and basket heads to the field to refresh the laborers under the approving eye of a cleric.

Saint Hildegard and “Labors of the Months”

English Fleta and other European manuals on model agricultural practices for landlords and manorial managers appeared widely in the late thirteenth century, followed by others like Pietro de Crescenzi’s exceptional fourteenth century Agricultural Calendar. Although many of these manuscripts were heavily influenced by the classic Latin treatises of Varro and Columella, that they were penned in vernacular languages was significant and reflects the growing appreciation of agriculture beyond abbeys and royal libraries as a subject worthy of intellectual interest and susceptible to systematic improvement. 

Hildegard of Bingen, The Wheel of Life

Detail showing harvest reaper at center left; Codex Latinus 1492 (Liber Divinorum Operum); State Library, Lucca, Italy; Wikimedia Commons

The progression of European summer climate from Mediterranean to continental influenced these artistic arrangements with representative reaping scenes in Italy typically shown in June (Cancer), and in July (Leo) in France. Similar views are found for August (Virgo) in Germany and England, though fewer depictions of the “labors of the months” are known during this time in northern Europe.  In de Crescenzi’s Calendar the emerging Italian conception of realism holds colorfully active sway with men and women in period clothing shown more naturally working together to reap and thresh the crop. De Crescenzi’s illustrated treatise on agriculture, Liber Ruralium Commodorum (Book of Rural Benefits, c. 1309), became the first printed book on the subject when it was published in Augsburg in 1471. 

Personified cycles of diligent rural endeavor, which often prominently feature lightly clad men and women in wide-brimmed straw hats, are typically shown with accompanying signs of the zodiac and more realistically depicted than earlier, passive symbolic forms in earlier illuminated manuscripts like the Calendar of Salzburg (c. 820). Benedictine abbess and visionary mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)—the “Sibyl of the Rhine” who wrote extensively about botany and plant cultivation, composed and illustrated her remarkable Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works) from 1163-1174 which described a holistic cosmology of the temporal and divine realms. Hildegard conceived of a natural world (in regno mundi) that remained vital and inseparable from Christ’s divine kingdom (in regno Christi) as people lived in accordance with the perpetual calendar of natural processes and religious observances. In this way of viriditas (fecundity), the microcosm of an individual’s life could more fully conform to the universal divine macrocosm as revealed in Scripture, evident in nature, and shown in the Book of Divine Works’ illuminated Universal Wheel of Life that depicts the entire calendar from fall sowing to summertime harvest.

The “Cerealization” of Europe

The story of farming is one of usual significance throughout rural America, and certainly to urban consumers year-round, let alone in times like these when stocking grocery store shelves is threatened by pandemics and market dislocations. Self-reliant agriculture had long been practiced by natives peoples in North and South America, and since ancient times in the Eastern Hemisphere. When European immigrants began flocking to the United States in the early 1800s they brought many Old World farming traditions that harken back to practices introduced a thousand years ago. A gradual shift in the early medieval period away from annual and two-year cropping in Europe that exhausted soil fertility led to improved cereal production across the continent. The three-year open field rotation system (German Verzelgung, Russian trekhpol’ye) became widespread during the thirteenth century and increased crop yields from one-half to two-thirds in many parts of central and eastern Europe with heavier soils and higher rainfall than in the south. While variable local geographic conditions allow for only generalizations, the triennial system did begin a widespread continental shift from mixed farming to the production of specific grains on designated fields.

This “cerealization” of Europe was directly related to the era’s population rise and led to the emergence of urban centers and new social classes. Grain yields from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries remained negligible by present standards, however, with wheat averaging some eight to twelve bushels per acre, barley ten to fifteen, and oats fifteen to twenty. (Modern non-irrigated yields are commonly five to six times higher.) England’s medieval standard measure of distance, the furlong, was established at 220 yards, or about how far a team of oxen could make a furrow by pulling a plow before needing to rest. A width of forty-four yards—twenty-two trips down and back, came to represent a full day’s work to define the present acre of 4, 840 square yards.

Pietro de Crescenzi, “Farmers Harvesting Crops, ”Opus Ruralium Commmodorum (1471), Vollbehr Collection, Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress

Field size varied widely depending on local norms of peasant holdings, topography, and soil conditions. The area of a “full holding” varied considerably in early medieval Europe but was generally understood to be the amount of land and livestock necessary to support a three-generation family living under the same roof. The year’s culminating grain harvest served the three imperative needs of sustenance for family and livestock, seed for future crops, and seigneurial tax. Over time conventional units of area (English “hide,” German Hufe, French mansus) came to be associated with obligations to seigneur and state, though definitions reflect considerable stratification among villagers. In central Europe, for example, a prosperous Austrian peasant head of household with both full holding and a tenancy might have a hundred acres, while similar status in Bohemia represented sixty acres, but half that area in England and Hungary. Subdividing over generations led to numerous fractional holdings, cotters with only a house and garden, and large numbers of landless laborers.

A Medieval Bread Buffet in the Tri-Cities!

Thanks to our Palouse Heritage crop plots tended by a dedicated group of local school students, we were able to supply some heritage bread wheat flour to legendary baker Angela Kora at Ethos Bakery in Richland. Angela has kindly provided her incredibly flavorful creations for museum events and we enjoy visiting with her about agrarian traditions from long ago (see below). Responsibility for care of the fields from seed time to harvest through the centuries substantially rested with young adults and older children. Villages from Eastern Europe to the British Isles were generally synonymous with a single religious parish and many inhabitants shared ties of kinship that fostered social cohesion. But responsibilities and obligations rested with family units to care for the land. To be sure, all able-bodied workers of both genders were deployed during the crucial weeks of harvest, and important roles were also assigned to older children and elders to care for the youngest and provision reapers and binders. But prevailing economic norms that tied family units to individual holdings, tenancies, and leases limited greater cooperative economic development.

Angela Kora, head baker at Ethos Bakery in Richland, WA

Ethos Bakery Bounty

The wider availability of cereals led to greater specialization in food production. As early as the 1360s records from the Poitou region of central France reveal the grading of four types of wheat bread likely typical in other parts of Western Europe: superior white choyne made from sifted flour of highest quality and salted, unsalted choyne (Russian krupichataya), high extract reboulet likely made from approximately 90% whole flour with the heaviest bran removed (Russian sitnaya), and unsifted, whole grain safleur bread (Russian resheto).

Commoners also made coarse flour from barley, rye, and oats for flavorful, dense breads, and remained faithful into modern times to old culinary traditions using toasted grains for an array of such nutritious soups and porridges as Italian polenta (barley), Brittany grou (buckwheat), Russian kasha (rye), and Scottish porridge (oats). Raw grain was commonly stored in well-built wooden chests (known as “hutches” or “arks” in Britain) that rested upon the kitchen or pantry floor.

The Farm Novel

In the wake of industrialization and associated currents of social change, the farm novel appeared in the eighteenth century as a distinct genre beginning with works like Patrice Lacomb’s story of French-Canadian country life La Terre Paternelle (1846, later translated into English as The Ancestral Farm). A concurrent European phenomenon led to the appearance of numerous French “roman rustique,” German “Bauernroman,” and British Country Life titles. This “literature of the land” flourished in North America and Europe through the 1950s, and has been revived in the twenty-first century with the rise of “back to the land” and small-scale sustainable agriculture efforts. While rural locations in these novels has been as varied as the fictional characters who inhabit them, they generally share settings in a specific place where plots unfold that explore the human condition through protagonist struggle with the elements and urban influences. Notable works by such writers as Lacomb, O. E. Rølvaag, Willa Cather, and Louis Hémon are also characterized by use of vernacular language and accurate, detailed depiction of farming operations like tillage and harvest.

John Nash, Land Agitation in Ireland, The Graphic (September 20, 1880)

Association of the term “agrarian” with rural experience dates back to at least to second century BC Rome with tribune Tiberius Gracchus’s controversial Lex Sempronia Agraria (Agrarian Laws) which sought to redistribute public lands to the poor. In many contexts the term retained a land reform connotation into the modern era with published works containing the word before 1920 almost exclusively suggesting economic struggle. Nineteenth and early twentieth century books titles including the word deal with such topics as the agrarian “problem” (England), “outbreak” (Ireland), “disturbance” (Italy), and “distress” (India). The term has had similar connotations in America, where Solon J. Buck’s The Agrarian Crusade (1920) summarizes post-Civil War farmer political activism.

A different, more naturalistic and idealistic sense of the word emerges in the writings of Thomas Jefferson about yeoman farmers and with modern writers like Russell Lord and Wendell Berry. In the introduction to Agrarianism in American Literature (1969), author M. Thomas Inge identifies key tropes of this understanding to include religion (farmers reliance upon God and nature), romance (redemption through natural harmonies), and reciprocity (mutuality of healthy rural communities). These elements have long been expressed in art and literature, and inform present considerations of rural challenge and environmental sustainability.

George? Gregory, Hill (engraver), Harvesting in Scotland, Harper’s Bazar (February 16, 1878)

Historian Florian Freitag (2013) writes of the genre’s significance in establishing the farm as a symbol of national identity and giving voice through rural discourse to enduring national values. Among such widely shared attitudes and tendencies are self-reliance and individualism, political conservatism and religious faith, and suspicion of city ways informed by a kind of primitivism. However, Freitag further notes national and cultural distinctives in farm novels. American authors, for example, have often written of impoverished immigrant settler families who seek prosperity on the broad expanses of the heartland. Québécois rustic literature generally affirms strong the agrarian community and religious identity among well-established farm families, while English Country Life novels tend to depict the peaceful “order and control” seen in well-tended, stone-fenced fields and the parish assembly.

“What is Art?”

Amidst the mistral winds of June, 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his Harvest (Wheat Fields) series of ten paintings which provided him opportunity to experiment with color and technique. He worked quickly, “just like the harvester, …intent only on the reaping,” and blended striking hues of gold, copper, and bronze with yellow, red, and brown. The lush expressionistic masterpiece Wheat Field with a Reaper he painted in July 1889, gleams with a swirling sea of grain in impastoed layers of yellow-orange with white highlights seen in many of his Saint-Rémy paintings. A benevolent sun stands against a sky of aquamarine and seems to shine from the canvas uninterrupted by shadow or shade. The view is from the upper story of the building where van Gogh had sought recovery and shows the field’s gray-white boundary wall without any sense of confinement.

Van Gogh, Wheat Field with a Reaper (1888), Van Gogh Museum

Van Gogh wrote of its “vague figure toiling away… in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold,” as a modernist expression of “sacred realism” with calm, religious hope in the face of death and his own demise. Association of grain with life suggested humanity’s vulnerability and resiliency in passionate reds and golds composed in balanced synthesis with the greenery and browns of verdant earth. These colors he complemented by mysterious orange and blue tones of the cosmos—a palette strikingly similar to his The Resurrection of Lazarus (1890). In spite of grain’s susceptibility to ruin from fire and wind, or harvest with scythe and sickle, the fields serenely endured as tangible evidence of incomparable beauty, fecundity, and energy of the divine order. The death reaper fulfilled the sower’s purpose in the grand mysterious cycle of life.

Tolstoy’s exposition on aesthetics in What is Art? (1897) embraces a wide range of creative expression from painting and sculpture to literature, folklore, and liturgy. He characterizes their highest forms as conveyance of their makers’ regard for human dignity and the natural world in ways that astonish, mystify, and benefit the common good. That Tolstoy points to Millet, Lhermitte, Gogol, and Pushkin as aesthetic exemplars is significant for their use of agrarian themes to present such universal values. Great painting and writing engender struggle and beauty by depicting meaningful ideas or memorable associations with people and places. Such understanding is at risk in contemporary society at once smart and ignorant. Information technologies can be exploited to distraction for endless browsing and displace contemplation of relationships to the earth and to others.

The characters who inhabit Tolstoy’s stories have heroic capacity, even when cast as loners and losers. They walk familiar paths to work together in the fields and better understand the people and world around them. Among the most stirring moments in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is when landlord Konstantin Levin, who sought the full life of mind, love, and labor, joins a scythe-wielding brigade in an afternoon of great satisfaction: “He… wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible.” In a day of tension over progressive approaches to a more sustainable future, considerations of Ruth and Boaz, Barbizon harvesters, and Port William farmers continue to offer meaningful interpretations of land use, technology, and the human prospect.

     Praise God for the harvest of farm and field,

     Praise God for the people who gather their yield,

     The long hours of labor, the skills of the team,

     The patience of science, the power of machine.

     Praise God for the harvest of conflict and love,

     For leaders and people to struggle to serve,

     To conquer oppression, earth’s plenty increase,

     And gather God’s harvest of justice and peace.

—Brian Wren, “Praise God for the Harvest” (1968)

Mediation of Ancient Urges

Contemporary agrarian art and literature offer insightful if complex perspectives on the transformation of such rural landscapes and ways of life. Stories and paintings are elegiac and abstract as well as hopeful, with expressions of agrarian renewal evident in newfound appreciation for regional heritage and stewardship of the land. These considerations juxtapose values related to the natural world with those of private development and global capitalism. There is little to regret about archaic rural prejudices, grinding aspects of exhaustive dawn to dusk farm labor, and highly erosive tillage practices. Small town redevelopment efforts are leading  to examine in new ways how local stories and resources might be shared to better contend with shifting labor patterns and demographic change. Harvest bees and church benefits still aid neighbors in times of special need. More broadly, the harvest experience abides with seasonal urgency because of its changeless and necessary provision. The instinct unites humanity worldwide through rituals of planting and harvesting and thanksgiving.

Cultural tensions rise in the wake of climate change, global food security needs, and concern about impacts on soil biomes and wildlife. Establishing balance involves mediation of the ancient urges for veneration and exploitation, and the serious critique of technocratic limits in agricultural improvement. Wendell Berry’s writing offers a fertile field of practical recommendations for how persons living anywhere can apply the useful habits of memory, attention, and reverance to promote the good life. Wendell Berry recognizes the primacy of earth care to support all other human endeavors, and likens this to holy service: “The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it…. It keeps the past, not as history or memory, but as richness, new possibility.”

Earl Roberge, Stalks of Wheat (c. 1960), Franklin County Museum; Pasco, Washington

Whether on a Midwest farm or in a Chicago high-rise, one can live with fidelity to place by learning and practicing the home arts and community building. Family care and homemaking need not require moving “back to the land.” In any setting folks can summon moral courage to eat together, shop locally to support practicioners of local crafts, connect young people to worthwhile endeavors, and affirm the values of environmental stewarship. Policies and practice of self-reliance and promotion of the common good that characterized republicanism in the ancient world are relevant more than ever in an era of threatened landscapes, endangered species, and marginalized labor. Environmental ethicist Julie Crouse characterizes Berry’s ongoing literary conversation about these matters as a “sacred harvest” for renewing the common good by promotion of connections among people, landscapes, and spirituality. In the context of farm work for participation in the market economy, or mental work for healthy imagination and discernment, Berry calls the external standard of such endeavors the “Great Economy,” or the “Kingdom of God.” The goal is to promote abiding, abundant harvests and the long term wellbeing of individuals in community.

Berry has explored these ideas most fully in his novels and short stories about the Coulter, Catlett, Branch, and other families. They dwell together in imaginary Port William, for which the author’s native Port Royal, Kentucky, serves as a touchstone. The place is not a utopian metaphor as its residents navigate with failure and success through cross-currents of old ways and modernity’s encroachments and benefits. In “That Distant Land” (1965), a rural neighborhood crew gathers for tobacco harvest in the sweltering August heat, and Berry casts a scene that resembles field laborers of ancient times: “They drove into the work, maintaining the same pressing rhythm from one end of the row to the other, and yet they worked well, as smoothly and precisely as dancers. To see them moving side by side against the standing crop, leaving it fallen, the field changed, behind them, was maybe like watching Homeric soldiers going into battle. It was momentous and beautiful, and touchingly, touchingly mortal.” The classical allusion is not incidental. In “The Agrarian Standard” (2002), Berry invokes lines from Virgil’s Fourth Georgic about “an old Cilician” who cares for a small plot of land that produces abundantly because of an ethic “rooted in mystery and sanctity” that values giving back to the health of the soil—an affectionate agarian stewardship for the sake of present and unborn generations.

Mentalities of moderation foster individual identity as well as social cohesion to sustain both culture and soil. In his foreword to Of the Land and the Spirit (2008), an anthology of Walter, Lord Northbourne’s writings on ecology and religion, Berry (like Lord Northbourne) points to perennialist matters of ultimate purpose as expressed by Jesus to, “[S]eek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness...,” in order to be provided food, drink, and clothing. Berry suggests that mastery of agriculture, husbandry, weaving, and other skills are assumed in this context, and that Jesus demonstrated faith by prayerful service to others in feeding and healing them. In these ways, literary, artistic, social, and vocational endeavors in any age represent harvests in which anyone can participate.

Johann Raphael Wehle, And They Followed Him (detail, 1900), Lithograph on cardboard, 4 x 6 inches, Columbia Heritage Collection