Terre's Brilliant Mines

This chapter turns to a mid-sixteenth-century poetic text, the “Hymne de l’or” (Hymn to Gold) by French author Pierre de Ronsard. The poem is read here—recuperating in particular its “vision” of Terre that generations of critics have written off as a mere aside—as a poem ever conscious about gold’s exterranean origins and as a kind of poetic counterpart to nonpoetic texts about mining such as Georgius Agricola’s Bermannus (1500) and Vannoccio Biringuccio’s metallurgical treatise De la Pirotechnia (1540). After analyzing the “vision” of Terre in some detail, especially the way that Terre is described as always already containing not just gold, but mines, the chapter explores how Ronsard juxtaposes (in somewhat problematic ways) specific sites of extraction.

Sickly Mountain sides

This chapter offers a counter-reading of Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica (On Mining) (1556), the first major printed book about mining. Usually understood within a teleological narrative of technological progress, it is here argued that Agricola’s work also, and despite itself, gives a voice to the extraction sites from which matter is extracted.

Geomedia

This chapter focuses on limestone in the context of the Normandy town of Caen, which is largely built atop and indeed from that stone. Caen is thus at once extraction site and extracted matter. Discussing both buildings within the city and the texts of a local historian, Charles de Bourgueville, which describe them and their destruction at the hands of Protestants during the Wars of Religion, this chapter seeks out some of the ways in which humans long for that stone’s endurance while also worrying about its fragility. Putting geological and human timelines into dialogue, the chapter thus situates the exterranean at the intersection of extraction, longing, and fear.

Demonic Mines

This chapter shifts attention from the hillsides to the shafts and galleries that miners hollow out underground. Via a close reading of Agricola’s De animantibus subterraneis (On Subterranean Creatures) and of sections of De re metallica not discussed in the previous chapter, as well as works by French writer François Garrault and by Paracelsus, this chapter asks if it is possible to understand “belief” in mining spirits as colluding with the chemical realities and medical dangers for humans connected with extracting matter. From this section, it thus emerges that for early modern humanists extraction of matter ex terrawas never just a question of human agents yielding extractive and controlling mastery over inanimate hillsides and underground rock faces.

Terra Has Standing

This chapter offers a reading of a late fifteenth-century Latin text, Paulus Niavis’s Judicium Jovis(Judgment of Jupiter), which grants Terra legal standing, a right it uses to enter Jupiter’s court and accuse a miner of matricide. Situating Niavis’s Terra in a tradition going from Greek Gaia to Roman Terra up through the twelfth-century Terra of Alain de Lille in his De planctu naturae and finally reaching forward to Anthropocene-era debates over the relationship between humans and the Gaia of Lovelock and Latour, the chapter teases out how the Judicium Jovis fashions a sense of the exterranean in which Terra is neither just a body (or globe) nor a vital force (i.e., Earth’s systems), but both at the same time, such that the text’s final locking together of Terra and human activity serves as an argument against forms of ecological thought that depend upon seeing totalities from afar.

Incipit

… the voice-less things once placed as a décor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone, from now on thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and maneuvers. —Michel Serres, Le contrat naturel Humans in the sixteenth century did not observe things with a cold eye, with a detached gaze. They felt wholly bound up with them....

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Saline Intimacies

This chapter studies another and wholly different exterranean matter, salt. The focus here is on how authors (both early modern and contemporary) attempt to describe salt by listing what it does, which ultimately points toward its chemical properties, as too does the doing of one particularly salty hero, Rabelais’s Pantagruel. Discussion follows of salt’s contested exterraneanity via Cellini’s saliera and a poem by André Mage de Fiefmelin. The chapter ends by discussion of a neo-Latin poem by Conrad Celtis that imagines salt extraction and human descent into the mines in strikingly similar terms. From these two chapters, it becomes clear that collective perception of the exterranean origins of extracted matter in an oscillation is more than a given, and that it does not determine in and of itself how humans live with bits-taken-from-the-Earth.

Terra Globalized

This chapter shifts the focus firmly to a geographical—as opposed to mythological—Terra and to Terra’s (quite literal) early modern post-1492 globalization, as when Sebastian Münster says Terra is known to be “globum magnum & rotundum” (a big and round globe). The chapter explores how the post-1492 Terra of cosmographic writing and globe gores—and that might seem to be produced only for a divine seen-from-nowhere perspective—collide with contemporary presentations of New World mining on this new global Terra.