Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature

Jean E. Feerick is an assistant professor of English at Brown University. Vin Nardizzi is an assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia.

'The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature is a brilliantly conceived collection that challenges the apparent stability of categories we have come to assume are fundamental to the ordering of the cosmos animal, vegetable, mineral, and, most of all, human. Its individual essays are scintillating: on every page we find a new revelation, a fresh reading of an old standard, a surprising juxtaposition, an original, and provocative argument. These essays will profoundly influence how Renaissance scholars perceive relationships between culture and environment in the period.' Karen Raber, professor of English, University of Mississippi 'A wonderfully deep and diverse collection on what may be the most important problem ecocriticism can now address: the culturally constructed boundary between human and other forms of life. With insightful essays on sea-creatures, plant-grafting, wooden legs, stony hearts, and many other topics, The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature deploys Renaissance literature to recover valuable lost perspectives on the collective vitality of our planet.' Robert Watson, Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA and author of Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance

• List of Figures vii Series Editors' Foreword ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Swervings: On Human Indistinction 1 Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi Part I The Head-Piece 1 The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human 15 Laurie Shannon Part II Modes of Indistinction Crossings 2 'Half-Fish, Half-Flesh': Dolphins, the Ocean, and Early Modern Humans 29 Steve Mentz 3 Royal Fish: Shakespeare's Princely Whales 47 Dan Brayton Bodily Ingestion 4 You Are What You Eat: Cooking and Writing Across the Species Barrier in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair 69 Jay Zysk 5 'A Bett'ring of Nature': Grafting and Embryonic Development in The Duchess of Malfi 85 Erin Ellerbeck Technologies of Conjunction 6 Bastard Grafts, Crafted Fruits: Shakespeare's Planted Families 103 Miranda Wilson 7 The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies: Prosthesis and Stump in A Larum for London 119 Vin Nardizzi Part III Indistinct Bodies (Un)Sexed Bodies 8 Vegetable Love: Botany and Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century England 139 Marjorie Swann 9 On Vegetating Virgins: Greensickness and the Plant Realm in Early Modern Literature 159 Hillary M. Nunn Stony States 10 A Heart of Stone: The Ungodly in Early Modern England 181 Tiffany Jo Werth 11 Of Stones and Stony Hearts: Desdemona, Hermione, and Post-Reformation Theater 205 Jennifer Waldron Soiled Bodies 12 Groveling with Earth in Kyd and Shakespeare's Historical Tragedies 231 Jean E. Feerick 13 The Politic Worm: Invertebrate Life in the Early Modern English Body 253 Ian MacInnes Notes on Contributors 275 Index 279