Soggy Knowledge: Mud and the Making of Modernity

Examining the marshes, swamps, and fens of coastal Europe, Africa, and America, this paper dredges up an epistemology of mud. Building on a rich body of work in sensory history, it digs into the slimy materiality of coastal clays, silts, and sands—the touch, smell, taste, sound, and visual dimensions—as they were imagined by early modern commentators. As this paper shows, mud was often imbued with moral meaning. An admixture of water and earth that could sink a wagon or soil one’s Sunday best, mud challenged notions of societal order, which by the early modern period was increasingly predicated on private property, agricultural productivity, and a growing belief that cleanliness meant godliness. In efforts to create the type of stable land upon which one could built a virtuous life, Dutch engineers dammed and diked the Low Countries and then went on to modify marshlands across Europe. With Dutch assistance, the English drained and enclosed their fenlands both to create private property and to subdue the unsavory people who lived there. Similarly, settlers in America drained and filled their tidal marshes to create pastures and build coastal cities. This story of fenland reclamation, agricultural revolution, and urban development is a familiar one. But by placing mud and its moral dimensions at the center of the narrative, this chapter writes the marginalized people who waded knee-deep through the stuff into the history of oceanic natural knowledge production.