ABSTRACT
Fulke Greville’s poetry suggests a reconsideration of the role played by mathematics in a Protestant culture of discipline. Reformist schemes such as Cressey Dymock’s for the English farm or indeed Milton’s for education can be regarded similarly as tentative attempts to balance spiritual virtue and intellectual truth against human frailty and acquisitiveness through the mediating discipline, or ‘reduction’ of good ‘design’. Where the traditional moral economy conceives of a national polity constituted through the aggregate of its particular local traditions, the formalized economy of enclosure polemic makes common use seem incompatible with any wider human intercourse, including that of language itself. Wasteful women on the early modern stage, and those modern, commercial aspects of early modern culture coded feminine, are the enemies not just of a traditional moral economy of duty and hospitality, but also of newer values of Georgic thrift and independence.
