Edward McLean Test. Sacred Seeds: New World Plants in Early Modern English Literature. Early Modern Cultural Studies Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Illustrations. 243 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4962-0788-3.
Reviewed by Jack Bouchard (Rutgers University)
Published on H-Environment (February, 2021)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, plants from the Americas found their way to gardens, kitchens, fields, libraries, and households across Afro-Eurasia. Yet plants also arrived in less tangible ways. They appeared in the written and spoken word, talked about and performed on stage and page, even when they were still absent from the marketplace and dinner table. American plants were taken up by European authors as potent symbols and imagery, deployed in literature in important ways that spoke to political, cultural, and social problems in the early modern world. Uncovering how plants were represented and consumed in literature is the purpose of Edward McLean Test’s new Sacred Seeds: New World Plants in Early Modern English Literature.
Sacred Seeds contributes to a growing field of historical and literary works that have explored the transmission and translation of knowledge about plants from the Americas to Europe in the early modern period. Test is a literary scholar, but Sacred Seeds represents his desire to bridge the gap with history and to use literature to engage with important historical debates. The introduction is short but punchy, with a thoughtful and broad discussion of the scholarship on early modern biological exchanges, literature, and modernity. This is followed by a short chapter on the history of herbals and the circulation of biological knowledge across the Atlantic. The bulk of the book constitutes four chapters of varying length examining four plants: cactus fruit, tobacco, guaiac, and amaranth.
The goal of Sacred Seeds, as laid out in the introduction and back material, is to reassert the role of indigenous Americans in shaping how Europeans thought about “New World” plants. As Test makes clear in the introduction, the primary purpose of the work is to “unsettle the traditional Eurocentric view of English Renaissance literature as determined by Greco-Roman myth and culture by linking New World plants to Native American myths” (p. 4). He seeks the “indigenization of English literature” (p. 5). (Though he refers to “Native Americans” broadly, by virtue of the plants chosen and the European literature studied, the book primarily deals with the Mexica, the only community he addresses by name.) This is an eminently laudable goal, and Test is right to identify this as a major weakness in the literature.
After reading this book, I frankly do not think that it actually accomplishes this important task. For all of Test’s emphasis in the introduction on indigenous perspectives, the book itself seems much more concerned with European thought and Greco-Roman legacies. The emphasis on literature has produced a decidedly Eurocentric and, importantly, text-centric perspective. The source base is almost entirely printed European books, poems, and plays, leaving little room for non-European voices. Test does not balance this with sufficient attempts to explore ecological knowledge, religious beliefs, and consumption practices among various indigenous communities in the Americas. There is, remarkably, no attempt to study indigenous sources systematically or intensively: Edmund Spenser gets two chapters, while the Codex Mendoza is mentioned once. Archaeology is absent. It is frankly baffling that Test devotes so little space in his chapters to actually explaining various modes of indigenous American thought about the plants he is discussing or about the biology and ecological origins of those plants.
Chapter 4, on guaiac, is emblematic of the problem with Sacred Seeds. Opening with Spenser’s Faery Queen (1590) and a discussion of Cupid’s arrows, the chapter from the start adopts a classically inflected European perspective on plants and their properties. The chapter then explores how Europeans adopted guaiac by conflating it with ebony (“heben”) and their own experience fighting syphilis. As the title of the chapter implies, it is about how Europeans turned guaiac into a “Holy Wood,” one that served their needs, but there is no evidence provided that any indigenous American community thought of guaiac in these terms. Across the thirty-two pages of the book on guaiac, Test describes at various points Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Islamic, and English mythologies and how they affected Spenser’s writing. Likewise he explains how the wood was written about in Iberian, Italian, German, and English herbals; Dutch scientific treatises; and Ottoman natural histories. Yet, incredibly, at no point in the chapter does Test actually describe any indigenous American mythologies or scientific knowledge about guaiac. There is a brief description of Mexica beliefs about feathers but not about the actual wood under consideration. This is hardly a chapter that “view[s] European gardens—and Spenser’s Faery Land—through the cultural and botanical template of Mexican society” (p. 12). In many ways it does quite the opposite.
And therein lies the issue. In aiming so high but sticking to printed European sources and omitting indigenous perspectives, Test has produced in many respects the kind of Eurocentric work he is arguing against. As a consequence, while we see what Europeans thought about Mexica religion or agriculture, or how they understood the origins of cacti and heben trees, we do not often see those things on their own terms. Indigenous cosmographies are fleetingly mentioned in some of the chapters, while there is a paucity of analysis on medical practices. The chapter on cactus fruit (or “figs”) includes a brief description of Mexica thought about the cactus, but even this is quickly subsumed in a discussion of European reactions to human sacrifice and ideas about hell and figs. We learn about the European obsession with cochineal dye and the global dye trade at the end of chapter 2 but not about how Mexica peoples used or thought about the color red or the cochineal insect itself. The chapter on tobacco includes a fascinating discussion of how Europeans appropriated the religious connotations of tobacco in the Americas to create “Divine Tobacco” on stage and in print. But Test’s discussion of indigenous American religious ideas is limited to citing Marcy Norton, and the text of Sacred Seeds paints with a broad and flattening brush that rarely acknowledges diversity in the Americas. Test often gestures vaguely to “Native Americans” or lets Mexica stand in for all indigenous communities. How then can we understand “that colonizer and the colonized mutually constituted the early modern world” and the error of denying “the Native American contributions to modernity” if we cannot see the colonized or their contributions (p. 5)?
The other chapters of the book exhibit similar problems to greater and lesser degrees. The final chapter, on amaranth, does give substantial space to Mexica religious rituals and their connection to the plant. It is the most successful chapter in that regard and comes closest to what Test seems to have wanted. In terms of highlighting indigenous American beliefs about plants and their impact on European thought, Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (2010) accomplishes this task in a much more satisfying way. The recent collection of essays Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science (2019), coedited by Jaime Marroquín Arredondo and Ralph Bauer, also offers a much more innovative, thought-provoking, and well-researched approach to the problem of cross-cultural translation of ideas between indigenous American and European thinkers.
These shortcomings are regretful inasmuch as there is so much to like in this book. It is engagingly written and deeply, richly researched. For a book focused on English literature in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, Test thinks broadly and draws on sources and literary cultures from Iberia, France, Italy, the Low Countries, and even the Ottoman Empire. He pays as much attention to the visual as well as the written word, and the book is lavishly illustrated. The basic tenets underlying Test’s argument and methods—that the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries were a time of circulating biology and ideas across global borders; that indigenous American ideas, practices, and plants had to be “translated” by Europeans; and that eurocentrism is bad—are fairly well accepted already by environmental historians, who may find this book less than revolutionary. Yet Test shows the complexity and nuance of early modern European knowledge networks, and how they informed art and literature, in an instructive way.
As an exploration of European literary representations of certain American plants in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, Sacred Seeds is useful and essential reading. The first chapter, on European herbals and their transmission of information about American plants, is also a welcome guide to understanding the source base. The sheer breadth of Test’s research produces an incredibly detailed study of the many and complex ways that authors and artists wrote about and portrayed American biology. In some cases, Test offers interesting perspectives on overlooked plants. The chapter on cactus fruit is enlightening and draws attention to what was an important plant to sixteenth-century Europeans, which has since been forgotten. Alas, the chapter is too short, and I would have liked to have seen more on the topic. Guaiac and amaranth are worthy choices, as they shed light on how important these plants were to early modern Europeans. In this sense, Sacred Seeds contributes to the wider historical literature on biological exchange by expanding the kinds of plants we talk about. Test’s work also makes a case for paying more attention to literature, and he shows the speed and enthusiasm with which authors, poets, and playwrights tool up American plants. For those who study early modern biological exchanges, this will be helpful and important evidence. Outside of the shortcomings with Test’s main argument, this book is a helpful contribution to the scholarship.
In the end, even with its limitations, Sacred Seeds is, from a methodological perspective, thought provoking. I think it is worth considering whether or not it is possible to reconcile Test’s earnest and laudable goals with a methodology rooted in the close study of European (especially English) printed texts and images. Test clearly believes so, but I fear the work he has produced suggests the opposite. Instead of a dialogue between the Americas and Europe, Sacred Seeds lets an admittedly impressive array of European texts speak for both sides. In trying this approach, Test’s work has provided one answer and warning to what is a crucial question for literary scholars, and one that historians must address if we are to work across disciplinary boundaries.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-environment.
Citation:
Jack Bouchard. Review of Test, Edward McLean, Sacred Seeds: New World Plants in Early Modern English Literature.
H-Environment, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55440
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |