Rats, Witches, Miasma and Early Modern Theories of Contagion

Lucinda Cole

26 Pages

1 File ▾

English Literature,

Early Modern History,

Animal Studies,

Literature and Medicine

This chapter from Imperfect Creatures is an expanded version "Of Mice and Moisture," published in Journal Of Early Modern Cultural Studies. It explores the role of rodents and putrefaction in early modern theories of disease--mimetic contagion--by focusing on a wide variety of works, including drawings by Jacques de Gheyn and Shakespeare's Macbeth.

https://www.academia.edu/32937020/Rats_Witches_Miasma_and_Early_Modern_Theories_of_Contagion

Human, Animal and Machine in the Seventeenth Century

Lucinda Cole

Robert Markley

16 Pages    https://www.academia.edu/19821130/Human_Animal_and_Machine_in_the_Seventeenth_Century

In his 1695 letter to John Dennis on comedy, the playwright William Congreve confesses his dislike for satire that smacks of the “Degeneration of [that] God-like Species” – “man.” Having conceded that he is disturbed by “seeing things, that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature,” Congreve then admits he “could never look long upon a Monkey, without very Mortifying Reflections; tho [he] never heard any thing to the Contrary, why that Creature is not Originally of a Distinct Species
”(Hodges 1964: 183). 

Congreve’s “mortifying Reflections” stem from his culture 'snagging fear that anatomy may be destiny – that the physiological similarities between humans and monkeys may undermine the philosophical and religious principles that grant our “God-like Species” dominion over the rest of creation. Because it unsettles distinctions between instinctual behavior and intelligent self-awareness, Congreve's monkey calls attention to a crucial set of problems in seventeenth-century thought: the difficulty of trying to distinguish humans from animals, animals from inanimate objects, and humans from machines.

 As Francis Bacon declared in Of the Wisdom ofthe Ancients (1609), “there is no nature which can be regarded as simple”: “Man has something of the brute; the brute has something of the vegetable; the vegetable something of the inanimate body” (Bacon 1860: 13, 96; see Fudge 1999: 94–98). To try to make sense of the complexity of nature and its hybrid forms was the centralproject of seventeenth-century science – or what was then termed natural philosophy........

Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life 1600-1740 (University of Michigan Press, 2016)

Lucinda Cole

392 Views249 Pages

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Philosophy of Science,

Eighteenth-Century literature,

Animal Studies,

History of Science,

Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture

 ...more ▾

This is the full, published version of Imperfect Creatures, made available through the open access program Knowledge Unlatched. It contains chapters on George Wither, Abraham Cowley, Thomas Shadwell, John Wilmot, and Daniel Defoe, among others, read within the context of early modern science and ecology. Introduction Reading beneath the Grain Chapter 1. Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion Chapter 2. Swarming Things: Dearth and the Plagues of Egypt in Wither and Cowley Chapter 3. “Observe the Frog”: Imperfect Creatures, Neuroanatomy, and the Problem of the Human Chapter 4. Libertine Biopolitics: Dogs, Bitches, and Parasites in Shadwell, Rochester, and Gay Chapter 5. What Happened to the Rats? Hoarding, Hunger, and Storage on Crusoe’s Island Afterword We Have Never Been Perfect

https://tinyurl.com/ybjmykvu