González Remuiñán, Alberto, and Dulce Freire (2025): "Building Innovative Soil Knowledge to Improve Iberian Agriculture (16–18th Century)", en Justin Niermeier-Dohoney and Aleksandar ShopovI (eds.), Toward a Global History of Soil, Leiden, Brill, p. 138-160.

Despite its central role in agriculture, the relevance given to soil has changed through time. Drawing on books published in the Iberian Peninsula between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this chapter broadens the historical perspective of current soil studies. The Iberian literature on soil is grounded in the religious convictions of Catholicism, a knowledge also reinforced with authoritative quotes from classical writers, which complicated the appearance of new ideas. However, in noting their views on soil, Spanish and Portuguese writers also considered factors such as human labor, new interpretations of climate, and empirical evidence in vernacular languages. Here, the intensification of the Iberian states’ maritime contacts played an important role, introducing new knowledge from overseas territories that called into question previously held theories. In order to grasp the early modern understanding of soil as a natural resource, it is necessary to analyze how these writers adopted and altered the existing material they had inherited from previous centuries.