(Un)natural Loving:Swine, Pets, and Flowers in Venus and Adonis
Callaghan, Dympna
Early Modern Culture, No. 3 (2003)
Abstract
The history of the twentieth century is such that one is tempted to assume it has surpassed all previous eras in every form of depravity. Yet, one abuse, which much preoccupied the inhabitants of early modern England, “buggery with beasts,” has been either in sharp decline since the Renaissance, or at the very least, has been eclipsed by more comprehensively destructive rapes of nature.
One can say with certainty, in any event, that attitudes toward bestiality (which are probably never fully coincident with practice) were markedly different in the early modern period than in our own. For the Renaissance, sexual congress with brute creation transgressed the fundamental distinction between the human and the animal even as it served to articulate the notion of an absolute and inviolable distinction between them. Bestiality was the worst of sexual crimes according to one Stuart moralist because “[I]t turns man into a very beast, makes a man a member of a brute creature.”
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