“when the Iustice of God is inflamed against vs, and that hée shootes his arowes as a sharpe punishment for our offences, he maketh his ministers and executers of his iust anger, the litle and insensible worms of the earth, neither doth his wrathe fall altogether vpon the vulgar or people of meane condition, but hath also like force vpon Princes and degrées of greate callings, whereof appeares a familiar experience in the monstrous death of a King & Bishop, recorded alreadie vnder the seale and authoritie of 40. or 50. Historians, of no lesse credite than vndoubted truthe.” —Pierre Boaistuau, Certain secret wonders of nature, trans. Edward Fenton [London, 1569], [Biv]
In his translation of Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses extraictes de plusieurs fameux auteurs grecs & latins (1560), Edward Fenton recounts the tales of Prince Popiel and Bishop Hatto central to Pulter’s emblem, “The Bishop and the Rats.” The moralizing prefatory remark, quoted above, refers to the “little and insensible worms of the earth” which, like Pulter’s rats, become vehicles for divine justice. The text also preempts incredulity: lest we doubt the veracity of these wondrous tales, we are reassured that they are recorded by forty or fifty reliable sources.
By the time Pulter composed “The Bishop and the Rats,” she may have read or heard these stories in any number of places, from this and other books of wonders, to broadside ballads, sermons, and other moralizing works. Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses and Fenton’s translation are especially intriguing, however, because they include an illustration that we might imagine as the absent pictura this emblem evokes. Editions of this text, including both Boaistuau’s manuscript edition (1559) dedicated to Queen Elizabeth and Fenton’s translation, are illustrated with images of the prodigies and monstrous creatures described therein. In Fenton, the chapter in which the stories of Hatto and Popiel appear, “The wonderful death of sundry Kings, Princes, Byshops, Emperoures, and Monarques,” is preceded by a woodcut (based on a vivid miniature in Boaistuau’s manuscript) of two figures, presumably Hatto and Popiel, seated on thrones facing one another inside a castle (see Picturing Rats and Mice in Early Modern English Culture). Rats surround them and are climbing their garments. The men appear to be in casual conversation even as the image proleptically points to the gruesome death both will experience. It’s possible that Pulter had this image in mind when composing Emblem 46. Like her other emblems, this is a “naked emblem” (see Godfery and Ross’s Headnote to the Amplified Edition of Mighty Nimrod (Emblem 1) [Poem 67]). Lacking an illustration, it nevertheless conjures an image. Did Pulter think of the critters in the woodcut as she wrote about the “infinite uglie ratts” (19) that pursued and finally devoured Hatto? Of course, Pulter and her earliest readers need not have imagined this particular illustration; many images of rats and other vermin were available as referents. Modern readers might think instead of something like the film Willard (both the 1971 and 2003 versions), in which rats exact justice and revenge. We might watch such a film and cringe, in part because actual rats are likely at a further remove—a threatening sign carrying connotations of dirt and disgust, but a sign without a real-life referent. Not so for Pulter and her contemporaries. Rats were a fact of everyday life. They also carried different meanings. Mary Fissell has suggested that rats and other mammalian vermin were not necessarily associated with dirt or germs, pollution, or revulsion (though Pulter’s use of “nasty” does suggest a reaction of disgust); instead, such vermin were despised because they vied with humans for available resources. In addition, they displayed cunning, and they understood and manipulated signs, even language (Fissell, “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England,” History Workshop Journal 47 [Spring 1999]: 1-29; 1-2). Rats thus mirrored human strengths and highlighted human frailties. Threatening to humans, rats were also threatened by them: they were (and are), after all, categorized as vermin, one definition of which being “animals whom it is largely acceptable to kill” (Fissel 1).
What happens when humans are confused with vermin, a category of species that may be killed? This is a question Emblem 46 seems to pose—twice: first, with respect to the “wretched Creatures” (8) that Hatto kills; second, with Hatto himself who becomes the “wretch” (12). In Pulter’s rendering, Hatto’s crime is going after the wrong “rats,” burning the hungry peasants rather than the actual pests consuming the available grain. We can see the logic of speciesism at work; that is, in the words of Cary Wolfe, “the ethical acceptability of the systematic ‘noncriminal putting to death’ of animals based solely on their species” (Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory [University of Chicago Press, 2008], 7). Speciesism is, moreover, a logic that can be “used to mark any social other” (Wolfe 7). In this case, the attributes associated with vermin are deployed for the purpose of destroying a human population. Associations of vermin with marginalized human populations still circulate. The infamous Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew [1940]) dehumanizes Jewish people by explicit verbal and visual comparison to rats, and one need not look far to find more recent expressions of racism and discrimination through “verminization” and bestialization more generally. Pulter’s poem is situated in a broad and complex discourse in which vermin are classified as both threatening and disposable. Once defined, the features of this class of animal are available to apply to any population deemed equally undesirable.
Vermin are called upon in many prior narratives to underscore human frailty and vanity and to emphasize God’s ability to exact vengeance by means of seemingly the least of his creations. Though doing God’s work, Pulter’s rats are neither anthropomorphized nor given positive attributes; they are still “uglie” and “nasty.” (See for comparison The Marmottane (Emblem 24) [Poem 89], in which a particular species of rat is an emblem of wedded love.) Pulter’s emblem highlights the inexorable nature of divine justice and the potential for divine instrumentalization of the natural world. Like many of Pulter’s other emblems, however, this one takes a turn, moving from explication to devotional reflection (Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book,” The Seventeenth Century, 30:1 (2015): 55-73; 63). The final section of the poem is at once a personal meditation and an admonishment to the reader who finds too much delight in reading about tyrants receiving their just punishments by way of divinely weaponized vermin. Hatto may have made the grave mistake of burning humans as “rats,” but, to some extent, to take pleasure in the punishment of Hatto is to commit the same error that Hatto made in the first place—that is, to render him inhuman and therefore able to be killed (as Pulter’s use of “inhumane” [8], which early moderns would have read as “inhuman,” calls our attention to early on). On the one hand, Pulter tempts the reader to take such pleasure: her use of the word “frie” (10), for example, to describe the fate of Hatto’s soul even before we learn of his earthly punishment offers a certain kind of satisfaction as it promises Hatto will experience spiritually and eternally the “fire” (8) that peasants in the barn felt corporeally (the proximity and anagrammatic relation of these terms seems quite deliberate). On the other hand, the emblem abandons such “eye for an eye” thinking: the “first” lesson is to “compassionate” (21) “those whose disasterous fate / Have made them miserable” (22-23)—is not Hatto among those? Finally, the inescapable swarm of God’s judgment is coming for us all. Pulter invites the reader to seek divine mercy over and above justice, since there is no hiding from God’s judgment—or from the creatures he may use to deliver it. In this turn in the final ten lines of the poem, another German character comes to mind: Marlowe’s Faustus cowering before the ireful brow of a vengeful God and yet failing to repent and plead for mercy. Pulter writes, “T’is neither Earth nor Sea nor Ayr nor Skie / To which A Sad despairing Soul can flie” (29-30); nor can she take refuge in day or night. Just as Faustus cannot vanish into the air, nor dissolve in the sea, nor hide beneath mountains and hills, nor escape his fate by being changed into a “brutish beast” (Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus [1604], ed. Roma Gill and Ros King [New Mermaids, Methuen Drama, 2008], Scene 13, lines 62-112), and just as Hatto cannot escape the rats that overtake him in his tower, so, Pulter concludes, “no place will hide my sins and me” (37). This emblem, which fixes our attention on a profound act of cruelty and its just and gruesome punishment by lowly creatures made instruments of God’s wrath, ends with the speaker “fleeing” from justice to mercy and implicitly adjuring the reader to join her.
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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