ABSTRACT
While the real cause of malaria (i.e. ‘bad air’) remained a mystery to most Elizabethan and Jacobean subjects, ‘gnats’ nonetheless occupied a special place in the literature of the period. In this chapter, Chiari wonders how the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers represented midges and to what purposes. Generally speaking, what was described as ‘vermin’ in Reformation England was traditionally regarded as a harbinger of disasters. Mosquitoes, in particular, were considered as pasture pests which had to be eradicated. Interestingly, early modern playwrights like Shakespeare implied that pests generally thrived in wet, unhealthy climates, and they often established a link between gnats and pestilence.
Against this rather dystopian background connecting gnats to pestilential diseases as well as to presumably unhealthy lands to (re)conquer, insects were just beginning to emerge as objects of study for naturalists: Aldrovandi’s De animalibus insectis (1602) and Moffet’s Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum (1634) were the first illustrated books on insects to appear in Europe. In Chapter 1, the author thus also considers the epistemological shift which, at the turn of the seventeenth century, no longer exclusively pointed to vermin of all kinds as precursors of impending disaster, but instead made a compelling case for their entomological study. In Aldrovandi’s and Moffet’s treatises, gnats featured as complex tiny creatures, a move which allowed artists to display their artistic skills and to propose less anthropocentric visions of the animal world.
