ABSTRACT
Thomas Moffet, Mary Sidney Herbert's (MSH's) longtime family physician, is perhaps best known now as the author of a laudatory biography of Sir Philip Sidney, titled “Nobilis, or A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney,” which hails MSH quite simply as the “inheritor of wit and genius.” The Silkewormes, and their Flies represents, in short, the life cycle of this extraordinary insect as a divinely-sanctioned interrogation of the patrilineal genealogical underpinnings of scientific, mythic, and religious narratives of ancestry and descent, focusing on the silkworm/silk fly's mytho-historical origins and development. A compendium of etiological myths, theories from natural philosophy, and from the writings of the ancients, the text attempts to account for the nature of the silkworm's life cycle, one that challenges conventional notions of origin, development, and descent.
