Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance: Volume 1, Insects (Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 027109446X ISBN 13: 9780271094465

Publisher: Penn State University Press, 2023

Synopsis

Lesser Living Creatures examines literary and cultural texts from early modern England in order to understand how people in that era thought about―and with―insect and arachnid life. Designed for the classroom, the book comprises two volumes―Insects and Concepts―that can be used together or independently. Each addresses the collaborative, multigenerational research that produced early modern natural history and provides new insights into the old question of what it means to be human in a world populated by beasts large and small.

Volume 1, Insects, examines how insects burrowed into the literal and symbolic economies of the era. The contributors consider diminutive creatures―such as bees and beetles, flies and fleas, silkworms and spiders―and their depictions in plays, poetry, fables, natural histories, and more. In doing so, they illuminate how early modern science and literature worked as intersecting systems of knowledge production about the natural world and show definitively how insect life was, and remains, intimately entangled with human life.

In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume include Chris Barrett, Roya Biggie, Bruce Boehrer, Gary Bouchard, Dan Brayton, Eric Brown, Mary Baine Campbell, Perry Guevara, Shannon Kelley, Emily King, Karen Raber, Kathryn Vomero Santos, Donovan Sherman, and Steven Swarbrick.

About this title

About the Authors

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 027109446X
• ISBN 13: 9780271094465
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 294
• Editor: Botelho Keith, Campana Joseph