Agricola reframed mining as legitimate by marshaling and refuting its ancient critics

Evidence

If mining were to be freed of such strictures and sanctioned as a commercial activity, the ancient arguments would have to be refuted. This task was taken up by Georg Agricola (1494–1555), who wrote the first “modern” treatise on mining. His De Re Metallica (“On Metals,” 1556) marshalled the arguments of the detractors of mining in order to refute them and thereby promote the activity itself. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 208

Categorization

• XREF: Agricola’s move — systematically cataloguing rebuttals to delegitimize a moral stricture — is structurally the same rhetorical reversal the polyad’s law/institutions strand tracks: how an ideology licenses extraction by first defeating its restraining ethic. — connects to: Premodern miners treated mining as violating the Earth Mother’s sacred body — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 81; Agricola’s fish analogy aimed to free mining from organic-nature restraint. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 216; The earth-mother metaphor survived as a legal argument against mining into the 1490s — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 202
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: exactly which arguments did Agricola deploy to overturn the mother-earth restraint, and did he prefigure Bacon’s torture/rape-of-nature metaphors?

Broader Connections

• Agricola’s fish analogy aimed to free mining from organic-nature restraint. #expands (0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 216
• The earth-mother metaphor survived as a legal argument against mining into the 1490s #corroborates (0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 202