Current PhD Student

Francis Taylor

Thesis Title:

'A rude unsanctified mass, the Weeds of the World': Weeding in Early Modern England, c.1580-1680

Supervisors:

Professor Kevin Killeen & Dr Emilie Murphy

Description:

My thesis interprets weeding as a material and discursive practice in early modern England. On the one hand, it excavates the local world(s) of work involved in perceiving, categorising, and removing plants which propagated themselves on the margins and interstices of cultivated terrains, in market gardens, pastures, and arable fields. In this, I highlight both the enormous particularity (in temporal patterns, material cultures, plant types, and languages) of weeding ecologies, as well as the variable status of their weeds– as often a sign of latent fertility, thriftily put to new medical-alimentary uses, or composted in burned or rotted form, as straightforwardly abjected and displaced.

On the other, the thesis explores a widespread cultural metaphorics which figured a range of textual activities– homiletic, polemic, epistemic– as similarly engaged with unruly growth. It follows this across a series of works, including period sermons, devotional poetry and prose, and into writings on experimental method as they surrounded the early Royal Society, assembling a suite of authors from Thomas Adams and Peter Heylyn to Robert Boyle and Mary Rich. Stemming from analogical exegeses of the terms of the Adamic Fall ('thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee'), and wider interest in the typological symbology of Biblical growths, these works were shaped by typical Christianised themes of watchfulness and purification. However, they were also inflected by other, less certain, ones: the virtues of ill-discipline, the fecundity of spontaneous thought, and the worldly necessity of accommodation. Such a plurality of meanings reflects, I argue, both the strangeness of Scriptural weeds, and the diverse physical patterns of plant use, refuse, and reuse characteristic of rural settings in the period.

My research is funded by a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Arts and Humanities, and I have come to it after receiving a Masters with Distinction from the University of York's Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies.