In the conclusion to Animal Husbandry: Bestiality in Medieval Culture, Joyce Salisbury argues that, beyond religious or legal concerns, perhaps the main reason why bestiality provoked as much rejection in the Middle Ages as it does today is because of a certain anxiety surrounding the identity of the human. Behind the disgust toward interspecies sexual practices exists a fear of a blurring of the ontological boundaries that have taken centuries to construct and that grant humans a particular sense of exceptionalism in relation to other animal species. Coexisting with this anxiety, however, are practices such as bestiality—or, more recently, xenotransplantation—which reveal that we in fact operate “in our closely knit web of life, trying to define ourselves as human while blending in with the world that surrounds us” (266). For Salisbury, this tension is transhistorical: it connects the present to the European Middle Ages and suggests the persistence of certain thought structures.
This tension became particularly visible while reading Animal Husbandry, edited by Jacqueline A. Stuhmiller, as the phenomenon of therianthropy was going viral on X and TikTok: individuals who identify psychologically, spiritually, or just playfully with nonhuman species, sometimes using masks or costumes to emulate them physically. Far-right groups in different parts of the world were quick to capitalize on this viral moment, turning therianthropy into a symbol of what they framed as the decadence of contemporary societies. Media attention intensified, and social media was quickly filled with posts and comments marked by hostility and disgust toward members of this group. From calls for violence to religious condemnations, TikTok became a space of particularly virulent collective rejection. But why did the ostensibly harmless act of identifying with animals and dressing as them unleash such a wave of hostility? Perhaps, as Salisbury suggests, anything that suggests a blurring of the boundaries between the human and the animal tends to provoke a social rejection that has changed little since the Middle Ages. For this very reason, studies such as those gathered in Animal Husbandry feel necessary, and their topic strikingly timely.
Writing about bestiality, however, entails significant challenges. First, it is a deeply uncomfortable subject. Stuhmiller makes this clear in the introduction. There is no shortage of anecdotes, historical references, or bibliographic traces concerning interspecies sexual relations, yet these are rarely addressed openly in the public sphere. People are, and have always been, aware of these practices, yet nobody seems to be willing to discuss them openly. Animal Husbandry, by contrast, confronts the issue directly and proceeds from the premise that, if such practices have been as widespread across different periods and cultures as they are today, it is more productive to study them than to avoid them.
A second challenge, noted by several contributors to the volume, lies in the nature of the evidence specific to the Middle Ages. Medieval bestiality is a practice for which historical records exist, but one that often appears in coded, tangential, or veiled forms, through metaphors, allegories, or indirect references. In her essay on medieval art, Anna Russakoff, for example, shows how such practices are suggested through the inclusion of hybrid creatures in marginalia, even when the act itself is not explicitly depicted. In another chapter, Tess Wingard explains that confession manuals developed strategies to elicit admissions of bestial acts without resorting to direct questioning, in order to avoid inadvertently encouraging them. As she notes, “The parish priest had to tactfully compromise between the task of obtaining full and frank confession with the need to avoid giving his parishioners unintended inspiration” (98). Crystal N. Beamer, in another chapter, reminds us that in the late Middle Ages the details of legal cases involving accusations of bestiality are scarce, as the documents were often destroyed along with those condemned. Thus, the medieval cultural archive is marked by significant lacunae when it comes to bestiality, which compels the essays in Animal Husbandry to work from a position of fragmentariness.
These gaps are addressed through a range of methodologies and with uneven results across the volume’s nine essays. Some contributions grounded in history and the history of science engage with medieval scientific discourse and its implications for thinking about animal sexuality. Marian E. Polhill, for instance, examines the significance of the scholastic reception—and partial misinterpretation—of Aristotle in medieval scientific culture, particularly in relation to fears surrounding the generation of hybrids and contra natura creatures generated by interspecies sexual relations. She also analyzes documentation concerning the medical, sexological, and aphrodisiac uses of organs, substances, and practices linked to animal sexuality to show, in line with Salisbury’s argument, that contradictory forms of rejection and desire toward animal sexuality coexisted in both Western Europe and other regions during the Middle Ages. Wingard likewise acknowledges the imprint of Aristotelian discourse in her analysis of confession as a mechanism of control. From the thirteenth century onward, a close relationship between nature and morality became consolidated, giving rise to stricter disciplinary practices on the part of the Church to monitor and punish so-called “unnatural acts.” The ecclesiastical response to bestiality, Wingard argues, offers a particularly revealing case for understanding the emergence of a normative system of sexuality in the late Middle Ages.
The remaining chapters in the volume focus on literary texts of various kinds, including Middle Welsh poetry, riddles, and the lais of Marie de France. In the texts these essays examine, explicit references to interspecies sexual acts are rare, while indirect allusions abound, constructed through linguistic ambiguity—as in Andrea Schutz’s reading of “Wulf and Eadwacer”—through metamorphosis, as in the analyses by Katherine Leach and Larissa Tracy, or through a sensual vocabulary saturated with animal references, as Stuhmiller shows in her reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This absence may well be explained by the taboo nature of the subject. At the same time, some of these essays occasionally take interpretive liberties that raise the question of whether bestiality truly constitutes the most appropriate interpretive key for the texts under discussion, or whether it is instead a projection of contemporary critical concerns.
The inclusion of a chapter devoted to Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, authored by Bailey Flannery, is also quite surprising. Despite Flannery’s suggestive analysis of how Carter’s work destabilizes androcentric and patriarchal logics through the dissolution of the boundaries between the human and the animal, the essay does not seem to shed clear light on medieval culture or on interspecies sexual practices in that context. While it highlights the presence of medieval motifs in Carter’s prose and the convergence of animality and eroticism in her work, it ultimately does not sufficiently prove how this analysis contributes to the historical inquiry proposed by the volume.
Alongside the distance that some of the essays in this collection assume—whether deliberately or not—from their central topic of bestiality, one might add another form of distance: a relative inattention to animals as embodied, living beings. The volume’s broader argument which locates the condemnation of bestiality in an ontological anxiety about the boundaries of the human, is persuasive. However, this focus tends to sideline other lines of inquiry that focus more directly to the materiality of animals, their welfare, and the concrete conditions in which such practices occur to them.
A good example of this can be found in Stuhmiller’s introduction, which, among other things, addresses the question of bestiality directly in the context of contemporary ethical debates, but which dismisses perhaps too quickly two of the most common critiques: concerns about animal welfare and questions of autonomy, particularly regarding the impossibility of consent in sexual acts initiated by humans. Regarding the question of consent, she argues that the emphasis put by those who oppose bestiality on verbal consent may be misleading, since even in the absence of a shared linguistic code, it is possible to identify behavioral cues in animals that can be interpreted as acceptance or rejection of physical interactions, including sexual ones. However, one might object that the interpretation of behavior—animal or human—in sexual acts is far from straightforward. We know, for instance, that under conditions of stress a body may freeze, which can be misread as a lack of resistance to the initiation of a sexual act. This is precisely why contemporary definitions of consent emphasize that the absence of a “no” does not amount to a “yes.”
As for concerns about animal welfare, she points to the hypocrisy of those who condemn bestiality on these grounds while failing to apply the same standard to other forms of exploitation, such as scientific experimentation or the meat industry. In this context, she asserts that “a cow, if she were in her right mind and could speak, would express a preference to have sex with a human rather than to be brained and have her carcass turned into everything from antifreeze to insulin and gummy bears,” (6) which seems quite reasonable. Yet she strikingly concludes: “It is a relief that cows cannot express preferences in human language, because modern life would come to a halt if they could and if anyone felt obliged to honor those preferences” (6). While the argument effectively exposes a tension in contemporary attitudes toward animal exploitation, it does not in itself address the validity of the ethical objection it seeks to critique. Even if we read the conclusion of her argument as ironic, the two concerns are not mutually exclusive: a person might consistently be worried about welfare in bestiality and also in other forms of animal exploitation. Indeed, some of the most visible animal welfare organizations—such as PETA, which Stuhmiller herself mentions—condemn bestiality precisely as another form of exploitation.
I emphasize these two points because they suggest that a perspective more firmly grounded in the materiality of bodies and in the interests of animals might lead to different interpretive conclusions than those proposed in Animal Husbandry, or at least open alternative lines of inquiry. If, as Salisbury argues, “some things stay the same,” it may be worth considering whether concerns aligned to those that structure contemporary debates—particularly those related to animal welfare—might also be traced, even if only implicitly, in medieval texts and discourses on bestiality, in addition to the more explicit scientific and religious frameworks that dominate the sources.
Taken as a whole, Animal Husbandry opens suggestive lines of inquiry on a topic that Joyce Salisbury herself had already inaugurated in her now classic The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (1994). The essays that make up the volume analyze a varied—though not exhaustive—range of medieval textual and visual materials and, beyond their relevance for contemporary debates, contribute in several important ways. For instance, many of them build valuable bridges between gender studies and animal studies, while also highlighting the gap between normative discourses (legal, ecclesiastical, scientific) and lived practices, in which forms of zooerotic desire demonstrably persisted throughout the Middle Ages. At the same time, as mentioned, the volume might have benefited from a more direct engagement with the material dimension of the animal. This limitation can be read as an invitation for future works to advance the questions—undeniably very productive ones—first raised by Salisbury and further developed in this collection.