The Grand Spotted Moth

Appendix E
The Grand Spotted Moth: Ephelia's First Patronym

As the Baroness D'Aulnoy documents in her Mémoires (Paris, 1695), Lady Mary Villiers, the author's new candidate for the Ephelia poet, was called "The Butterfly," dating from an amusing impromptu trick she played on her good friend, the future Charles II, in the royal gardens, circa 1637. Lady Mary appears to have constructed an entire butterfly persona and aesthetic around her pet name. As the author has demonstrated here and in earlier work, "the brisk and jolly" "Mall" Villiers apparently encoded butterfly imagery in her pseudonym, her portraits, and her chief work, Female Poems...by Ephelia (1679). This first patronym for the Ephelia poet is a new subspecies of tropical Taiwan moth, identified and named by a longstanding friend of the Ephelia project, Dr John B Heppner, Founder & Director, Association for Tropical Lepidoptera, and Fellow, Royal Entomological Society, London. The official listing of this new patronym appears in volume two of Lepidoptera of Taiwan, edited by J.B. Heppner and H. Inoue (Florida: Assoc. Trop. Lep., 2001). Three inches in wingspread, this large and regal moth is discussed by the author in TLS (September 1, 2000, p. 17) and in her illustrated essay for the quarterly newsletter of the Association of Tropical Lepidoptera, Lepidoptera News (Fall 2000), which also will be posted on the Association's website <www.troplep.org>. Dr Heppner is now investigating a second Ephelia patronym in an English butterfly. See his illustrated essay, "Shall Mary Villiers Stuart, Duchess of Richmond, have a Butterfly Patronym?" (Lepidoptera News, Spring, 2001). This image of the Grand Spotted Moth is from the Florida State Collection of Arthropods, and used here with kind permission

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