'Concerning the Transmutation & Improvements of Plants': Vitalism, Alchemy, and Cornucopianism in John Beale's Agricultural Writings

Justin Niermeier-Dohoney (University of Chicago)

In a short, unpublished tract from 1659 (Royal Society, Boyle Papers, RB/1/34/9), natural philosopher and agricultural reformer John Beale wrote on the “transmutation & improvements of plants.” The use of the term “transmutation” was no rhetorical tool here, and Beale’s work reveals a curious and seldom addressed connection between alchemy and the agricultural improvement projects of seventeenth-century England. This paper details these correlations using Beale’s treatise as a case study of the broader influence that vitalistic alchemy had on botany, husbandry, horticulture, and the incipient “life sciences,” such as they were, in the mid-seventeenth century. Eventually a founding member of the Royal Society, Beale had previously been involved with the informal intelligencer network centered around Samuel Hartlib and the natural philosophers and reformers who associated with him, including the millenarian, utopian agricultural theorist and alchemist Gabriel Plattes. I describe Plattes’s influence on Beale in the 1650s, particularly regarding alchemy’s potential to transform natural substances like plant matter or animal manures in order to solve practical, agricultural problems such as increasing soil fertility and crop yields. I argue that those who subscribed to these vitalistic concepts, like Beale, contended that something essential to the existence of life inhered in all matter—both living and inert—and that through the proper understanding and application of these matter theories, early modern alchemists could control nature and induce it to provide a cornucopia of agricultural plenitude.

“Pre-Carbon Agriculture for a Post-Carbon Future: Considering the Mustards as a Form of Early Modern Agricultural Improvement in England”

Amy Coombs (The University of Chicago)

My talk explores the early modern origins of one of the most potent organic farming strategies used today—the tillage of seed meals from the mustard family to kill pests. More than 400 years before the biodiesel industry reinvented the integrated manufacturing system by which Brassicaceae species are pressed to make oil and the crushed meal is tilled into the earth to suppress pathogens, an English clothier named Benedict Webb launched a similar industry to produce oil for textile finishing. His monopoly dominated markets for well over 100 years and likely changed the very soils of the early modern English landscape. Historians of the British Agricultural Revolution have largely ignored this innovation. While they explore the disbursal history, the technology was never designated a form of soil improvement. My talk makes this case. Farmers strategically used mustards as well as their meals to target pests and prepare the soil for corn. Unlike legumes and clover, which have a small, gradual benefit, modern studies show that Brassica meals compete with chemical fumigants and deliver similar yield increases. Rapeseed introduction overlaps with poorly understood increases in grain yields that pre-date the Norfolk, enclosure, and plowing innovation, and this piece contributes to revisionist models that argue for an earlier agricultural revolution. By tracing the coupling of this technology with the drainage of the Fens, I also explore how enclosure benefited poor farmers working undesirable plots. I have been developing this project through scanned farming protocols and by linking disbursal histories to grain yield graphs, but in November I will also have archival "findings."