Imperfect Creatures

Front matter

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CHAPTER 2. Swarming Things: Dearth and the Plagues of Egypt in Wither and Cowley 49

CHAPTER 3. Observe the Frog”: Imperfect Creatures, Neuroanatomy, and the Problem of the Human 81

CHAPTER 4. Libertine Biopolitics: Dogs, Bitches, and Parasites in Shadwell, Rochester, and Gay III

CHAPTER 5. What Happened to the Rats? Hoarding,

Hunger, and Storage on Crusoe’s Island 143 AFTERWORD

We Have Never Been Perfect 172 Notes 179 Bibliography 211

Introduction Reading beneath the Grain cLov: (anguished, scratching himself): I have a flea!

HAMM:A flea! Are there still fleas? cLov: On me there's one. (Scratching.) Unless it’s a crab louse.

HAMM. (Very perturbed.) But humanity might start from there all over again!

— SAMUEL BECKETT, ENDGAME

In the last three decades, animal studies has influenced every discipline in the humanities, including literary studies, encouraging scholars to acknowledge the anthropocentrism of the stories we have been telling about ourselves and the natural world. Nuanced analyses of what Aristotle called the “more perfect creatures” have introduced new life forms into traditional literary and cultural history, so that once-overlooked references to horses, dogs, apes, bears, cats, wolves, and other beasts in early modern texts now shimmer again with complex meaning.’ Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life recovers a category of creatures—vermin—whose philosophical and literary significance in the period between 1600 and 1740 has been underestimated, if not erased. Historically, “vermin” is a slippery term because it refers neither to a particular biological classification nor to a group of genetically related animals; instead, it names a category of creatures defined according to an often unstable nexus of traits: usually small, always vile, and, in large numbers, noxious and even dangerous to agricultural and sociopolitical orders. The characteristic feature of vermin is they reproduce so rapidly and in such numbers they threaten to overwhelm their biological, environmental and—from a human perspective—sociolegal contexts.

The first full-length study of vermin in the early modern period, Imperfect Creatures is not a straightforward cultural history but an interdisciplinary analysis of how and why these reproducing animal populations, perceived as threats to a fragile food supply, make their way into seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literature and philosophy. Vermin play an important role in Shakespeare's Macbeth; they are natural antagonists in the plague poetry of Abraham Cowley; and they enable Thomas Shadwell’s satire of science, along with his critique of a parasitical social order. As the constitutionally simple beings against which the complexity of the human brain and body are defined, imperfect creatures anchor experiments in early modern neuroanatomy. And disappearing magically from Crusoe's wrecked ship, they serve as the absent center of an island economy that has grounded discussions of modern subjectivity and political economy. By bringing scholarship from agricultural history, environmental history, and medical history to bear on these and other works of literature, I argue rats, frogs, flies, and other animals located at the limits of our now-suburban zoography have shaped humanist practices, writings, and systems of thought. My historical focus is on the period 1600 to 1740, when religion, art, and science, in different ways, cast vermin as agents in studies of, and debates about, the socionatural world. Throughout this period, fleas, worms, wasps, maggots, and other swarming things carried considerable metaphysical and ethical weight, continually reshaping fundamental categories of analysis and perception.

By far, the most sustained body of scholarship on vermin during the early modern period has been written by medical and agricultural historians: the former focus on microscopy and plague treatises, and the latter focus on farming and extermination manuals. Medical historians trace a line of thought linking vermin and disease that runs through the works of Athanasius Kircher (1601-80), William Harvey (1578-1657), Robert Hooke (1605- 1703), Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), Francesco Redi (1626-97), Marcello Malpighi (1628-94), Jan Swammerdam (1637-80), and Sir William Ramsay, author of the first full-length treatise on worms in English.’ ‘The root of vermin is vermis, from the Latin word for worm, and the origin of worms was a subject of ongoing debates about the origin and nature of the universe and, in microcosm, of the human body.’ Kircher describes the blood of those infected with plague as “so crowded with worms’ that he is dumbfounded: “I have even been persuaded forthwith that man both alive and dead swarms with numberless but yet invisible little worms.”* In his Helminthologia (1668), Ramsay, one of two physicians to Charles II, claims the body’s “innumerable” vermin are “the most material enemy” of the physician, responsible for diseases from flux to melancholy.’ Parasitology and medical history have generated their own subgenre of literary criticism, with critics such as Jonathan Gil Harris demonstrating how English writers imagined internal others—Jews, Catholics, and witches—as pathogens within the body politic.®

‘The work of agricultural and legal historians offers a glimpse of how humans struggled to protect an often-fragile food supply from vermin—crows, rats, locusts, and other pests. Animal trials, in particular, provide a window to assess the status of vermin as local and national threats.’ In The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), E.P. Evans describes attempts on the part of ecclesiastical and civil courts to punish, rehabilitate, or excommunicate insects, rooks, roosters, caterpillars, pigs, and other animals between 1266, the first recorded instance of an animal prosecution, and the eighteenth century. Nicholas Humphrey singles out a 1478 Swiss prosecution against insects called the Inger: “Thou irrational and imperfect creature(s],” the proclamation begins, are “called imperfect because there was none of thy species in Noah's ark”; they are charged with destroying or devouring “food for men and animals” and are ordered to “depart” or else present themselves for trial on the sixth day.* Their advocate used the usual defense that God had directed all creatures to“go forth and multiply”; the court, however, countered that because the Inger, like other insects, had not been placed on the ark but were products of spontaneous generation, they had no rights, and their defense did not hold. While animal trials were less frequent in England than on the Continent, English rats and other creatures were subject to ongoing extermination campaigns, and vermin-killing treatises described a wide range of technologies.” Leonard Mascall’s 1590 Book of Engines, subtitled Sundrie Engines and Trapps to take Polecats, Buzards, Rattes, Mice and all other Kinded of Vermin and Beasts Whatsoever attests to the battles humans waged against creatures that threatened crops and grain supplies.

By grounding my analysis in medical, agricultural, and environmental history, I explore the relationships between scientific accounts of vermin and literary and philosophical representations. Focused, as they are, on the prehistory of germ theory, medical historians often overlook the role of vermin in the everyday attempts of people in the seventeenth century to put food on their tables. Agricultural historians reverse the problem; concentrating almost exclusively on the food supply, they focus, understandably, on extermination campaigns, farming technology, and wetlands drainage, always with an eye to economic rather than epidemiological consequences. Literary critics have inherited and even reinforced this division, recognizing the importance of vermin to literature but rarely attempting to think outside of traditional disciplinary divides, seldom investigating relationships among a fragile food system, dearth, disease, and social order. Part of the problem is humanists have tended to base their analyses on culturally individuated vermin or, more precisely, on verminized individuals, such as Reynard the Fox or the other trickster figures who populate Aesop's fables. As a composite of characteristics packaged for human consumption, these speaking rats, fox, and ravens necessarily reflect to readers their own fears and desires, much as John Donne's flea becomes the emissary of the speaker's erotic ambitions or Anna Letitia Barbauld’s eloquent “free born” mouse ventriloquizes Barbauld’s revolutionary views. Significantly, Aesop's rat, Donne's flea, and Barbauld’s mouse, unlike their real-life counterparts, travel alone. If we are to understand vermin as a category and as genuinely agential creatures in the early modern world, it is necessary to resist subjectivizing tendencies to treat dangerous and annoying animals as allegorized, isolated, domesticated, personified or even eroticized beings. In order to appreciate—indeed, even to recognize—the specific role of vermin in early modern literature, we must supplement an emphasis on individual animals or anthropomorphic representations by focusing on how writers and their readers perceived the creaturely populations who were their fellow travelers and constant, if unwanted, companions.

Imperfect Creatures, accordingly, argues what made vermin dangerous was less their breed-specific cleverness or greed than their prodigious powers of reproduction through which individual appetites took on new, collective power, especially in relation to uncertain food supplies." Bitterly cold winters during the Little Ice Age brought with them not only skating parties on the Thames, the first in 1607, but widespread dearth, if not famine.” Temperatures in northwestern Europe dropped an average of two degrees during the period 1350-1850. During these centuries of comparatively cold winters and wet, cool summers, national policies on vermin control began to be developed; Henry VIII's 1533 policy mandating villages collect dead pests was renewed and amended under Elizabeth in 1566.” It required citizens to make and maintain nets and snares for trapping crows, rooks, and choughs—birds that devoured seeds before they could take root and sprout and grain before it could be harvested. Mascall estimates crows and other birds in England consumed or spoiled eight bushels of grain per parish; this amounted to 13,000 tons a year across the kingdom.” On the Continent, where grain prices were even higher, vermin—and especially rats and mice—began to be prosecuted vigorously during this same period. Walter Hyde's 1916 count suggests a direct correlation between climate change and the increased number of animal trials: in the fourteenth century, only twelve animals were tried; that number nearly doubled in the early days of the Little Ice Age, and then in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it rose to fifty-seven and fifty-six, respectively. While it is easy to dismiss the animal trials as superstitious or archaic practices supplanted by advances in philosophy and science, we should not underestimate the panic they expressed or the extent to which populations of rats, moles, rooks, choughs, and mice were perceived as eating into the health of the body politic.

To view vermin in their stark collectivity during the early modern period—as “infestations, “crowds, “hordes,” and “swarms” —is to acknowledge their agency, including their role in disease. Francis Bacon observes in Sylva Sylvarum (1627) that during the plagues of 1624 and 1625, “many toads” with tails appeared in the ditches and “low grounds” of London, “which argueth,” he writes, “a great disposition to putrefaction in the soil and the air.”!° Even in the absence of germ theory, early modern writers were attuned to the relationship between “swarms” of imperfect creatures and threats to the human body. According to Paul Reiter, Shakespeare, Defoe, Pepys, and others commented on changing weather patterns and what we now recognize as malaria, the physician Thomas Sydenham (1624-89) even noting relationships between fevers and rapidly reproducing insects. “When insects swarm extraordinarily,’ Sydenham writes, “and when... augues ... appear early about mid-summer, then autumn proves very sickly.” Late seventeenth-century travel writers such as John Ovington (1653-1731) similarly remark, with horror, that “the prodigious growth of Vermin, and of venomous Creatures” during India’s monsoons are seemingly both cause and effect of the “malignant Corruption of the Air,’ which has “direful Effects upon the Europeans”:

For Spiders [in India] increase their Bulk to the largeness of a Man's ‘Thumb, and Toads are not of a much less size than a small Duck; whereby ‘tis easily seen by these venomous creatures, what encouragements these infectious and pestilential Qualities meet with in this place, and under what a contagious Influence all the Inhabitants must consequently be seated. This inducd a Gentleman one time in the Governours and my Company, and some other person of Note, to affirm, that he believd it raind Frogs; because he espied upon his Hat small Frogs, about the bigness of the end of ones Finger, when he was at a great distance from any House or Covering, from whence they might drop."

Like Sydenham and Bacon, Ovington links vermin infestations to lifethreatening effects on human health: “All Wounds and Contusions in the Flesh,” he continues, “are likewise very rarely healed here” (145). If vermin are not quite disease vectors in such accounts, they are harbingers and agents of malignant forces.

On transoceanic ships, the malevolent triad of illness, effluvia, and vermin was intensified. Writing from Commodore George Ansons flagship, the Centurion, in the 1740s, Richard Walter describes efforts to eliminate the “noisome stench” below decks and destroy “vermin” by cleaning, smoking the deck, and then washing the whole ship with vinegar. Both stink and vermin had “increased upon us to a loathsome degree,’ he reports, “and besides being most intolerably offensive, they were doubtless in some sort productive of the sickness we had labored under for considerable time.” Walter’s phrase “doubtless in some sort” is extraordinarily suggestive. Three quarters of Anson's crew died of scurvy and other diseases during the four years that the Centurion spent circumnavigating the globe.” While the specific role of animals in shipboard illness was subject to debate, Walter joins other writers of the period in assuming that “infection” and “infestation” are related, perhaps different aspects of environmentally induced disease, one endoparasitic, the other exoparasitic.

Imperfect Creatures explores the associative linkage noted by Sydenham, Ovington, and Walter through several literary genres and across a range of disciplines that were once folded into the broader rubrics of “natural philosophy” or “physico-theology.’ In contrast to the dominant trends in scholarship on early modern animals, represented by the groundbreaking work of Erica Fudge, Bruce Boehrer, Karen Raber, Laurie Shannon, Donna Landry, Richard Nash, Tobias Menely, Nathaniel Wolloch, Laura Brown, and Jonathan Lamb, I turn away from so-called “charismatic megafauna’— including companion species with whom humans affectively identify—in order to analyze animals as part of dangerous or noxious collectives.” Imperfect Creatures also lies outside the tendency of animal studies to align itself with animal welfare movements; I do not, admittedly, have an overriding interest in the welfare of weevils. But, as Cary Wolfe argues, it is not necessary to “like” animals in order to confront speciesism or to craft a posthumanist theory of the human subject.” Indeed, critical animal studies, to which I am deeply committed, can only benefit by sustained critical attention to zoological outcasts, those “imperfect creatures” traditionally excluded from Noah's Ark. As the onto-historical “others” of dogs, horses, apes, and humans, vermin offer a new, post-Cartesian way to understand the material and ethical systems underwriting early modern literature: the “perfect” creatures of Renaissance humanism are, in a very real sense, dialogically dependent on “imperfect” ones. Whether depicted as frogs raining from the Indian sky, as plagues of lice swarming over bodies in Egypt, or as packs of dogs roaming the streets of London, populations of vermin move through history like locusts through a field. They contribute materially to dearth, famines, and disease—and discursively to ethical and political systems that expose or exploit human corruption, competition, violence, and vice. William Shakespeare, Abraham Cowley, George Wither, Thomas Willis, Bernard Mandeville, Thomas Shadwell, John Wilmot, Daniel Defoe, and their contemporaries write vermin into history and, in so doing, gesture toward the larger systems that define early modern culture.

ACTANT FLEAS, NESTING SYSTEMS

“Mark but this flea,” writes Donne, drawing attention to a parasite that, in biting him and his lover, has “mingled” their blood.” In order for Donnes poem to work as a mode of playful seduction, it must figure the flea as an individuated agent, an accidental (or contingent) opportunity for the poet's sportive, metaphysical speculation. In its solitude, Donne's flea is decontextualized—not party to bodily pain, not a harbinger of a parasitical infestation that might remind us of the couple's proximity to disease and death. His flea, singled out by the speaker, allows the poem to bypass or even eclipse a larger biopolitical system in order to focus on a singularly specific and explicitly erotic situation. Metaphysical wit depends on such decontextualizing: “this flea” that joins the lovers—not “these fleas” that collectively bite and torment their hosts.

Donne's“ Mark but this flea” evokes a prior tradition of already-eroticized parasites celebrated in the genre known as La Puce, or “Flea Searcher” paintings. In these often-puzzling and much-debated treatments of women grooming themselves, the (always invisible) flea symbolizes, for the viewer, the potential of vermin to define and cross boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, innocence and corruption.” Georges de la Tours’ The Flea Catcher (1630-34), the most famous painting in this tradition, features a (possibly pregnant) young woman in a stage of partial undress, sitting before a candle in an austere room, crushing between her fingers an invisible parasite. In its apparent religiosity, de la Tours’ painting often is contrasted to secular versions of the genre, such as The Flea Hunt (1628) by Gerrit van Honthorst, one of several flea-searcher paintings set in a richly decorated brothel, where a bare-breasted woman, usually with the help of one or more servants, investigates her naked body while two or more men look on. Within the erotic tradition, the flea serves as a point of (impossible) identification for heterosexual men, fantasizing (in the words of the seventeenth-century poet Peter Woodhouse) about being transformed into a parasite who has “free scope him selfe to sport” in the “soft bosomes” of women, even to “lower stray” at his “best pleasure.’ For Woodhouse and the painters like van Honthorst, the flea is the inferred agent of a forbidden intimacy that, two centuries later, still finds expression in the semi-pornographic novel, Autobiography of a Flea.*° The women in the flea searcher paintings and literature are always the objects of a scopophilic gaze. Having said that, the very possibility of scopophilia depends, to some extent, on the flea as an agent. Without the flea, the woman is not searching, her breasts are not uncovered, the voyeurs in the painting see only the interior of a room, and the viewer's gaze is not directed to the actions that precede the imperative, “Mark but this flea.” The actions and identities of the men and women in the room are bound up in the set of relations that includes, but is not limited to, the fleas being purpled under women’s fingernails.

By insisting on the agency of invisible fleas, I am invoking the post- Kantian tradition of analysis associated with, among others, the work of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour.” For Serres and Latour, there are no a priori distinctions between humans and nonhumans, subjects and objects, because these distinctions depend on complex relational networks of actors, forces, objects, and so on. The actor-network theory (ANT) with which their work is allied promotes a relational materiality that presupposes all entities in a system can be identified and analyzed only in relation to a larger system, Within this context, nonhumans are more than Cartesian objects or mere vehicles of our thoughts and intention; instead, they do things in specific sociohistorical, ecological, institutional, and psychological environments. They are, like humans, actants in the world. Latour coined the term actant to distance himself from anthropocentric accounts of intentionality; it is only through a series of networked associations that actants are provided with substance and action. Actants, he writes, “modify other actors”; they are not subjects, but “interveners.”” In this respect, for Donne or de la Tours, fleas are actants because they compel changes in those around them: women search, men watch.

Latour’s work has been useful to scholars in Animal Studies because, in the words of Erica Fudge, it allows “us a way of rethinking not only how we conceptualize the arrangements of culture and the structures of thought that organize humans perceptions of animals and themselves in the past—it might also allow us to rethink how it is that we understand the history of being human, and from that gain a better understanding of what it means to be human now.” In treating distinctions between agents and structures, in perceiving humans, animals, and objects as equally significant actors in dynamic and interlocking systems, historical animal studies and ANT share post-Cartesian assumptions about the socionatural world. Latour’s theory of actants shifts fundamental questions from the identity of actors to their functions; the “who am I?” of western philosophy is superseded by another question: “what is my place in the system’? Moreover, the idea of system itself is destabilized: systems are not regarded as hierarchical or unidirectional arrangements of actants and forces but as what some historical ecologists call“heterarchies.’ Rather than emphasizing stability in ecosystems and holistic and deterministic notions of “system,” many historical ecologists base their analyses on models in “which elements are unranked ... or ranked in a variety of ways depending on conditions,’ or on “scalar hierarchies” in which any level of organization can affect or control temporarily others.” Imperfect Creatures offers a heterarchical reading of key texts in early modern literature in order to explore how sociohistorical, biopolitical, and ecological conditions reconfigure seventeenth-century perceptions of fleas, curs, rats, worms, and other vermin. If these are the despised and wretched creatures at the lowest rungs of the Great Chain of Being, they are also, paradoxically, crucial constituents of early modern eco-culture.

A brief look at Guiseppi Maria Crespi’s flea searcher painting reveals how the concept of heterarchies can be useful as an interpretive strategy. The so-called Italian Hogarth, Crespi produced seven paintings in this genre between 1715 and 1740; most of them feature a woman delousing

IO IMPERFECT CREATURES herself as her lapdog, a King Charles spaniel, looks on.*! While its focus is on the woman disrobing, Crespi’s painting (fig. 1) differs from works in both the earlier religious tradition, associated with de la Tours, and the overtly ribald one of the Merry Flea Hunt. Crespi depicts what many critics have regarded as a more realistic, ostensibly less emblematic, depiction of everyday life, possibly the first plate in a lost series about an opera singer from the lower ranks who arrives through youth, beauty, and talent to a life of luxury. Commenting on the painting's “fully detailed ambience and situation,’ Mira Pajes Merriman finds:

A slightly dissolute air pervades the scene, perhaps through the suggestion made by the baby in the care of people who seem to be too old to be its parents. The ingénue—in charming disarray—takes center stage, absorbedly looking within her bodice. . . . Her profession is indicated by the announcements on the wall and primarily by the presence of the musical instrument, wholly out of place in the otherwise unrelievedly lower-class scene of hanging garlic and clay pots.”

‘This interpretation divides the painting into humans and the objects around them—garlic, pots, the spinet, papers on the wall—an “ambience” that accords with critical perceptions of seventeenth-century realism. The only action in the painting is described as a form of seeing: the woman is “looking within her bodice,’ oblivious to the stares of those around her. She is the only real agent in the room.

Yet from a heterarchical perspective, the painting depicts multiple actants—the young woman, the old man, the woman at the door, the baby, the dog, and the invisible flea. While all of them look at something, the organization of the painting, its kinetic energy, hinges on what we cannot see— the biting flea or louse. As in Donne's poem, then, the flea draws the viewer into a quasi-intimacy with the young woman. An irritant in a seemingly anthropocentric system, the flea provokes the action and is the source of the painting's humor. The obvious and lewd joke of most flea searcher paintings is that the female breast, which should nurse a human child, is instead the dinner table for vermin; in this painting, the flea feeds on a woman's breast, the old man feeds the child, and the dog waits to be fed. Part of a network of relations, the flea and its actions are not necessarily subordinated to an anthropocentric social order. Indeed, the more sophisticated, second order joke of Crespi's painting is all the actants are in some sense parasites, feeding off others. The baby is parasitical in an obvious sense, living on the body of the young mother. The young mother, in turn, depends on the gifts of her admirers (the spinet and the lapdog). If the old couple can be seen as the womans parents, then they too may be living off her singing or sex work, but the lapdog may be the most overtly parasitical of the portraits actants. Having replaced both the baby and the lover in the woman's bed, stripped of the ability to feed itself, the small dog stares at the viewers, drawing us into the system of parasitical relations.

As Latour and Serres suggest, parasitical relations need to be viewed as temporary alliances—as elements of a system that come together, disrupt previous arrangements, and then are disrupted. Nested within Crespi's painting, in this regard, is a gendered network of relations that turn on the historical association between the lower creatures and women, between vermin and female “imperfections.” In Aristotelian taxonomies, modified throughout the seventeenth century, women were identified by a comparative lack of physiological development, regarded as cold and therefore imperfectly formed versions of men. As Aristotle writes in On the Generation of Animals:

For females are naturally more imbecile and cold; and it is necessary to conceive the female sex as if it were a physical mutilation. Within the womb therefore the female acquires a perfect organization slowly; for the separation and distinction of the parts [by which a perfect organization is effected] is a concoction; but heat concocts, and that which is hotter is more easily concocted. Out of the womb, however, the female quickly arrives at perfection and old age. For whatever is less, more swiftly arrives at the end, as in the works of art, so likewise in the productions of nature.”

Morally, an “imperfect” constitution implied an “imperfect” moral nature, one lacking a masculine, guiding rationality.” Despite objections by Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) and other less orthodox thinkers, so established was this historical connection among women, insects, and constitutional inferiority that it was only in 1701 that the parasitologist Nicolas Andry de Bois-Regard congratulates his readers for having overcome the mistaken Aristotelian assumption that insects and women are intrinsically defective.” Writing after microscopy revealed complex nervous systems in fleas and women alike, he asserts,

I2 IMPERFECT CREATURES

That it is not at all to be wondered at, that some Philosophers have looked upon Insects as imperfect Animals, since some of them have so far been mistaken as to advance, that the Body of a Woman is an imperfect Work, a rough Draught formed contrary to the design of Nature, as if a Body perfectly proportioned, in which no irregularity can be observed, which wants no necessary part, and has none that’s Superfluous [can be imperfect].**

Microscopy, the two-sex model, and the argument from design potentially freed women from the traditional association with imperfect creatures like flies, spiders, reptiles, and shrews.

At more or less the same time, however, women were assigned, in their roles as housewives and mothers, the function of policing the parasites in the household. “The whole Preservation of Men's Health and Strength,” writes the author of a 1750 book on parasites, “chiefly resides in the Wisdom and Temperance of Women.” While the author of this treatise (an “Eminent Poulterer, Lately Deceased”) is not the first to enjoin women to flea patrol—a famous Dutch Proverb is “Lazy mother, lousy heads’—he describes how “cleanliness,” defined simultaneously as a moral and spiritual category, turns on new intimacies between women and vermin. The “greatest Slut in the World,’ he asserts, “does hardly smell her own House or Bed stink; For in Man is contained the true Nature and Property of all things, both of Good and Evil; therefore he is both liable, and also apt, to receive all Impressions, and to be wrought on by all things he shall either communicate with, or joyn himself to, whether it be Cleanness, or the contrary” (22). Her sense perceptions dulled by long habituation to filth, the “slut” becomes immune to the vermin around her; the good woman, in contrast, is “wrought on’ by their presence and exercises“ Wisdom and Temperance’ in combating their filth.

In the context of this discourse of parasites and medical hygiene, some of the “realistic” elements of Crespi’s painting, his highly textured “ambiance,’ become particularly meaningful. Herbal nosegays, including elder, fern, penny-royal, rue, mint, wormwood, and hops, were employed to ward off fleas and vermin. In the painting, herbs around the bed, intertwined garlic on the wall, the pot of water for drowning fleas, the woman's aired clothes, the open windows—all these may indicate that the poor flea-searcher (or perhaps her mother) is aware of verminous forces of corruption and is trying to combat them. Working against such efforts, however,

Fig. 1. Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Searcher for Fleas is the presence of the dog on the bed. By the time Crespi painted, theories of spontaneous generation used to explain the rapid proliferation of insects had largely been replaced—thanks to Van Helmont, Harvey, Redi, and others—by notions of biogenesis, or reproduction from eggs. Although Robert Hooke was uncertain about the process of spontaneous generation, later microscopy placed domestic animals unambiguously in the chain of relations that lead to infestations:

Fleas are produced of Eggs, which the Females stick fast by a kind of glutinous Moisture to the Roots of the Hairs of Cats, Dogs, and other Animals, and also to the Wool Blankets, Ruggs, and other such-like Furniture. Of these Eggs, a female lays ten or twelve a Day, for several Days successively, and they hatch in the same Order, about four or five days after their being laid. From the Eggs come forth not perfect Fleas, but little whitish Worms or Maggots, whose Bodies have annular divisions, and are thinly covered with long Hairs. They adhere closely to the Body of the Animal, on whose Juices they feed; or they may be kept in a Box, and brought up with dead Flies, which they eat with Greediness.*®