Lucinda Cole?s Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of ?vermin? as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Cole?s argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts?William Shakespeare?s Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe?s The Jew of Malta, Abraham Cowley?s The Plagues of Egypt, Thomas Shadwell?s The Virtuoso, the Earl of Rochester?s ?A Ramble in St. James?s Park,? and Daniel Defoe?s Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year?alongside other nonliterary primary sources and under-examined archival materials from the period, including treatises on animal trials, grain shortages, rabies, and comparative neuroanatomy.