Richard Marggraf Turley

Evolution, Physiology and Phytochemistry of the Psychotoxic Arable Mimic Weed Darnel (Lolium temulentum L.)

Darnel (Lolium temulentum L.), the subject of this review, is botanically and culturally significant because of its evolutionary origin as a mimic weed of cereals and its reputation as a source of potent psychoactive toxins. Evidence from molecular phylogeny, palaeontology and archaeology allows the source and spread of darnel in time and space to be reconstructed. Contemporaneously with the progenitors of wheat and barley, at the dawn of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent region of Mesopotamia and the Eastern Mediterranean, darnel was derived from a perennial ancestor that was subject to the same human-mediated selection pressures as the earliest cereal species, and shares with them the domestication traits of annuality, self-fertility, high harvest index and non-shattering grains. Because it combines the characteristics of cereals with those of forage species of the Lolium–Festuca complex, L. temulentum is a useful experimental subject for the study of the physiology of temperate grasses. In particular, it has been a model for research on the control of flowering by day length, as well as investigations of vegetative development, resource allocation and responses to abiotic stresses. Recent studies of the chemical basis for darnel’s noxious reputation reveal a complex picture in which endophytic fungi, nematodes and pathogenic bacteria separately or in combination account for the toxicity of the darnel grain. The relationship, and frequent historical conflation, of darnel and ergot poisoning is considered in detail. Finally, some examples of literary allusions to L. temulentum, from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, are given.

Objects of Suspicion: Keats, ‘To Autumn’ and the Psychology of Romantic Surveillance

Keats makes few explicit allusions to surveillance, but they are memorable, queasily attuned to asymmetries of power. Think of Porphyro’s unsuspected eye in the closet as Madeline disrobes in her bedchamber, or the ‘sly’ conspiring vision of Isabella’s brothers, or Lamia reconnoitering the nymph’s ‘secret bed’ before turning informant to Hermes.

Remembering Darnel, a Forgotten Plant of Literary, Religious, and Evolutionary Significance

Abstract This paper explores the complex interactions between people and the psychotoxic crop contaminant and wheat mimicker darnel (Lolium temulentum). Bringing together knowledge from literary, historical, religious, medical, and scientific sources, we trace the ways in which the plant’s cultural story has been informed by its cultivation (accidental and otherwise) by humans. Darnel is a man-made plant that evolved from a perennial progenitor and was subject to the same human-mediated selection pressures as the ancestral cereal species it infested. The toxicity of darnel grains is due to a cocktail of phytochemicals secreted by genetically complex endophytic fungi of the genus Epichloë, closely related to ergot (Claviceps purpurea). We show how darnel’s reputation as a poisonous cereal mimic that corrupts the food-chain made the plant a symbol of malign subversion, notably invoked in crises around religious heterodoxy and political subversion. We consider the ways in which literary allusions, from Shakespeare to Dickens, identified the corrupting influence of darnel with psychological and social breakdown. Darnel is classified as extinct in the United Kingdom and other developed countries with intensive agriculture, and its significance as a food chain contaminant and literary and religious symbol is vanishing from experience and understanding. This paper, then, is intended to serve as a textual seed bank to collect darnel’s cultural traces, and to demonstrate the ways in which the plant has annotated key debates and moments of crisis in human history.

Reading Shakespeare with the grain: sustainability and the hunger business

Although scholars have begun to re-read Shakespeare’s poems and plays in the light of ecocritical theory and methods, the role of food supply in his works, life and career continues to be overlooked. In our essay, we employ the idea of sustainability to conceptualise Shakespeare’s literary career as a continuation of his business practices. We consider both his involvement in the public stage through his investment in a joint stock playing company and his management of natural resources – especially food and food-producing land – as commodities. The value of sustainability as a literary critical methodology is exemplified by a close reading of King Lear, using the early modern principle of œconomia as an analogue for the modern notion of sustainability. Œconomia, we argue, enables us to recover King Lear’s sophisticated portrayal of the politics of food supply and competing models of sustainable development in the household and state.

Keats’s Ode ‘To Autumn’: Touching the Stubble-Plains

When William Butler Yeats thought of Keats, he imagined a Cockney schoolboy, ‘nose pressed to a sweet-shop window’.2 In his poem, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ (1917), Keats is the ‘coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper’, shut out due to his class and non-university education from ‘all the luxury of the world’, who peers longingly in at the shop window.3 Yeats’s Keats stops short, however, of smashing the glass. The situation in London was very different during a furious week in August 2011, when unrest spread through the capital and into the Midlands. The critic and restaurateur A. A. Gill dismissed the riots — some commentators prefer ‘uprising’ — as a ‘rant without reason’, a thoughtless ‘bonfire of consumer vanities’.4 In similar vein, Justin McGuirk labelled the disorder a ‘venting of consumer spleen’, which, he insisted, lacked ‘any articulated aims or ideology’.5 In a Channel 4 News interview, Paul Bagguley, researcher in the sociology of protest, remarked that ‘there used to be food riots in Britain’ — the summer’s disturbances, he added, were ‘like a consumer version of that’.6 Bagguley’s allusion to historical food riots, which we discussed in Chapters 1, 3 and 4, was perhaps more pertinent than he realized. It is worth pausing to remind ourselves that the first premises to be looted at the outbreak of the riots on 8 August was not a sportswear store, nor an electrical retailer, but the Clarence Convenience store in Hackney.

The Field in Time

It is the 10th of November 1845. Michael Faraday, writing in his diary, wishes to coin a term to describe the zone of forces that surround a magnet.2 He reaches for that most familiar and versatile of words: field. Beginning with the electromagnetic field as conceived by Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell (1831–75), the field (there’s that word again) of physics has become almost totally defined by its preoccupation with fields: indeed, Unified Field Theory — sometimes called the Theory of Everything — may reasonably be said to be the raison d’etre for physics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.3

Remembering the Land in Shakespeare’s Plays

In 1596, Paul Hentzner (1558–1623), a German lawyer, travelled through England as part of his three-year tour of France, Italy and Switzerland. Hentzner’s description of his visit includes important first-hand testimony of the royal palaces, their architecture and treasures, and he is less reticent than English courtiers in giving a frank assessment of the 66-year-old Queen Elizabeth (‘her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled … her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow, and her teeth black’).1 Fortunately for us, Hentzner also recorded some of the customs of the peasantry. In the early evening of 14 September 1598, he approached the outskirts of Windsor: As we were returning to our inn, we happened to meet some country people celebrating their harvest-home; their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed, by which, perhaps, they would signify Ceres; this they keep moving about, while men and women, men and maid servants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn. The farmers here do not bind up their corn in sheaves, as they do with us, but directly they have reaped or mowed it, put it into carts, and convey it into their barns.2

Chaucer’s Pilgrims and a Medieval Game of Food

Consider an arresting silence in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c.1380–1400). Of all the pilgrims who travel from the Tabard Inn in Shoreditch, London, to Canterbury Cathedral, the Plowman doesn’t tell a tale.2 Nor does he contribute to the pilgrims’ good- (sometimes bad-) natured banter in between the tales. The other pilgrims who do not tell their tales are the Knight’s Yeoman and the Five Guildsmen, whereas the Canon’s Yeoman tells a tale despite not having been present at the Tabard Inn. The Parson, the Plowman’s brother, has a rather tempestuous time of it between tales; his is the tale Chaucer seems to have had in mind as the culmination of his storytelling competition.3 The Canterbury Tales appears to be unfinished, which gives us one possible reason for the Plowman’s silence. As William Blake discovered on reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost, it is perhaps easier to give voice to flawed individuals than perfect ones. The Plowman as limned in the General Prologue is as close to perfection as can be imagined: A trewe swynkere and a good was he, Lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee. God loved he best with al his hoole herte At alle tymes, thogh him gamed or smerte, And thanne his neighebor right as hymselve.

The Mill in Time: George Eliot and the New Agronomy

Although Don Quixote (1606, 1615) is more famous for its ‘tilting at windmills’ episode, the antique knight makes a similar mistake when he chances on two watermills. Sancho Panza, a former farmer, sees ‘water-mills in the river, where they grind wheat’.2 Don Quixote sees something quite different: ‘There, my friend, you can see the city, castle, or fortress where some knight is being held captive, or some queen, princess, or noblewoman ill-treated, and I have been here to deliver them.’3 Their boat caught in the millrace, it is Don Quixote and Sancho who have to be rescued — by two floury-faced and exasperated millers. In Chapter 3, we considered the tendency among scholars and literary critics to read literary representations of watermills as something, anything, other than as places ‘where they grind wheat’. A hermeneutic somewhere between the knight and his squire is needed, in which literary watermills can be places of food production with the potential to carry other, related significations.