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.

“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

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction ConceptsJoseph Campana1.Sting Stinging like a Bee in Early Modern EnglandJulian Yates2. Scale Lesser Living in the RenaissanceJoseph Campana3. Pest Environmental Justice and the (Early Modern) Rhetoric of Pest ControlJennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche4. Infestation Out of Africa: Locust Infestation, Universal History, and the Early Modern Theological ImaginaryLucinda Cole5. Habitat and Politics “Regardles of his gouernaunce”: Exploring Human Sovereignty and Political Formation in Early Modern Insect HabitatsAndrew Fleck6. Consume Consuming InsectsAmy L. Tigner7. Decompose Worm WorkFrances E. Dolan8. Locomotion Creeping and CrawlingKeith Botelho9. Communication TettixLowell Duckert10. Swarm Song of the SwarmDerek Woods11. Illumination “Living Lamps”Jessica Lynn WolfeEpilogue ConceptsKeith BotelhoList of ContributorsIndex