LEADER 04476oam 2200685 450 001 9910136353803321 005 20230418234417.0 010 $a0-472-90063-3 010 $a0-472-12155-3 024 7 $a10.3998/mpub.4424519 035 $a(CKB)3710000000614784 035 $a(EBL)4427886 035 $a(SSID)ssj0001634977 035 $a(PQKBManifestationID)16387152 035 $a(PQKBTitleCode)TC0001634977 035 $a(PQKBWorkID)14945035 035 $a(PQKB)10508875 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC4427886 035 $a(MiU)10.3998/mpub.4424519 035 $a(OCoLC)1049855374 035 $a(MdBmJHUP)muse51327 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC6533233 035 $a(EXLCZ)993710000000614784 100 $a20151202d2016 uy 0 101 0 $aeng 135 $aurmn#---||||| 181 $ctxt$2rdacontent 182 $cc$2rdamedia 183 $acr$2rdacarrier 200 10$aImperfect creatures $evermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740 /$fLucinda Cole 210 1$aAnn Arbor :$cUniversity of Michigan Press,$d2016. 215 $a1 online resource (249 p.) 300 $aDescription based upon print version of record. 311 $a0-472-07295-1 311 $a0-472-05295-0 320 $aIncludes bibliographical references (pages 211-232) and index. 327 $aIntroduction: Reading beneath the Grain -- Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion -- Swarming Things: Dearth and the Plagues of Egypt in Wither and Cowley -- "Observe the Frog": Imperfect Creatures, Neuroanatomy, and the Problem of the Human -- Libertine Biopolitics: Dogs, Bitches, and Parasites in Shadwell, Rochester, and Gay -- What Happened to the Rats? Hoarding, Hunger, and Storage on Crusoe's Island -- Afterword: We Have Never Been Perfect. 330 $a"Lucinda Cole's Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of "vermin" as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Cole's argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts--William Shakespeare's Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Abraham Cowley's The Plagues of Egypt, Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso, Rochester's "A Ramble in St. James's Park," and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year--alongside other nonliterary primary sources and under-examined archival materials from the period, including treatises on animal trials, grain shortages, rabies, and comparative neuroanatomy. As Cole illustrates, human health and demographic problems--notably those of feeding populations periodically stricken by hunger, disease, and famine--were tied to larger questions about food supplies, property laws, national identity, and the theological imperatives that underwrote humankind's claim to dominion over the animal kingdom. In this context, Cole's study indicates, so-called "vermin" occupied liminal spaces between subject and object, nature and animal, animal and the devil, the devil and disease--even reason and madness. This verminous discourse formed a foundational category used to carve out humankind's relationship to an unpredictable, a-rational natural world, but it evolved into a form for thinking about not merely animals but anything that threatened the health of the body politic--humans, animals, and even thoughts. "--$cProvided by publisher. 517 3 $aVermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740 606 $aEnglish literature$yEarly modern, 1500-1700$xHistory and criticism 606 $aEnglish literature$y18th century$xHistory and criticism 606 $aAnimals in literature 606 $aInsects in literature 606 $aLiterature and science$xHistory$y17th century 606 $aLiterature and science$xHistory$y18th century 615 0$aEnglish literature$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aEnglish literature$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aAnimals in literature. 615 0$aInsects in literature. 615 0$aLiterature and science$xHistory 615 0$aLiterature and science$xHistory 676 $a614.43 686 $aNAT001000$aLIT019000$2bisacsh 700 $aCole$b Lucinda$0944903 801 0$bMiU 801 1$bMiU 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910136353803321 996 $aImperfect creatures$92133248 997 $aUNINA