Imperfect Creatures

Lucinda Coles Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of vermin as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Coles argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts alongside other nonliterary primary sources (including under-examined archival materials) from the period, including: William Shakespeares Hamlet and Macbeth, Christopher Marlowes The Jew of Malta, Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year, Giambattista Della Portas Natural Magick, William Harveys Anatomical Exercises on the Generation of Animals; Thomas Willis Cerebri Anatome and Of the Soul of Brutes, and Robert Boyles Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Receivd Notion of Nature. As Cole illustrates, human health and demographic problemsnotably those of feeding populations periodically stricken by hunger, disease, and faminewere tied to larger questions about food supplies, property laws, national identity, even the theological imperatives that underwrote humankind's claim to dominion over the animal kingdom. In this context, Coles study indicates, so-called vermin occupied liminal spaces between subject and object, nature and animal, animal and the devil, the devil and diseaseeven reason and madness. This verminous discourse formed a foundational category used to carve out humankinds relationship to an unpredictable, a-rational natural world, but it evolved into a form for thinking about not merely animals but anything that threatened the health of the body politichumans, animals, and even thoughts.