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 textsWilliam Shakespeares Macbeth, Christopher Marlowes The Jew of Malta, Abraham Cowleys The Plagues of Egypt, Thomas Shadwells The Virtuoso, the Earl of Rochesters A Ramble in St. Jamess Park, and Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Yearalongside other nonliterary primary sources and under-examined archival materials from the period, including treatises on animal trials, grain shortages, rabies, and comparative neuroanatomy. 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, and the theological imperatives that underwrote humankinds 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, irrational 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.