Seeing the Invisible under the Microscope: Natural Philosophy and John Donne's Flea. (2024)

Proper Comparisons do the Imagination almost as much Service, asMicroscopes do the Eye; for, as this Instrument gives us a distinctview of divers minute Things, which our naked Eyes cannot well discern;because these Glasses represent them far more large, than by the bareEye we judge them; so a skilfully chosen, and well-applied, Comparisonmuch helps the Imagination, by illustrating Things scarce discernible,so as to represent them by Things much more familiar and easy to beapprehended. (1)

"MARK BUT THIS FLEA, AND MARK IN THIS,/How little that whichthou deny st me is." (2) So begins John Donne's "TheFlea," perhaps the most notorious seduction poem of the EnglishRenaissance. The lyrics entomological conceit, questionable as an eroticstrategy but thrilling in its inventiveness, has long been taken as theexemplar of metaphysical wit. Yet its sacrilegious bravura--e.g., itstethering of marriage rites to the lousiest of vehicles; its comparisonof flea squashing to Christ killing--perhaps occludes the one way inwhich Donne's "The Flea" is actually quite ordinary. Itenvisions insect life as a formal and philosophical challenge forpoetry. Industrious bees, lascivious bugs, dream-inducing Mabs,gnat-like fancies, ethereal glowworms, cavalier grasshoppers, parasiticMoscas, midsummer moths: infinitesimal creatures like these buzzinnumerably through Renaissance literature. One unfamiliar with theearly modern period might expect this thrumming multitude to exemplifymere flights of fancy, poetic curiosities with little substance. Yet aswith Donne's metaphysical flea, the poetic insect--delicate,multifarious, obscure--regularly became a vehicle for abstractspeculation, belying its ostensibly humble source.

This essay argues that the lingering influence of poetry'sentomological turn can be discerned, unexpectedly, in that otherportentous location occupied by bugs in early modern intellectual life:that space between glass slides, where fleas and their brethren werepressed into service by early microscopists. Historians have observedthat the study of insects played an outsized role in the early RoyalSociety, because these creatures so effectively demonstrated thewonder-generating capacity of the new instrument. The microscope, afterall, seemingly "revealed forms of life that were entirely new toscience: new universes and societal structures of which nobody couldhave dreamt." (3) The panegyric is contemporary, though it fairlyventriloquizes the enthusiasm of the early Society. Yet then, as now, itoverlooks an important detail. Universes of the subvisible had, in fact,been dreamt of for centuries, by poets. As Anna-Julia Zwierlein remarksof Mercutio's dream-inducing Queen Mab, "The physical evidenceof microspace... is preceded by the mere idea of the subvisible."(4) The first-century BCE De Rerum Natura, for example, theorizes mobilesubvisible realms purely on the basis of analogy. Its author, Lucretius,had no electron microscope or particle accelerator, and he certainly didnot know Einstein's theory of general relativity. But many of hisatomic speculations would, in the course of nearly two millennia, cometo be corroborated. Insects, like Lucretian atoms, were key players inthis vast imaginary, for in their intricacy and minuteness theyintimated further subvisible worlds that were just beyond humanperception.

At least since Marjorie Hope Nicolson's The Breaking of theCircle: Studies in the Effect of the "New Science" UponSeventeenth-Century Poetry, scholars have readily identified theprofound influence of natural philosophy upon imaginative literature.(5) But as that subtitle insinuates, the stimulus had too readily beenunderstood as unidirectional. More recent scholarship, such as work byN. Katherine Hayles, Claire Preston, Elizabeth Spiller, and others, hashelped correct the assumption that the production of knowledge went onlyone way. (6) Such a presupposition would indeed have been bizarre toearly moderns themselves. The works of figures like Francis Bacon, SirThomas Browne, and Margaret Cavendish are almost impossible tocategorize, so freely did these thinkers roam between imaginativeliterature and natural philosophy. Other authors like Robert Boyle,William Gilbert, and Galileo, easily identifiable as naturalphilosophers, nonetheless availed themselves of richly metaphorical,fantastical, and allegorical devices to convey their ideas, paying asgreat care to their style as any poet. (7) The list of strictly"literary" authors who wrote probingly about things that wenow think of as belonging to the realm of science runs into the scores,and includes authors as varied as John Milton, William Shakespeare,Edmund Spenser, Michel de Montaigne, Jane Barker, John Donne, AbrahamCowley, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Traherne, Andrew Marvell, and Ben Jonson.

This essay attends to a particularly intriguing facet ofliterature's influence on the Scientific Revolution, namely, thatwell through the seventeenth century, microscopic observations partlyreplicated something stunningly close to the poets' view. It willbe my aim to demonstrate that, in fact, multiple mythological, literary,and conceptual categories influenced the formal constructs naturalphilosophers "saw" under the lens. Primary among them, as thefirst part of this essay will trace, is the literary prehistory of thediminutive flea. Made infamous through its appearance as the first poemin John Donne's posthumous 1633 Songs and Sonnets, the flea was infact a familiar literary "character" for many centuries, andit enjoyed peculiar influence on early modern speculative thought--bothimaginative and philosophical. (8)

To demonstrate that the natural philosophers' flea reflectsthis literary ancestry, and thus that literature and "science"were mutually influential, I then turn to Robert Hooke and Henry Power,the early giants of the English microscope. Both of these men givecurious pride of place to the flea and its almost-famous literarycousin, the louse. Although Hooke's ad oculus empiricism has cometo be contrasted with Power's more florid descriptions, they sharean important commonality. Both divulge the influence of the fantasticalinsects of English, French, and classical poetry, and both depend uponliterary means to convey the form of subvisible entities. InHooke's rendering, I argue, insects are repositioned as compellingtheatricalized beings occupying alternate realms; they become, throughhis verbal and visual portraits, akin to fictional charactersencountered in a romance or travelogue, with curious histories and largepersonalities. Henry Power ventures even further into the fantastical,in experimental observations that lead from laboratory report to lyric,and from formal analysis to metaphysical speculation. I will end thisarticle, then, looking at Henry Power looking through a microscope. Inhis sights is a literal flea. But what he sees is not only carapace andpincers. It is also fabular fiction, Donnean seduction poetry, and thevery idea of the subvisible. As we encounter the place of thevanishingly small in the works of these microscopists, we will alsoconsider the counterperspective offered by Margaret Cavendish: equallycaptivated by atoms, insects, and microcosms of all sorts, butvociferously unpersuaded by the power of the microscope to revealanything relevant about the subvisible world. Cavendish serves as thelimit case that shows that imaginative "fancy" was by no meansdisplaced by the factual aspirations of natural philosophers, evenamongst those philosophers themselves.

THE IMAGINARIUM: LITERARY INSECTS AS CONCEPTUAL TOY

Long before John Donne imagined the sybaritic feats of the flea,poets had inclined towards infinitesimal and insectile subjects. Much asDe Rerum Natura offered an account of the dynamic activities of thosespeculative bodies we now call atoms (the Latin elementum rather thanthe Greek atom was Lucretius's preferred nomenclature), otherpremodern works laid out the busy doings of tiny entities. The etiologyof early modern accounts of wondrous insects, as Jessica Wolfeindicates, comprise among other things "a genre passed down toRenaissance culture from Pliny, namely the catalogue of miniatura--tinycarvings of ivory ants, a chariot so small that a fly might cover itwith her wings, chains made of glass, poems carved into cherrystones." (9) These delicate rarities and their insect originalsfind their way into several distinctive literary kinds, fromVirgil's Georgics to medieval bestiaries to the genre ofexaggerated praise known as the paradoxical (or mock) encomium, to, asDonne's roguish poem intimates, an extensive body of eroticl*terature. These seemingly unrelated short forms of erotic verse andparadox, which Arthur Stanley Pease included among the popular"forms of the little" in vogue in the Renaissance, show asurprising commonality of approach, a shared interest in diminutiveliterary and natural figures. (10) In both genres, the flea was anespecially prodigious presence, thanks to its unique combination ofdistinctive traits: mobility, intricacy, and access to intimacy--andthus, implicitiy, hidden knowledge. In these literary evocations offleas, bees, mites, and so forth, we repeatedly find that envisioningthe infinitesimally small readily gives way to speculating on theepistemo-logically elusive.

In the history of literary fleas, of course, most readers thinkfirst of John Donne and his deputized paramour. Yet Donne was aJohnny-come-lately to aggrandizing mock erotic stories about fleas.Probably the most notorious of these is a lewd poem found in theAppendix Vergiliana. That compendium ascribes to Virgil "the wittytake of the Culex (the 'gnat'), so Ovid is assinged a poem--aversified dirty joke, really--on the Pulex (the 'flea')."(11) Scholars have long known that this faux locus classicus influencedthe inception of Donne's own lascivious insect. But fewer identifythe bevy of influential literary peregrinations of the flea, such as theexchange of poems between Catherine des Roches, Etienne Pasquier, andtheir circle of friends, on the subject of a flea Pasquier once spottedon her breast, resulting in the 1583 publication of the wittymultilingual collection La Puce. (12) Closer to home, ChristopherMarlowe, always the Ovidian, references the lascivious flea twice inDoctor Faustus, the Clown Robin requesting that "if you turn meinto anything, let it be in the likeness of a little pretty friskingflea, that I may be here and there and everywhere: O, I'll ticklethe pretty wenches' plackets"; and Pride, likewise, sayingthat he is "like to Ovid's flea, I can creep into every cornerof a wench ... indeed I do. What do I not?" (13) These examplesshow that the flea was an object of envy and delight due to its capacityfor seemingly unrestricted access, but this is not the only reason itgenerated disproportionate curiosity. Its notorious strength, seemingmechanicity, and mysterious biology contributed to the sense that theflea and its fellow arthropods were ambiguous beings, about which"fundamental anatomical and ontological questions" wereregularly asked. (14) Pride's "What do I not?"underscores this sense of volatility, omnipresence, and disproportionatepotency.

Putting these features together explains why the flea might wellappear in erotic poetry in the guise of a surreptitious lover. But italso illuminates why the flea was a regular denizen of paradoxicalliterature, where disproportion reigns supreme. The paradoxical mode ismarked not only by its objects of fascination, after all, but also byits rhetoric of approach: a form of amplificatio that celebrates becauseit exaggerates. Like the Lurcetian semina or seed, the insect readilylent itself to scalar analogies. Whether vaunting the value of syphilisor baldness, of nobody or nothing, of vermin or virginity, theparadoxical form operates by making much of things seemingly toodiminutive or despicable to celebrate. Therefore, although the subjectsof classical and early modern paradoxes include a heterogeneous cast ofobjects and abstractions, it is insects--from the homely ant to thecharming bumblebee to the more noxious crew of "flies, gnats,fleas, lice, and bedbugs"--that are among the most commonly"celebrated" by the encomiast. (15) Of these, again, the fleamaintains the dubious distinction of being the creature perhaps mostamply and paradoxically praised. Its primacy can be readily witnessed inworks like Caspar Dornau's Ampitheatrum Sapientiae SocraticaeJoco-Seriae, an encyclopedic compendium of paradoxical materialspublished in 1619 that contains no fewer than a dozen flea("pulex") poems, including the most famous pseudo-Ovidian poemmentioned above. (16) The theme, then, would seem to have been almost asinexhaustible as the vigorous creatures themselves, who, when they werenot crowding into mistresses' blouses or encomiasts' paradoxesor serving as the objects of microscopists' experiments, weredazzling crowds by performing in flea circuses. It is no wonder theyturn up "here and there and everywhere"; fleas were theveritable workhorses of early modern imagination and revelation,apparently lending themselves almost equally to erotic, naturalphilosophical, and metaphysical speculation.

But ubiquity is not the whole of the story. The special attentionparadoxical encomia gives to insects also reveals something about thesubstantive compatibility between the aspirations of concentratedliterary forms and the conceptual provocations of the humble bug. AsDeborah Hawhee explains in her chapter "Looking Beyond Belief:Paradoxical Encomia and Visual Inquiry," valorization of thesecreatures is effected by an implicit "theory of magnifiedrhetorical vision," which virtually enlarges the minute throughnobler or grand comparisons. "In doing so, [the encomiast]exemplifies the guiding principle Cicero ascribes to Gorgias, thefifth-century Sophist, that oratory's 'biggest distinction...is to magnify a thing by praise.'" (17) What is true fororatory more generally is especially vital to the paradoxical mode inits elevation of the preposterous, whereby an aphid might be analogizedto an elephant. Hawhee focuses particularly on the eleventh-centuryencomiast Psellos, notorious for his four speeches in exaggerated praiseof the louse, the bedbug, and the flea, the last of which is the subjectof two of the four speeches. This by-now familiar cadre again suggeststhat, even in the Byzantine era, the very insects that would somedaybecome the focus for early microscopists were already the fixation ofpoets. In the case of the encomium, it is the rhetoric of mock praiseitself that provides a "kind of amplification throughmagnification--that cultivates an urge to bring the tiniest of animalsup close, before the eyes, to press the senses into the realm ofwonder." (18) In this way the encomiast gleaned a view of insectlife that men like Hooke, Power, and Boyle would have to wait severalcenturies for. As we will see, for poet and natural philosopher alike,delicate forms compel imaginative expansion.

Although it is beyond the "scope" of this essay toexplore in great depth, these tendencies of the paradoxical encomiumunderscore the broader capacity for lyric in particular to function as akind of magnifying oculus, a device for zeroing in on a subject. I meanthis figuratively, but also literally, much in the sense intimated byElizabeth Cook in Seeing through Words: The Scope of Late RenaissancePoetry. (19) She presents, for instance, a remarkable shape poem thatappears in Joshua Sylvester's English translation of Guillaume deSaluste Du Bartas's "Spectacles," whose text is renderedwithin a pair of drawn "perspective" glasses. The short poem,claiming to "discern the worlds vanitie," thus visuallyrenders poetry's claim to epistemological supremacy. This was anidea that, of course, adhered with a special fixity to shape poems,emblem poems, and the like, all of which typographically concretizelanguage's more material aspirations. (20) But the"scopic" effect is by no means restricted to visual modes.Lyric expansiveness is born, rather, of formal compression.

One might think here of the distinctive quality of the atomic poemsin Margaret Cavendish's Poems, and Phancies, across which, as LaraDodds puts it, "speculation about the atom is inextricably linkedwith speculation about the world. Contemplation of matter in itssmallest part leads to contemplation of matter on a cosmic scale."(21) Scholars familiar with Cavendish certainly recognize thisontological effect of her microcosmic worlds. One "cause of thiseffect" (with apologies to Polonius) is that Cavendish presents herpoems themselves as atoms, reflecting, quite brilliantly, the atomismconstitutive of her approach to lyric. (22) The form of the codex limitsthe means of representing this poetics-as-physics, which will happily beactualized in a forthcoming multimodal edition, Choose Your Own Poemsand Fancies, responsive to the "fact that between the first editionin 1653 and the second in 1664, the 106 poems are completely shuffledand rearranged." (23) This edition uses digital technology torealize the lyric mobility that Liza Blake identifies as a feature, nota bug, of Cavendish's output. (24) Blake suggests that, in fact,"many of the things that make Cavendish's poetry difficult toread as lyric poetry--the lack of the personal development of afirst-person speaker, the way that so few of her poems come to asatisfactory (or any) conclusion, even the monotony of couplets usedthroughout the volume, etc.--come from her physics, her vision ofatomism. She views, uses the poems in this section as atoms... notindividual, enclosed, complete well-wrought urns... [but] rearrangeablemosaics of thought." (25) If we turn back to Donne's "TheFlea" for a moment, we can perhaps see more expansively how smallforms tether the microcosmic to the cosmic through the collapsible lensof imagination. (26) This is not to limit to lyric the expansivepotentialities of poetry; as De Rerum Natura itself exemplifies, epic isa perfectly apt home for expansive reflection. But epic and mock epic(and other diminutive genres) respond to each other because of thesevery scalar capacities of literary form.

For Donne, as for the encomiasts, the flea functions as a poeticdevice for thinking about questions of scale, moving from themicrocosmic to the macrocosmic in ways that prod metaphysicalruminations. We can see how these ambitions play out over the course ofthe poem as a whole, in part because it avails itself of theamplificatory rhetorics of paradox. As readers have long observed, itsbrilliantly shifting strategy first makes nothing, and then everything,and then again nothing of the flea, whereby the careening wit of theseducer, not the plausibility of the analogy, carries the poem. A livingmicrocosm unto itself, the infinitesimal form of life provides an objectfor literalizing abstractions and condensing speculations. (27) Forexample, Donne takes up the legal fiction that, technically speaking,consummation conjoins bloods and makes man and woman one, and is thustantamount to a legitimate enactment of marriage ("This flea is youand I, and this / Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is; / Thoughparents grudge, and you, ware met, / And cloistered in these livingwalls of jet"). (28) How far, the poem wonders, can this reductioad absurdum be applied? All but anticipating the scientist's petridish or test tube, Donne uses the imaginative microcosm of the flea totranslate an abstract postulate into an embodied proof. (29) The fleathus provides the poet an exemplum for raising metaphysical questionsthat may mock scholastic exactitude, but that also seriously explorewhat happens when abstract logic occupies real, living bodies.

In a similar way, the poem playfully questions the disproportionbetween the physical and the social effects of lost virginity. Theostensibly humble punctum of the fleabite is first proffered as ananalogy for the virginal woman's ruptured hymen. Yet what isinitially minimized ("how little that which thou deny'stme") is soon just as obstreperously magnified to metaphysicalproportions. Lover, womb, marriage bed, temple, Christ figure, martyr,cloister: the poem's initial, outrageous conceit casts the humbleinsect in a dazzling repertoire of roles that ventriloquize the mockencomiast far more than the Petrarchan lover. As a starting point for apoem that infinitely "swells" its own metaphors andmicrocosms, that infinitesimal prick soon seems to be only the first ina series of concentric circles that might potentially expand toinfinity. The "nothing" of virginity is perhaps not the soleterminus ad quem of the poet's gaze. Instead, much like theLucretian (or Cavendishian) atom, it is a starting point for analogy andanalysis, a conceptual entity tendered up for experimentation. (30) Thisswelling of turgid metaphors, I am arguing, is not just attributable tothe seductive idiom. It is also the fault of the bug that blisters thethought and sends it skyward. One might reflect on an additionalinstance in Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House," whichagain magnifies the mote to a metaphysical scale:

They seem within the polished grassA landskip drawn in looking-glass.And shrunk in the huge pasture showAs spots, so shaped, on faces do.Such fleas, ere they approach the eye,In multiplying glasses lie.They feed so wide, so slowly move,As constellations do above. (31)

The topical reference is to the painted creation scene referencedin Davenant's Gondibert, which the poet reflects on while surveyingthe meadows of Lord Fairfax's estate. (32) But the vision conjuredalso renders that creation scene as majestic because it is analogous toviewing fleas under a magnifying glass: both imagination swelling, bothwonder producing, both microscopic perspectives evoking metaphysicalrealms.

Given the proliferating connections between the insect world andthe imaginative one, by now readers may not be surprised to learn thatif poems could be equated with atoms or oculi, they could also befigured as fleas. This connection between the literary and the lousyagain illuminates how readily finite entities are harnessed tophenomenological and metaphysical abstractions. To recall an instancequite familiar to readers, Mercutio denigrates Romeo's propheticdream as the byproduct of the movements of one Queen Mab, avision-granting insect drawn by a "team of little atomi." AsRomeo struggles to discern what his dream meant, and dreads (quiterightly) its foretelling of doom, Mercutio dismisses such"visions" as merely the result of material causes. Through hisreductive lens, supernatural prognostications are not enchanted, butparticulate; or to put it in the simplest terms, Romeo's dreamitself is born of--indeed tantamount to--a flea. Todd Borlik notes thatthe association is by no means unique to Mercutio; pointing to theOED's indication that, "atomy functions as a generic name forthe smallest of insects," he cites too the little-known 1605 PeterWoodhouse poem "The Flea: Democritus, His Dream," which,again, employs the word "atomy" as a flea reference, andemploys both as the filmy forerunners of dreams. (33) This should nolonger surprise us. Cavendish famously disparaged the experiments of themicroscopists in The Blazing World though her character the Empress, whor*coils from a magnified flea and louse. But even Cavendish could notget away from insects as imagination-spurring motes. As SuparnaRoychoudhury notes in Phantasmic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age ofEarly Modern Science, Cavendish's colorful way of referring to"mental figments" was "small Gnats" that "buzin the Braine" ("Similizing Fancy to a Gnat"); the"insectile connotation, in Goneril's refusal to indulgeLear's 'each buzz, each fancy, each complaint'(1.4.303)." (34) Cavendish and her Empress might have condemned thedistorted image of insects under glass. But she had no hesitation inidentifying poetic thoughts as insects, or as stings that are onlyhealed with writing ("The Head of Man just like a Hive is made /The Braine, like as the Combe's exactly laid. / Where every Thoughtjust like a Bee doth dwell, I Each by it selfe within a partedCell"). (25) Ideas are motes, motes are poems, and poems areworlds, marriage temples, brains, constellations.

Dreams and poetic dreamers, then, and their tiny and fleetingproductions, were hom*ologized as both insect-like and atom-like:imaginative expansions upon microcosmic forms. The set of associationshad real staying power, as witnessed by--to cite one last example--alittle-known 1679 play by then-poet laureate Thomas Shadwell, A truewidow a comedy acted by the Duke's servants, which features "acopy of verses upon a Flea, presented to his Mistress, in a goldChain." We can clearly see the influence of John Donne, thepseudo-Ovidian pulex poems, and paradoxical encomia in this mobile,virile creature whose body itself is the means of transmitting eroticverse:

Oh happy Flea! that maist both kiss and bite,Like Lovers, in their height of Appetite,Her Neck so white.Pretty black Alderman, in golden Chain,Who suck'st her Blood, yet putt'st her to no pain,Whilst I in vain. (36)

The preposterous moment, which comes at the marital and comedicclimax of the play, evokes the ephemerality of love poetry (for example,Orlando's verses in the Forest of Arden), and jovially mocks theflea poetry tradition. But one is nonetheless struck by the image of theminiature manuscript tucked in a locket, thus placing the love poem atprecisely the spot where the lascivious flea most liked to feed.

As these divergent examples show, literary forms repeatedly drawupon various formal and rhetorical properties to amplify the minute intothe infinite. It is worth reflecting here on etymology, whichunderscores the connections between the infinite--that which cannot becontained--and the microscopic or finite--that which can be no furtherparsed. Both of these seemingly opposite constructions are reflected ina slightly later word, "infinitesimal." As the OED notes,"The form of the modern Latin word shows that it was originallymeant as an ordinal, viz. the 'infiniteth' in order, thatwhich is at an infinite distance from the first; but the ordinals arealso used to name fractions, e.g. hundredth (part)... hence...infinitesimal, came to mean unity divided by infinity, [phrase omitted],and thus an infinitely small part or quantity." (37) Both thefinite and the endless come together in the specter of the smallestpossible forms, the elusive mote that draws outward from itself visionsof the cosmos. We have seen this in John Donne and other poets'parsing of the flea as an atomy that can, with the imaginative aid ofcompressed literary form, be magnified almost ad infinitum. (38) Theliterary lives of these early modern insects thus underscore an argumentmade by Christiane Frey: that in studying the epistemologies of thesubvisible, one quickly comes to recognize the "imagination itselfas a microscope." (39) The insect is a wonderful curiosity forpoetry, a philosophical object that the poet's eye expands to amacrocosmic scale, an entity of "here and there andeverywhere." And it is also a figure of poetry, in its ownintricately contrived and elusive being, and in its imaginative capacityto transform iotas into infinities.

THE LABORATORY: IMAGINATION MAGNIFIED

In the first half of this essay, I considered the prominence offleas and related insects in the imaginative life-world of Renaissanceliterature, a presence that was variously (and often simultaneously)paradoxical, metaphysical, ludicrous, mythological, and erotic. Readersmight understandably expect to find the curious arthropod playing arather more sober role for early microscopists. But as we turn frominsects in literature to those in the laboratory, we find that bugsunder glass retain their literary associations to a surprising extent.These depictions, as I will now suggest, reflect not only new realms asrevealed through the magnifying lens, but also the residual influence ofliterary paradigms upon what natural philosophers thought they saw. Theprimacy given to insects among the objects of microscopic study, thedramatic nature of the awe they inspire, and the tendency for theseprotoscientific descriptions to spiral into fabular myths andmetaphysical ruminations, all show that the fleas of Hooke and Powerremained fantastical as well as factual. In the pages that follow, Iwill show that the mote viewed through the oculus actually had a greatdeal in common with the mote valorized in the paradoxical encomium,erotic lyric, and fable. The microscope's verisimilar aspirations,in other words, failed to entirely displace the Mercutian, Donnean,faux-Ovidian flea.

Whatever else one might say about the place of insects in earlyworks of microscopy, their role was definitely not minor. Among theheterogeneous and "tantalizing collection of strange and unusualcreatures and objects" explored by men like Anton van Leeuwenhoek,Henry Power, and Robert Hooke, perhaps none played so outsize a role asinsects. (40) So ubiquitous was the insect to these texts that one mighteven identify it as constituent of the genre itself, traceable all theway back to Francesco Stelluti's 1630 Persio tradotto in versoschiolto e dichiarato, "the first book to contain images oforganisms as viewed through the microscope." Anticipating thestrategies of the better-known microscopic texts, Stelluti's bookincluded a "striking full-page image of a magnified bee" which"still has the capacity to arouse the wonder of modernexperts," along with a "smaller illustration of a magnifiedgrain weevil, including a detail of the tip of the insect's snoutand mandibles." (41) These depictions anticipated the desire ofreading audiences for striking representations of magnified insects andreveal the traces of literary categories that gave these creaturesprimacy. Especially notable here is the prominence given to the bee,which boasts a literary heritage at least as vigorous as that of anyinsect, taking pride of place for Virgil, Ariosto, and Mandeville inparables of organization, industry, and complex sociality.

These early microscopic texts were clearly exciting to readers, forthey promised to reveal new and wondrous forms of living and nonlivingentities, an intention exemplified by the prominence accorded tostartling visual display. The prioritization of insects in these workslikewise makes it clear that they were especially meant to generatewonder and amazement. Indeed, enlarged representations of insects seemto do so still, as anyone encountering the foldout plates in RobertHooke's Micrographia (1665) for the first time can readilycorroborate. Even repeat readers often startle at the much-magnified(and quite magnificent) flea, and the volume's almost equallyremarkable louse. Hooke was, as Brian Ford puts it, surely"concerned with making familiar objects appear larger." (42)Henry Power's Experimental Philosophy, in Three Books (London,1664) also gives pride of place to the flea, making it the firstcreature to be examined in the book's first section,"Microscopicall Observations." The flea is also one of thecentral subjects of Power's accompanying poem, "Incommendation of the Microscope." Leeuwenhoek, too, includes a longdiscussion on fleas and a remarkable engraving to accompany thatdiscussion, veering from his colleagues in displaying the creature as,remarkably, upside-down and dead (we will have more to consider aboutthe general "liveliness" of microscopy's insectsshortly). Where Leeuwenhoek emulates his colleagues, nonetheless, is bymaking much of the flea. He makes a point of insisting that the creatureas seen through the microscope is truly tremendous, "eight timeslarger than here shewn, though the limner declared that it did not seemany larger to him. Nor could I ever have believed that there was such adiversity in the sight of different people as I now find to be the case.But this limner was very short sighted." (43) Leeuwenhoekacknowledges the unexpected variation in perspective but nonethelessasserts that with unimpeded vision, the creature in the microscopeastounds.

As accounts like this of the unreliable "short sighted"limner suggest, it is perhaps no wonder that early microscopic studiesemphasize the epistemological necessity of the (shocking) visual imageto truly manifest the subvisible. The printed image quickly became themedium of actualizing the heretofore unverifiable for the presumablyskeptical reader. Its capable negotiation of print's potential wasa central component in the ascendency of the Micrographia, which wouldbe the first book on microscopy published and promoted by the RoyalSociety. Hooke's work was preceded by Henry Power'sExperimental Philosophy, in Three Books: Containing New ExperimentsMicroscopical, Mercurial, Magnetical, making it the first work publishedin England with observations made through the microscope. A comparisonof these pioneering texts soon reveals why it was Hooke's work, notPower's, that the Society favored. (44) Power, as FrederiqueAi't-Touati points out, relied predominantly (and rathercharmingly) on Thomas Muffet's rustic, woodcut-illustratedInsectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum (Theater of Insects) as asource, and although Hooke in turn borrowed from Power and thus fromMuffet, he nonetheless proffer a completely different relation to thedisplay and interpretation of visual evidence. As Ai't-Touatiexplains:

The primary difference between Power and Hooke lies in theirdefinitions of visual proof. Paradoxically, the "ocular demonstration"that Power claims to offer is not visible at all: illustrations are fewand unconvincing, and the text bears the burden of transmitting avisual experience. In Hooke's Micrographia, on the other hand, the "adoculum" proof is the image itself; it becomes epistemologicallynecessary if it is to constitute evidence. The microscopist has notonly seen; he also shows. Declining the conventional succor ofimagination or analogy, Hooke took it upon himself to present hisdiscoveries "directly." (45)

The necessity of this approach makes perfect sense: in an era withlimited access to scientific instruments, readers might well doubt theveracity of the claims which natural philosophers vaunted. As MargaretCavendish's (and the short-sighted limner's) case shows, evensome who did look through microscopes were not necessarily persuaded bythe authenticity of what they saw. Still, for most, what Othello calls"ocular proof" was increasingly becoming the gold standard forsubstantiating evidentiary claims. Hooke's roundel-shapedengravings throughout the volume effectively replicate the view throughthe lens, putatively minimizing the distance between reader and thesubvisible. Meghan Doherty has helpfully established that Hooke'sespecial success derived from his extensive "connections to theartistic community in London and his interest in printing and theprinted image," especially techniques that he adopted from portraitengravers to translate three-dimensional entities into the flat visualplate through shadows and crosshatching. (46) For all the claims ofverisimilitude, however, Hooke's strategy effectively fictionalizedas much as it revealed. Insects under glass who died during experimentswere drawn as if still alive. Variations in lighting were obfuscated inorder to present a luminous, uniform substrate. Even "surfaces,those least metaphorical, most literal of things... became objects ofuntrustable paradox... when the apparently smooth and continuous surfaceof the real proved calloused, inscrutable and inconstant." (47)Promises of a revelatory truth were also severely compromised by thefact that these engravings were composites produced by collatingmultiple views. They never would have been available to the actualviewing eye. Finally, the difficulty in translating matters of scalecomplicated the longed-for transparency of the image. (48) As Zwierleinnotes, "when lice look like lobsters, it is only the commentarythat identifies them;... the illustrations could not exist without theexplanatory text." (49) Thus Hooke presents a visual scheme thateffectively creates the illusion of a virtual viewing experience, yetone built upon misrepresentation, and not nearly as self-sufficient asits champions propose.

Hooke's reliance on visual re-presentation of the creaturesand objects that he viewed has, nonetheless, long created the impressionthat the Micrographia is the "scientific" text to Power'smore inventive fictionalized account. This was a notion that Hookehimself was all too happy to champion, as we see in his critique of theerrors of the rather too "ingenious Dr. Power." (50) Scholarslike Ait-Touati assert that "after Micrographia, it seemed, therewas no longer a need to buttress weak analogies with mythologicalimagery." (51) But the Micrographia by no means abandons suchimagery, and Hooke, as we will see, is pretty "ingenious" too.For example, he regularly highlights the aesthetic and literaryqualities of the creatures he views, entities that are almost invariablypresented through the animating fiction of liveliness even as theydisintegrated and died. He is not immune to philosophical reverie, aswhen reflecting on "the small Silver-colord Bookworm," acreature he calls "one of the teeth of time." (52) Likewise,personal motivations, worldly ambitions, and curious habits of mind areregularly ascribed to the ants, fleas, bees, and lice he examines,entities that, in the process, are transformed from specimens tocharacters. One suspects that while Hooke was learning from portraitengravers' pictorial methods for conveying the impression ofthree-dimensional space within a flat plane, he was also gleaning theconveyance of the humanizing, eternizing elements of portraiture. Wheneven Leeuwenhoek, a successor of Hooke and Power, could not resistreferring to his objects of study as if they were the figures offables--"wee animalcules" and "cavortingbeasties"--we can see why for Hooke, anthropomorphizing insectsseemed irresistible. Sometimes playful, sometimes vicious, sometimesambitious: Hooke's bugs are agential explorers, well-roundedcharacters of their own world, with mock epic aspirations to rival ours.(53) No wonder that Samuel Pepys, almost certainly unaware ofHooke's barbed critique of Power, and genuinely dazzled by hisinsect microworld, called "Mr Hookes Microscopicall Observations,the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life." (54)

This "ingenuity" of Hooke's had many components, butnot least among them was this tendency to highlight the aesthetic,literary, and anthropomorphic qualities of the insects he observed. Afoundational animating fiction was that the objects of his study were"whole, living creatures," regardless of their state ofdissection, immobilization, or decay. The insects in Micrographia areinvariably presented as "lively, compelling creatures" notunlike those that one might encounter during foreign travelogue. (55)Some of these characters are, as in the human world, of the pedestrianvariety, as was the "crab-like insect" that, while"reading one day in Septemb. I chanced to observe one very smalcreature creep over the Book I was reading," or the peripatetic"wandering mite," enlarging his domain by "traversing awindow at London." (56) One gleans here the more bathetic,deflationary tendencies of mock encomium. (57) But other, braver fellowsseemed to have greater ambitions, as in the case of the "whitefeatherwing'd moth," which makes Hooke muse on its, andtherefore potentially humans beings', ability to fly. And thenthere is that notorious upstart, the "impudent,""officious," and "saucy" louse. (58) Hooke, clearly,has a laugh describing "this creature... so officious, that'twill be known to every one at one time or other, so busie, and soimpudent, that it will be intruding it self in every ones company, andso proud and aspiring withall, that it fears not to trample on the best,and affects nothing so much as a Crown." (59) Reading these pluckybattles against human enemies, one is immediately reminded of theparadoxical encomium and its similar valorization of the humble butnoisome louse. Availing himself of a pun conflating the human scalp andthe royal "crown," Hooke pretends to see the louse as a(social) climber who would transcend the animal for the human"kingdom." This is not empirical description, but metaphysicalwit.

In this semifictional landscape of mock empires, Hooke ascribes tothe scientist a literary role too, comparing himself to a secondAlexander ready to take on the "terra incognita" of thesubvisible world. (60) To affect the conquest of these unknown lands ofthe subvisible is to enter not only the wheelhouse of the historicalnarrative but even more purely imaginative domains, from Hamlet's"undiscovered country after death" to Donne's eroticempire ("O my America! my new-found-land / My kingdom, safeliestwhen with one man mann'd, / My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,/ How blest am I in this discovering thee!"). (61) ThatHooke's empires are, in part, implicidy erotic is evidenced by thefact that "naturally there is a female love-interest named Naturewhose footsteps are especially 'to be trac'd,' not onlyin her ordinary course, but when she seems to be put to hershifts." Hooke pursues the "the secret workings" and"inward motions" of what Mary Blaine Campbell archly calls the"coy mistress" of nature. (62) She draws a connection to thep*rnographically inflected texts of the era, the notorious "Schoolof Girls" and "Academy of Ladies," but I would suggestthat other erotic genres may also be in operation here. In figuringHooke in pursuit of the "coy mistress" of nature, Hooke alsoresembles Acteon spying on Diana, and of course the metaphysical lovepoets, who wished themselves to have the license of the flea.

If Hooke replicates the experience of peering through the lens,relying on occasional anecdotes to enliven and supplement hisempiricism, Henry Power's nearly coterminous ExperimentalPhilosophy (1664) prioritizes verbal over visual evidence, and freely"blended literary devices, in particular analogy and literaryreferences, with scientific observation." (63) His approach furthersuggests that even with access to natural philosophy's revelatoryinstruments, direct observation did not eradicate the need forimaginative means of accessing the unknown. He cites incredible fablesfrom the Insectorum and classical myths from Ovid, and he regularlyinterrupts his empirical descriptions with general speculations andcolorful anecdotes. This clash of epistemologies emerges especially inPower's description of the humble flea, a figure that, as we haveseen, also features quite prominently in Hooke's account. Powerbegins empirically enough, with a description of physical qualities. Butsoon he pulls away from conveying the newly discovered perspectiveprovided by the microscopic glass and reverts to more fictionalizedaccounts: fables from Thomas Muffet's Insectorum, fantastic claimsabout the flea's legendary strength and prowess, and a poeticcommonplace derived from John Donne's most famous seduction poem.

Power's personal manuscript of the text, completed three yearsbefore Experimental Philosophy's 1664 publication, even furtherdisplays the literariness of his approach. For this manuscript alsoincludes Power's enthusiastic poem "In Commendation of theMicroscope," which gives us especial insight into the degree towhich imagination as well as empiricism drove his studies. (64)Delighted that "thy Atomes (brave Democritus) are now / made toappear in bulk & figure too," Power goes on to commend therevelations of scores of other microscopic observations. What Power seesunder his microscope are, as we might anticipate, magnified ventricles,hairs, and sinews. But he also seems to see an idea--the idea ofimmateriality:

Here are the Curious Mathematick's HereLyes the rare skill of theire Artificeere.all things hee made of nothing, but in thishee made a thinge that less then Nothing is.

Empirical observation is overwhelmed by something that the naturalphilosopher could not, in any literal sense, have seen: less thannothing. Like the hymen of the erotic poets, the atom presents for Powera breathtaking exemplum of matter at the moment of its dissolution intoimmateriality. Purporting to offer a work of natural philosophy, Powerstill thinks much like a poet: observations of vanishingly small thingslead ineluctably to considerations of those which lie beyond thevanishing point. Things dissolve into nothings. The structure of thoughtrevealed here is one trained not by sober observation, but by a wittycapacity to see, like the mock encomiasts did, multum in parvo (much inlittle). He traverses realms along imaginative, scalar lines that pullaway from physical description and towards metaphysical thought.

The argument that Hooke achieved what Power did not depends on theclaim that Micrographia "proposes that the problematic use of theimagination be replaced by the detailed observation provided by themicroscope." (65) This implicitiy triumphalist account perhapsoverly naturalizes the assumption that metaphoricity was a temporarycrutch that could be happily discarded once microscopes burst on thescene with full revelation of reality. But certainly not all ofMicrographia's early readers were persuaded that its images weretrustworthy representations. Margaret Cavendish, again, insisted thatmicroscopes were "false informers," lampooning them andtelescopes alike in The Blazing World. Her skepticism about experimentalscience has sometimes been maligned by both her contemporaries and quitea few critics and historians. But we might more reasonably ask whyshould one have confidence in the revelatory powers of artificialinstruments? An ocular prosthesis does not in itself guarantee areliable view of the natural world, any more than a fun-house mirrordisplays what we "really" look like. Against what objectiverubric can the optical device's representations be corroborated? Weshould resist the reifying perspective of teleology, the common-senseassumption that in questioning the veracity of optical instruments,skeptics like Cavendish were somehow especially naive. As CatherineWilson asks in The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and theInvention of the Microscope, "in what sense did the images providedby the microscope explain anything?... Why should we admit that theimage delivered by the microscope is a better image, or a deeper ortruer image, rather than simply another image?... Microscopy generatesrepresentations, but representations by themselves do not explainanything." (66) Scientists who continued to "see" insectsin literary terms clearly found something in the erotic, encomiastic,and fabular forms that the lens itself failed to displace.

When Power published his Experimental Philosophy, he left out therhapsodic commendatory poem. But remaining were strange traces of themetaphysical poets' quest, evident in the frequency with whichPower, looking through his microscope to "see how curiously theminutest things of the world are wrought," finds himselfdiscoursing upon objects imagined rather than actually seen. (67)Outfitted though he was with the "incomparable artifice" ofthe "dioptrical glass," Power nonetheless depends, just asLucretius did, on the power of analogy to reveal the true nature ofthings. (68) Dust in a sunbeam; alphabetic letters subject to infiniterecombination; seeds in potentia: as mentioned above, the "natureof things" in De Rerum Natura is rendered through poeticcomparison. Each metaphorical vehicle became a placeholder for an ideaabout matter's construction, its mobility, and its ontology: inother words, what it is, and how it changes, and what it means for thenature of being. In a surprisingly similar way, Power finds himselfdrawn to a natural philosophy born of metaphoricity, a physics derivedanalogically. Power had it on good authority that this was a legitimateapproach, for even the biblical Adam had to "ingeniously ghess...by the Analogie of things in Nature." (69) If Power (and Hooke) areboth ingenious, then, they surely have good precedent for being so.Accordingly, Power finds himself regularly drawing upon the analogicaland speculative mode, moving from what he seems to see beneath his lensto that which as yet remains unseen:

therefore it hath often seem'd to me beyond an ordinary probability,and something more than fancy (how paradoxical soever the conjecturemay seem) to think, that the least Bodies we are able to see with ournaked eyes, are but middle proportional (as it were) 'twixt thegreatest and smallest Bodies in nature, which two Extremes lye equallybeyond the reach of Humane sensation. (70)

If Power imagines the visible realm as a kind of empiricist'smiddle axiom, it also paradoxically reveals the extent to which henavigates observation through conceptual rather than visual categories.(71) So too, Power's fascination with the realms beyond the reachof human sensation--with what he later calls "sublimeSpeculations"--is also apparent in his choice of the flea and thebee as the first objects of his "Microscopical Observations."For the bee, like the flea, has an expansive literary history. (72) Withits appearance in the works of Virgil, Milton, emblem books, and more,the bee further underscores the poetic sourcing of the volume'sfirst subjects.

Certainly, Power's description of the flea includes someminute observations such as would have been aided by themicroscope's lens. He provides a detailed description of the"diaphanous Cornea" through which "is the pupil or appleof the eye, beset round with a greenish glistering circle, which is theIris, (as vibrissant and glorious as a Cats eye)." (73) We learnthat "his feet are slit into claws or talons, that he might thebetter stick to what he lights upon," and that "at his snoutis fixed a Proboscis, or hollow trunk or probe, by which he both punchesthe skin, and sucks the blood through it." (74) Each of theseprecise observations gives readers a fairly accurate sense of what theymight see under a microscope. Yet the description of physical structuresoon gives way to Power's recollection of something he had readabout in Muffet's Insectorum: the story of a flea pulling aminiscule carriage by a golden chain. "Yea, we have heard itcredibly reported, saith he, that a Flea hath not onely drawn a goldChain, but a golden Charriot also with all its harness and accoutrementsfixed to it, which did excellently set forth the Artifice of the Maker,and Strength of the Drawer." (75)

Having left the realm of direct observation for that of rememberedanecdote, Power then concludes his discussion of the flea with thisperoration: "So great is the mechanick power which Providence hasimmur'd within these living walls of Jet." (76) John Donne,readers will recall, had most famously attempted to persuade his own coymistress that virginity's loss was akin to a fleabite, insistingthat within the flea's "living walls of jet," thelovers' bloods were already, fantastically, mingled. (77)Donne's lady haughtily kills the flea, an upset that the cleverspeaker immediately assimilates into a revised seduction strategy. Wenever learn if the lady succumbs to the trick, but some thirty yearsafter Donne's "The Flea" first saw print, the naturalphilosopher Henry Power is seduced. Drawn away from observation ofactuality into the realm of literary analogy, the natural philosopherlooks at a flea for the first time through a microscope and sees notonly iris and talon, but also the tiny heroes of paradox andmetaphysical speculation. He sees pincers and proboscis, but he cannotresist evoking, too, the hymeneal conceit of the love poet.

Oberlin College

NOTES

I gave a version of this essay at the 2017 Renaissance Society ofAmerica on the panel, "Visualizing Nothing in Early ModernEngland," and I benefitted greatly from the feedback of myco-panelists James A. Knapp, Timothy M. Harrison, and Travis D.Williams, as well as audience members. I received helpful suggestions onan earlier version of this work from Roger Gaskell and CarolineDuroselle-Melish, who led the Rare Book School course "TheIllustrated Scientific Book to 1800," and from fellow participantsin that course, especially Daniel Selcer, Meghan C. Doherty, and DahliaPorter. Dianne Mitchell and Jessica Wolfe generously shared severalarchival flea poems with me. My especial thanks to Debapriya Sarkar andJenny Mann, and to two helpful anonymous readers.

(1) Robert Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso (1690) [A6r]. I wasreminded of this passage when reading Claire Preston, The Poetics ofScientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford U.Press, 2015).

(2) John Donne, "The Flea," John Donne: The Major Works,ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008), 89.

(3) Brian J. Ford, "The Royal Society and theMicroscope," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 55.1(Jan. 2001): 29.

(4) Anne-Julia Zwierlein, "Queen Mab under the Microscope: TheInvention of Subvisible Worlds in Early Modern Science and Poetry,"in Spatial Change on English Literature, ed. Joachim Frenk (Trier:Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2000), 69. It is curious thathistorians of the microscope can so readily overlook this, as does C. H.Luthy in "Atomism, Lynceus, and the Fate of Seventeenth-CenturyMicroscopy," Early Science and Medicine 1.1 (1996): 1-27, whoclaims that "we know of no sixteenth century phantasies concerningmicroscopic vision" (4).

(5) Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies inthe Effect of the "New Science" Upon Seventeenth-CenturyPoetry (Northwestern U. Press, 1950).

(6) See for example N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos and Order. ComplexDynamics in Literature and Science (U. of Chicago Press, 1991); ClairePreston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation; Elizabeth Spiller,Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of MakingKnowledge, 1580-1670 (U. of Cambridge Press, 2004). For introductions tosome of the important conversations happening between these fieldscurrently, see Howard Marchitello's "Science Studies andEnglish Renaissance Literature," Literature Compass 3.3 (2006):341-65; and Carla Mazzio, ed., Shakespeare & Science, SCR 26.1-2(2009): 1-23.

(7) Several essays in The Palgrave Handbook of Early ModernLiterature, Science, and Culture, ed. Evelyn Tribble and HowardMarchitello (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) cover this ground. SeeWendy Beth Hyman, "'Deductions from metaphors':Figurative Truth, Poetical Language, and Early Modern Science,"27-48; Kristen Poole, "God's Game of Hide-and-Seek: Bacon andAllegory," 115-38; and Jean Feerick, "Poetic Science: Wonderand the Seas of Cognition in Bacon and Pericles" 423-44.

(8) For the place of imagination in early modern science, seeSuparna Roychoudhury, "Melancholy, Ecstasy, Phantasma: ThePathologies of Macbeth" Modern Philology 111.2 (2013): 205-30, andher monograph Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of EarlyModern Science (Cornell U. Press, 2018).

(9) Jessica Wolfe, "Circus Minimus: The Early Modern Theaterof Insects," in Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater, ed.Karen Raber and Monica Mattfeld (Penn State U. Press, 2017), 111-22.

(10) Arthur Stanley Pease, "Things without Honor,"Classical Philology 21.1 (January 1926): 27-42.

(11) Ralph J. Hexter, "Shades of Ovid: Pseudo- (and Para-)Ovidiana in the Middle Ages," Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James G.Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge U. Press,2011), 298-99. My thanks to Jennifer Bryan for sharing this with me.

(12) This episode and the poems that accumulated around it aretreated extensively in From Mother and Daughter: Poems, Letters, andDialogues of Les Dames des Roches, ed. and trans. Anne R. Larson (U. ofChicago Press, 2006). The original publication is La Puce de Madame desRoches, Quiest un Recueil de Divers Poems Grecs, Latins, et Francois,Composez par Plusiers Doctes Personnages aux Grans fours tenus aPoitiers (Paris, 1583).

(13) Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus A 1604-version Edition,2nd ed., ed. Michael Keefer (Petersboro, Ontario: Broadview, 2007),1.iv.61-63; II.vii.110-12. As in many texts, the flea and the louse arepaired as similarly uncanny characters; cf. Wagner threatening in thesame scene that "I will turn all the lice about thee intofamiliars, and they will tear thee all to pieces" (I.iv.25-26). Foran extensive list of the eroticized appearances of the flea inRenaissance literary history, see Gordon Williams, A Dictionary ofSexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3vols. (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Athlone Press, 1994), 1:503-4; andDavid H. Brumble, "John Donne's "The Flea': SomeImplications of the Encyclopedic and Poetic Flea Traditions,"Critical Quarterly 15 (1973): 147-54.

(14) Wolfe, "Circus Minimus," 114.

(15) Pease, "Things withuot Honor," 32. The most thoroughtreatment of this literary kind remains Rosalie Colie, ParadoxiaEpidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton U. Press,1966).

(16) Caspare Dornavio [Caspar Dornau, 1577-1632], AmpitheatrumSapientiae Socraticae Joco-Seriae (Hanoviae: Typis Wechelianis, ImpensisDanielis ac Davidis, 1619).

(17) Deborah Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language,Sensation (U. of Chicago Press, 2017), 89. Her citation of Cicero comesfrom "Brutus," in Cicero V, Loeb Classical Library 342(Harvard U. Press, 1988), 12.47.

(18) Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, 10.

(19) Elizabeth Cook, Seeing through Words: The Scope of LateRenaissance Poetry (Yale U. Press, 1986), 21-47.

(20) Cook, Seeing through Words, 33-35.

(21) Lara Dodds, The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish(Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 2013), 80.

(22) Dodds, Literary Invetions, 81.

(23) Liza Blake, "A Thousand Lines of Nonlinear Poetry:Reading Cavendish's Poems and Fancies, Part I" (unpublishedessay presented in the "Reading Lyric" seminar at ShakespeareAssociation of America conference, 2017), n.p.

(24) Liza Blake, Electric Presshttp://electric.press/books/cavendish.html.

(25) Blake, "A Thousand Lines of Nonlinear Poetry."

(26) In a chap, in Seeing through Words, "Quick Thought andIts Vehicles," Elizabeth Cook shares an interest in insects (andsparrows) as spurs to "imaginative elasticity" (117). Notableis that Donne does not "show that interest in the minute which Godand scientists share" (119), but overlooks physical description infavor of "conceptual abstraction." Even here, microscopistsare Donnean. But see also Heather Dubrow, who calls attention to thespecificity of attention evoked by the deictic "Marke but thisflea" (emphasis added) in Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric:Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like Here," "This,""Come" (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

(27) In a fascinating recent essay, Todd Andrew Borlik argues thatMidsummer Night's Dream is itself a scalar experiment, one thatmagnifies insects into human-sized "actors." See"Shakespeare's Insect Theater: Fairy Lore as Elizabethan FolkEntomology," in Raber and Mattfeld, Performing Animals, 123-40.

(28) Donne, "The Flea," 89.

(29) These entomological excurses are thus exercises aligned withwhat Elizabeth Spiller describes as the generative practice of creating"model worlds" applicable to both literary and scientificpractice (Science, Reading and Renaissance Literature, 50).

(30) Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in RenaissancePoetry (Oxford U. Press, 2019), explores the metaphysical implicationsof the virginal hymen in great depth in its fourth chap., Seizing the"Point Imaginary."

(31) Andrew Marvell, "Upon Applet on House," in TheComplete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Penguin, 2005), 89;stanza 58.

(32) For Marvell's appropriation of Gondibert and allusions toHooke, see A. B. Chambers, Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: SeventeenthCentury Praise and Restoration Style (Penn State U. Press, 1986),139-42.

(33) Borlik, "Shakespeare's Insect Theater," 126.Borlik notes (nl2) that the OED defines the well-known Mercutianlocution, viz. Queen Mab's "team of little atomi" in1.4.58, as a "diminutive or tiny being, a mite" (s.v."atomy," n.1, def. 2).

(34) Suparna Roychoudhury, Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination inthe Age of Early Modern Science (Cornell U. Press, 2018), 92-93.1 amgrateful to the anonymous reader who pointed out that "one reasonCavendish associates insects with thoughts is because she thinks thatsharp atoms, which prick/sting/poke, are those that produce thought.They are actually shaped like mosquitoes!"

(35) Margaret Cavendish, "Similizing Fancy to a Gnat" and"Similizing the Head of Man to a Hive of Bees," Poems andFancies (London, 1653), 149, 151.

(36) Thomas Shadwell, A true widow a comedy acted by theDuke's servants (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1679), 77 (L3r).

(37) OED, s.v. "infinitesimal" (etymology).

(38) A phrase that, itself, evokes flea lore: "The vermin onlyteaze and pinch, / Their foes superior by an inch. / So, naturalistsobserve, a flea / Has smaller fleas that on him prey; / And these havesmaller still to bite 'em, / And so proceed ad infinitum. I Thusevery poet, in his kind, / Is bit by him that comes behind." FromJonathan Swift, "On Poetry: a Rhapsody" (1733). My thanks toJohn Aguero for reminding me of this passage.

(39) Christiane Frey, "On the Art of Observing the Small: Onthe Borders of the Subvisibilia (from Hooke to Brockes),"Monatschefte 105.3 (Fall 2013): 380.

(40) Janice Neri, "Between Observation and Image:Representations of Insects in Robert Hooke's Micrographia"Studies in the History of Art 69 (2008): 88.

(41) David Freedburg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends,and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (U. of Chicago Press,2003), 189, cited inhttp://www.historyonnformation.com/expanded.php?id=3854.

(42) Ford, "Royal Society and the Microscope," 30.

(43) Antony van Leeuwenhoek, The Select Works of Antony vanLeeuwenhoek: Containing His Microscopical Discoveries, trans. SamuelHoole (London, 1798). Cited inhttps://leeuwenhoek.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/leeuwenhoeks-flea-i/.

(44) Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy, in Three Books:Containing New Experiments Microscopical, Mercurial, Magnetical. Withsome Deductions and Probable Hypotheses, raised from them, in Avouchmentand Illustration of the now famous Atomical Hypothesis (London: Printedby T. Roycroft, for John Martin, and James Allestry, at the Bell in S.Pauls Churchyard, 1664).

(45) Frederique Ait-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science andLiterature in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Susan Emanuel (U. ofChicago Press, 2011), 149, 152.

(46) Meghan C. Doherty, "Discovering the 'TrueForm': Hooke's "Micrographia" and the VisualVocabulary of Engraved Portraits," Notes and Records of the RoyalSociety of London 66.3 (2012): 228.

(47) Kevin Killeen, "Microscopy, Surfaces and the Unknowablein Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy (from Lucretius to MargaretCavendish)," Journal of the Northern Renaissance 8 (2017),https://www.northernrenaissance.org/microscopy-surfaces-and-the-unknowable-in-seventeenth-century-natural-philosophy-from-lucretius-to-marearet-cavendish/. But see also Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science:Imagining Worlds in Early Modem Europe (Cornell U. Press, 1999), whoargues that "his optical instrument deconstructs the notionof'interior'--all it finds is further surfaces" (183).

(48) See Neri, "Between Observation and Image," 96-97,for issues of scale as addressed in the Micrographia.

(49) Zwierlein, Queen Mab," 75-76.

(50) Neri, "Between Observation and Image," 101n70.

(51) Ait-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos, 151.

(52) Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or Some physiological descriptionsof minute bodies made by magnifying glasses with observations andinquiries thereupon (London, 1665), 210 ("Observ. LII. Of the smallSilver-color'd Book-worm").

(53) Clifford Dobell, Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His "LittleAnimals" (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1932).

(54) Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Jan. 21,1664/65,https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/01/21/.

(55) Neri, "Between Observation and Image," 92;"Hooke conceived of his insects as exotic and strange creaturesakin to those described by travelers to the New World" (91).

(56) Hooke, Micrograpia, 207 ("Observ. LI. Of the Crab-LikeInsect"), 205 ("Observ. L: Of the wandering mite").

(57) My thanks to the other anonymous reader of this essay forpointing to the antiheroic strain of the encomiast tradition, and itspossible place in scientific description.

(58) Hooke, Micrograpia, 198: "For to me there seems nothingwanting to make a man able to fly, but what may be easily enoughsupply'd from the Mechanicks hitherto known, save onely the want ofstrength, which the Muscles of a man seem utterly uncapable of, byreason of their smallness and texture, but how even strength also may bemechanically made, an artificial Muscle so contriv'd, that therebya man shall be able to exert what strength he please, and to regulate italso to his own mind, I may elsewhere endeavor to manifest"("Observ. XLVI. Of the white featherwing'd moth").

(59) Hooke, Micrograpia, 211 ("Observ. LI V. Of aLouse").

(60) Campell, 190.

(61) John Donne, "Elegy 2: To His Mistress Going to Bed,"in The Major Works, ed. (Oxford U. Press, 1990), 12-13.

(62) Campbell, Wonderland Science, 191.

(63) Ait-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos, 150.

(64) A full transcription of this poem, Sloane MS 1380, wascompleted in 1934. See Thomas Cowles, "Dr. Henry Power's Poemon the Microscope," Isis 21.1 (1934): 71-80. See also Sloane MS1393, 58-59 (BL MS 1276). I was able to check the transcription inperson. My thanks to the staff at the British Library for allowingaccess to the manuscript.

(65) Ait-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos, 151.

(66) Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophyand the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton U. Press, 1995), 254,255.

(67) Power, Experimental Philosophy, A3v.

(68) Power, Experimental Philosophy, A3r, A3v.

(69) Power, Experimental Philosophy, A4v.

(70) Power, Experimental Philosophy, b1r-v.

(71) In Bacon's New Organon, the middle axiom is the groundwhereupon one builds from "senses and particulars" to"general principles." Sir Francis Bacon, The Works, 15 vols.,ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (Boston: Houghton,Mifflin, and Co., 1901), 4:50.

(72) Power, Experimental Philosophy, c1v.

(73) Power, Experimental Philosophy, B1r.

(74) Power, Experimental Philosophy, B1v.

(75) Power, Experimental Philosophy, B2r.

(76) Power, Experimental Philosophy, B2r.

(77) John Donne, The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. HelenGardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

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