Wasteland: A History by Vittoria Di Palma (review)

Every now and then, a gifted scholar produces a book that simultaneously reimagines some broad dimension of everyday life in the early modern British world and situates the telling of that experience in the physicality of material culture. One of the most important of these for me was John Crowley’s The Invention of Comfort, which provided a rigorous historical frame for the shifting conceptions of comfort, directly challenged our contemporary assumptions about the primacy of physical comfort, and gave new meanings to all kinds of everyday material culture, from mirrors to fireplaces.¹ Crowley taught us that comfort had a history. In her new book, Waste-land: A History, Vittoria di Palma reminds us that “nature” has a history—we’ve already learned this, of course, from William Cronon and others—but Di Palma adds to that discourse a critical theological/social/aesthetic condition as yet underdeveloped if not flatly ignored.² And for historians of places, material culture, and vernacular architecture, she situates the wasteland in actual territories of the British world and gives us a new frame for understanding not only cartographic representations and landscape paintings but also fences, embankments, ditches, windmills, and sawmills. All scholars of the early modern British world should read this book.

She begins by grappling with the difficult task of defining her subject. A wasteland is “a landscape that resists notions of proper or appropriate use,” is “defined not by what it is or what it has, but by what it lacks,” and is a “threatening, challenging, and perilous place” (3–4). The earliest manifestations of the word in English are biblical. The Latin term desertus becomes “wasteland” in early translations of the Old and New Testaments, referring to spaces of desolation, isolation, and wandering. But, Di Palma argues, “a particular convergence of beliefs, technologies, institutions, and individuals in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Scotland, and Wales” transformed the early biblical understanding of wasteland as immutable antithesis into a very real physical (and social) problem with potential solutions. The early modern British view of wasteland took on something greater than theological significance partly in response to the reformulation of aesthetic theory that gave sensory perception and emotional response greater significance in the definition of beauty. The production of a theory of the beautiful made room also for the rise of its aesthetic antithesis, the disgusting. The picturesque found its antithesis in the wasteland, a place in which theology and aesthetics comfortably cohabitate. But this aesthetic reformulation took place alongside the enclosure of the countryside, the agricultural revolution, the expansion of empire, and the early Industrial Revolution. Wasteland arises as a convenient trope in the remaking of early modern Britain.

Di Palma’s telling unfolds in six chapters. The initial two—“Wasteland” and “Improvement”—very carefully unpack the historical usage and evolution of each word. The first undertakes a careful etymology, following the term from the Old English westen to the English wasteland and its early association with the notion of common lands: those fields made available by the nobility to commoners for gleaning and pasturing and those forests available for foraging for wild fruit and firewood. This understanding is deeply enmeshed in the legal framework of a commonwealth. The prominence of wastelands in John Bunyan’s enormously popular The Pilgrim’s Progress, first published in 1678, cemented the meaning of wasteland as “wilderness” in the popular imagination. Simultaneously, a new political economy—articulated most clearly by John Locke—reframed the commons not as a landscape of provision for the commoner but as land that is unproductive, unimproved. As a result, the end of the seventeenth century brought with it the demise of one land-dependent collective political economy and the rise of private property claims and the concomitant imagination of the wilderness as improvable. Without improvement, wasteland was, well, wasted. The solution, privatization of property and the resulting diminution of common lands, was generally understood to be a...