Georgius Agricola's seminal work on mining and metallurgy was published posthumously. It became the standard textbook on the subject for over two centuries, detailing everything from vein surveying and ore assaying to ventilation and the construction of stamp mills. The book included hundreds of detailed woodcut illustrations depicting the industrial technology of Renaissance Germany.

While a technical manual, 'De Re Metallica' provided the poetic imagination with a detailed lexicon of the underworld. Later poets, including John Milton in 'Paradise Lost', drew upon Agricola's vivid descriptions of subterranean fires and mineral veins to craft their own metaphors of hellish landscapes and hidden treasures. Herbert Hoover's 1912 English translation introduced this vocabulary to a 20th-century audience of writers.