Early modern poets equated mining the earth with sexual violation of women

Evidence

Not only did mining encourage the moral sin of avarice, it was compared by Spenser to the second great sin, human lust. Digging into the matrices and pockets of earth for metals was like mining the female flesh for pleasure. The sixteenthand seventeenth-century imagination perceived a direct correlation between mining and digging into the nooks and crannies of a woman’s body. Both mining and sex represent for Spenser the return to animality and earthly slime. In the Faerie Queen, lust is the basest of all human sins. The spilling of human blood, in the rush to rape the earth of her gold, taints and muddies the once fertile fields. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 231

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the Aristotle gendered form-over-matter hierarchy claim in ch7 and the ch9 womb-analogy for mineral generation; exemplifies the materialist cultural logic of controlling nature-as-female. — connects to: Premodern miners treated mining as violating the Earth Mother’s sacred body — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 81; The earth-mother metaphor survived as a legal argument against mining into the 1490s — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 202; Modern scientific language still encodes the sexualized coercion of nature — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 682 (+4 more)
• CANDY: The detail that 16th-17th c. authors read digging for ore as literally penetrating a woman’s body is vivid enough to launch a conversation about how extractive idioms carry gendered violence.

Broader Connections

• Poetic tradition reduces woman’s body to a natural landscape for man to possess. #expands (0.88)
• The image of the beneficent mother earth functioned as an ethical restraint on mining #qualifies (0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 173
• Modern scientific language still encodes the sexualized coercion of nature #expands (0.82) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 682
• Bacon framed scientific method as the capture and enslavement of a female nature #qualifies (0.82) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 676
• The female earth was central to premodern organic cosmology #corroborates (0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 61