Inspired by Virgil’s Georgics, this study conceptualizes Renaissance poetry as a domestic labor.

When is literary production more menial than inspired, more like housework than heroics of the mind? In this revisionist study, Katie Kadue shows that some of the authors we credit with groundbreaking literary feats—including Michel de Montaigne and John Milton—conceived of their writing in surprisingly modest and domestic terms. In contrast to the monumental ambitions associated with the literature of the age, and picking up an undercurrent of Virgil’s Georgics, poetic labor of the Renaissance emerges here as often aligned with so-called women’s work. Kadue reveals how male authors’ engagements with a feminized georgic mode became central to their conceptions of what literature is and could be. This other georgic strain in literature shared the same primary concern as housekeeping: the necessity of constant, almost invisible labor to keep the things of the world intact. Domestic Georgic brings into focus a conception of literary—as well as scholarly and critical—labor not as a striving for originality and fame but as a form of maintenance work that aims at preserving individual and collective life.

Traces those motives and modes of expression in English literature from the Elizabethans through the great masters of the eighteenth century which have been inspired or affected by the example of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The material presented is sure to interest both the student of the French Renaissance, as a notable memorial of the vitality of its greatest genius, and the student of English literature, as the makings of a tradition which is clearly in the ascendant today. Appendices include extracts from certain imitators and critics not readily accessible outside large libraries.