Lucinda Cole

"Lucinda Cole‚Äôs Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of ‚Äúvermin‚Äù as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Cole‚Äôs argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts‚ÄîWilliam Shakespeare‚Äôs Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe‚Äôs The Jew of Malta, Abraham Cowley‚Äôs The Plagues of Egypt, Thomas Shadwell‚Äôs The Virtuoso, the Earl of Rochester‚Äôs ‚ÄúA Ramble in St. James‚Äôs Park,‚Äù and Daniel Defoe‚Äôs Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year‚Äîalongside 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 problems‚Äînotably those of feeding populations periodically stricken by hunger, disease, and famine‚Äîwere tied to larger questions about food supplies, property laws, national identity, and the theological imperatives that underwrote humankind‚Äôs claim to dominion over the animal kingdom. In this context, Cole‚Äôs study indicates, so-called ‚Äúvermin‚Äù occupied liminal spaces between subject and object, nature and animal, animal and the devil, the devil and disease‚Äîeven reason and madness. This verminous discourse formed a foundational category used to carve out humankind‚Äôs 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 politic‚Äîhumans, animals, and even thoughts."

Imperfect Creatures

Lucinda Cole

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