Farming to Feeling in the 15th Century, with Lisa H. Cooper

Around 1440, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester commissioned a translation of the 4th-C Latin prose manual Opus agriculturae [The Work of Farming], the most popular agronomical text in the Middle Ages, into royal Middle English verse. Focusing on examples of technique and technological description in the poem, the talk argues that in the translator’s hands the work of farming becomes an affectively charged activity whose emotive charge goes hand-in-hand with the particular technologies of the book.