Reading Virgil’s Georgics as a Scientific Text: The Eighteenth-Century Debate between Jethro Tull and Stephen Switzer

Abstract

In this paper I argue that Virgil’s Georgics was taken seriously in the early decades of the eighteenth century as a scientific document. This view of the poem underlies a bitter dispute that broke out between Jethro Tull and Stephen Switzer over the technical merits of Virgil’s agricultural precepts, a controversy I trace in some detail. I consider how and why the Georgics could be read in this way, and I argue that Tull’s attack on the didactic claims eighteenth-century readers made for the poem had the effect, in the long run, of eroding its extraordinary literary and cultural authority.