Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740 by Lucinda Cole (review)

Lucinda Cole's Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740 is concerned with what she identifies as "reading beneath the grain" (p. 1). The phrase both plays with and takes issue with Terry Eagleton's reading against the grain. Cole wants to read "beneath the social, political, and anthropocentric modes of humanist analysis to the life-forms and energies that enable it" (p. 15). She wants to acknowledge "vermin"—a term that she grants is slippery to define—as actants in the social community, included with humans and their domestic animals in their social construction of the early modern era. In that acknowledgement, she also recognizes that "useless or monstrous animals" (p. 29) such as vermin and parasites help constitute the human world. They are our environment, and they both depend upon us for sustenance and also refuse to be removed from our all-too-human social constructions. Such animal studies engage and resist anthropocentric views of the Enlightenment and remind us that animals were undergoing development in the early modern period as well.

Cole constructs her book around four main early modern conceptions of vermin: the theological, the scientific, the literary, and the social. Each of these concepts has its own chapter and develops around a representative work. In the first chapter, "Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion," she examines rats as plague animals—though they were not recognized as such in early modern theories—and argues that "rats and other small animals nonetheless played an important role in linking environmental and supernatural accounts of disease" (p. 18). She uses the macabre art of Jacob de Gheyn and Shakespeare's Macbeth to track the numerous ways that witches, demons, small vermin, and miasma all contributed to a theory of contagion in early modern Europe. As she asserts, as the witch's familiars and indicators of corruption and decay, "rodents herald disease; as instruments of God's wrath, they are heaven's gluttonous emissaries" (p. 31), and they are entangled in both scientific and theological conceptions of disease and corruption. Cole follows this linkage into her next chapter, "Swarming Things: Dearth and the Plagues of Egypt in Wither and Cowley."

In examining seventeenth-century exegesis of the Exodus story, she takes on "the interpretive problems posed by vermin: if the plagues of Egypt can be read in terms of responses to political and moral crises—in terms, that is, of sovereign power—they can also, like Macbeth, be regarded as deeply entangled in contemporary epidemiological and ecological crises, especially food shortages" (p. 19). The seventeenth century, caught up in the ecological difficulties of the Little Ice Age, often saw food shortages as the result of swarms of mice, insects, or other vermin who could cause hardship and even starvation due to the losses. The plagues of Exodus took on new and ominous reality in such circumstances. As Cole notes, on the European continent there were ecclesiastical courts devoted to prosecuting rats and insects for their damage and "declaring them cursed in the name of the Lord" (p. 51). Plagues and famine were both often attributed to the sins of the rulers or the people of a country, as well as showing an uncertainty about whether vermin were of the Devil or of God. She notes that the examinations of plagues and scarcity also reaffirmed scientific ideas originating with the ancients about the balance of nature and the respective roles of predator and prey in the world, when undisturbed by human intervention. As Cole argues, "[S]ynthesized in the seventeenth century, these ancient balance-of-nature arguments, filtered through the imperatives of Protestant theology, helped formed [sic] the roots of modern ecological thinking" (p. 79). She sees the Exodus poems of Abraham Cowley and George Wither as moving vermin theologically into the balance of nature with other animals.

In...