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 IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction CreaturesJoseph Campana1. Silkworm Thomas Moffett, Silkworm LaureateBruce Boehrer2. Ants Go to the PismireShannon Kelley3. Flea Annihilating the Copulative Conceit: John Donne’s Conversion of the “son of dust” into Uncertain SacrilegeGary M. Bouchard4. Fly Of Flyes: The Insect Mind of Shakespeare’s Titus AndronicusPerry Guevara5. Gnat The Clamor of Things: Moffett’s Gnats, Spenser’s ComplaintsSteven Swarbrick6. Maggot Mutable Maggots: Corruption, Generation, and Literary LegacyEmily L. King7. Bee “Some say the bee stings”: Toward an Apian PoeticsKeith Botelho and Joseph Campana8. Wasp What Is It Like to Be Like a Wasp?Donovan Sherman9. Butterflies and Moths Volatile Creatures and Elaborate WorkChris Barrett10. Grasshopper and Locust Antimonarchal Locusts: Translating the Grasshopper in the Aftermath of the English Civil WarsKathryn Vomero Santos11. Beetle Sycorax’s Beetles: Legacies of Science, the Occult, and BlacknessRoya Biggie12. Spider The Renaissance of Spiders: Ambivalence, Beauty, Terror, ArtMary Baine Campbell13. Water Bugs Bugs Aquatic: Water Striders from Moffett to Marine ScienceDan Brayton14. Worms Worms of ConscienceKaren Raber15. Scorpions Flame of Fire Beaten: Scorpions in and out of MindEric C. BrownEpilogue CreaturesKeith BotelhoList of ContributorsIndex

“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