Reading Virgil's Georgics as a Scientific Text.

Reading Virgil's Georgics as a Scientific Text

F. de Bruyn. 2004. English literary history 71:661-689.

De Bruyn examines the debate between two 18th-century agriculturalists, Stephen Switzer and Jethro Tull, over the value of the technical information in Virgil's Georgics. While Switzer argued that Virgil's poem was a useful source of information about husbandry, Tull dismissed the work as largely useless to farmers, condemning Virgil's poetic style as he extolled the plainness of his own prose as a suitable medium for technical writing. "The logic of Tull's critique was to have far-reaching consequences, as the concept of the literary was redefined over time to exclude those modes of writing devoted to scientific and technical purposes."