God Speed the Plough

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This book presents a fresh view of crucial processes of change, offering through an inter-disciplinary analysis new insights into both the history and the literature of the land in early modern England. In the period 1500 to 1660 the practices and values of rural England were exposed to unprecedented challenges. Within this context a wide variety of commentators examined and debated the changing conditions, a process documented in the pages of sermons, pamphlets, satiric verse and drama, husbandry and surveying manuals, chorographical tracts and rural poetry. The analysis of these text in God speed the plough explores changing patterns of representation. The book argues that important movements revised preexistent assumptions about agrarian England and shaped bold new appreciations of rural life. While Tudor moralists responded to social crises by asserting ideals of rural stability and community, by the seventeenth century a discourse of improvement promoted vitally divergent notions of thrift and property.