Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Keith Botelho is Professor of English at Kennesaw State University. He is the author of Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity. Joseph Campana is William Shakespeare Professor of English and Director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University. He is the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity and the coeditor, with Scott Maisano, of Renaissance Posthumanism.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Creatures Joseph Campana 1. Silkworm Thomas Moffett, Silkworm Laureate Bruce Boehrer 2. Ants Go to the Pismire Shannon Kelley 3. Flea Annihilating the Copulative Conceit: John Donne's Conversion of the "son of dust" into Uncertain Sacrilege Gary M. Bouchard 4. Fly Of Flyes: The Insect Mind of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus Perry Guevara 5. Gnat The Clamor of Things: Moffett's Gnats, Spenser's Complaints Steven Swarbrick 6. Maggot Mutable Maggots: Corruption, Generation, and Literary Legacy Emily L. King 7. Bee "Some say the bee stings": Toward an Apian Poetics Keith Botelho and Joseph Campana 8. Wasp What Is It Like to Be Like a Wasp? Donovan Sherman 9. Butterflies and Moths Volatile Creatures and Elaborate Work Chris Barrett 10. Grasshopper and Locust Antimonarchal Locusts: Translating the Grasshopper in the Aftermath of the English Civil Wars Kathryn Vomero Santos 11. Beetle Sycorax's Beetles: Legacies of Science, the Occult, and Blackness Roya Biggie 12. Spider The Renaissance of Spiders: Ambivalence, Beauty, Terror, Art Mary Baine Campbell 13. Water Bugs Bugs Aquatic: Water Striders from Moffett to Marine Science Dan Brayton 14. Worms Worms of Conscience Karen Raber 15. Scorpions Flame of Fire Beaten: Scorpions in and out of Mind Eric C. Brown Epilogue Creatures Keith Botelho List of Contributors Index

"This is a superb and richly varied collection that does justice to the dazzling variety of entomological writing in the Renaissance. . . . Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance makes a significant contribution to animal studies, the environmental humanities and the history of science, particularly in its attention to scale and the ways that literary insects both underwrote and pressured the centrality of analogy as the episteme of pre-Enlightenment natural history." -Todd Andrew Borlik Renaissance Studies "Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance brings a welcome and timely focus on early modern understandings of insect life, ideas, and work that stood, as the authors convincingly argue, in the midst of the transformation of natural history 'as literary authority' to embodying the new scientific ideas and observational methods of the era. This two-volume work makes a significant scholarly contribution to literary studies and history by bringing insects and insect life into these conversations." -Martha Few, author of Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire "There has not previously been such a wide-ranging collection as this. Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance is a vital new contribution to not only early modern studies, not only animal studies and ecocriticism, but also the history of science, the history of medicine, and current debates about the environment." -Erica Fudge, author of Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals in Early Modern England