Feeding Desire: Generative Environments, Meat Markets, and the Management of Sheep Intercourse in Great Britain, 1700–1750 by Emily Pawley* ABSTRACT As a system of profit based on reproduction, growth, and eating, animal husbandry offers an ideal place to examine how capitalism shapes knowledge of bodies. Recent work on the history of breeding demonstrates this, showing how new markets in “blood” helped define new theories of heredity and race. This essay expands on this literature by examining eighteenth-century British efforts to control a different as- pect of animal reproduction: desire. Spurred by changing meat markets in out-of- season lamb and expanding property structures that created sex-segregated herds, shepherds, farmers, and agricultural writers worked to provoke the seasonally depen- dent desires of ewes by feeding them aphrodisiac foods, changing the ways that sex was staged, and creating landscapes of “artificial” grass timed to help ewes escape the constraints of the seasons. Their efforts draw our attention to a broader range of bodily experts, from physicians, to professional feeders, to Linnaean botanists, who were interested in the ways that landscapes could be made to shape bodies. The essay suggests that these forms of environmental control, which still undergird capitalist farming, have left significant modern traces on both knowledge and landscapes and offer a rich and relatively untapped source of bodily knowledge. William Ellis knew a surprising number of aphrodisiacs for sheep, including, but not limited to, “blades of onion and garlick,”“the ladyfinger grass, the Tyne Grass, and the Honeysuckle Grass,”“Half a Pint of good October, mellow, silky Beer,” and, more bleakly, two dogs to “fright and run [ewes] about the ground.” 1 Ellis was particularly proud of this last point. “If I was to write a full Detail of all the valuable Services this one Secret, that I have here exposed publickly, will do the World, I might write a Vol- ume on it,” he declared. Indeed, the inclusion of sheep aphrodisiacs was crucial to the appeal of Ellis’s book, A Compleat System of Experienced Improvements, Made on Sheep, Grass-lambs, and House Lambs (1749). On the cover, he promised to explain “How to make an hundred Ewes take Ram in an Hour’s Time, either by artificial, or by * Department of History, Dickinson College, P.O. Box 1773, Carlisle, PA 17013; pawleye@dickinson .edu. q 2018 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0369-7827/11/2018-0003$10.00 1 William Ellis, A Compleat System of Experienced Improvements, Made on Sheep, Grass-Lambs, and House-Lambs (London, 1749), 296–9; here and throughout, emphasis in the original. OSIRIS 2018, 33 : 47–62 47