Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Reviews / Votes

"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 "Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance brings a welcome and timely focus on early modern understandings of insect life, ideas, and work that stood, as the authors convincingly argue, in the midst of the transformation of natural history 'as literary authority' to embodying the new scientific ideas and observational methods of the era. This two-volume work makes a significant scholarly contribution to literary studies and history by bringing insects and insect life into these conversations."

-Martha Few, author of Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire "There has not previously been such a wide-ranging collection as this. Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance is a vital new contribution to not only early modern studies, not only animal studies and ecocriticism, but also the history of science, the history of medicine, and current debates about the environment."

-Erica Fudge, author of Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals in Early Modern England