‘Manure thyself’: The Poetics of Fertilisation in Early Modern English Religious Writing

When John Donne wrote, ‘Manure thyself then, to thyself be improved;/And with vain outward things be no more moved’, he was ironically combining rural and biblical tropes which underlined contemporary anxieties about dearth and fertility. This chapter discusses how the poetics of manure in early modern religious writing complicated the biblical language of dominion and reoriented familiar providential arguments about God’s will and authority. The chapter focuses mainly on the experience and writing of two figures—John Carpenter, rector of Northleigh in Devon, and Edward Bury, a nonconformist minister from Bolas Magna in Shropshire—who represent relatively obscure rural clergy and closely reads their experience of the spaces of rapidly transforming rural environments. It argues that their deployment of the poetics of manure uncovers the paradoxes of cognition, representation, and ecological sympathy in early modern religious writing. This was grounded in rural clergymen’s micro-negotiations of local geographies, which led to an experimental treatment of things in nature. Their methods of reading the books of Nature and God offered alternative, non-determinist understandings of the role of the human subject in a rapidly changing natural environment.