AMAD
"Archivum Medii Aevi Digitale - Specialized open access repository for research in the middle ages"To submission
| Title: | The Law is an Ass: Reading E.P. Evans ' The Medieval Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals |
| Contributor: | The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives |
| Author: | Piers Beirnes |
| Description: | In this essay I address a little-known chapter in the lengthy history of crimes against (nonhuman) animals. My focus is not crimes committed by humans against animals, as such, but a practical outcome of the seemingly bizarre belief that animals are capable of committing crimes against humans.2 I refer here to the medieval practice whereby animals were prosecuted and punished for their misdeeds, aspects of which readers are likely to have encountered in the work of the historian Robert Darnton (1985). In his book The Great Cat Massacre, Darnton (chapter 2) describes the informal justice meted out to offending neighborhood cats- some of whom were owned and adored by their master's wife- by a group of young male printer's apprentices in Paris during the late 1730s. One night the boys, who felt themselves wronged by the many cats who begged for food from their workshop and who kept them awake at night with their screeching, "gathered round and staged a mock trial, complete with guards, a confessor, and a public executioner. After pronouncing the animals |
| URI: | https://www.amad.org/jspui/handle/123456789/76712 |
| Other Identifier: | http://www.animalsandsociety.com/assets/library/276_piersbeirne.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.452.9814 |
| AMAD ID: | 568207 |
| Appears in Collections: | BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) General history of Europe |
