Bestiality Essay

Unit 1 Assignment- Bestiality in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth Century Sweden
The relationship between peasants and bestiality is a complicated history that has many aspects and contradictions to it. In Jonas Liliequist’s article “Peasants against Nature: Crossing the Boundaries between Man and Animal in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Sweden,” Liliequist endeavors to explain why there were so many males involved with bestiality. Liliequist suggests that the staggering quantity of people caught engaging in this act, though aware of its punishment as a capital crime, was inevitable and somewhat of a logical course of action for males of this time period given their circumstances.
Bestiality, the use of an animal for sexual needs and desires has long been seen as unthinkable in modern society, but the act has been controversial for centuries. Bestiality, also known as buggery, was considered unnatural sex, along with homosexual relations, coitus interruptus, many other positions and sexual acts. In western Christian tradition, bestiality was seen as a direct insult to the hierarchy that was set forth by God for his creations and was incorporated into the medieval canon law. The crime of bestiality also made its way into written law through secular legislature in western Europe, and was made a capital crime in Sweden in the provincial laws of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and was added to the national law codex of 1422 (Liliequist 57-58).
Folklore and myths had told stories about humans and animals, and their mixed relations for centuries and continued to be told in sixteenth century Sweden. The Christian religions did not believe these stories to be innocent, and as Christianity grew, these stories w...

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...servants of the household would stop drinking the milk of the cow thinking it would avert contamination of the devil into the household. Due to the poor digging up animal carcasses and eating them, it later became mandatory to burn the animal carcass at a stake (Liliequist 72).
Liliequist’s argument as to why bestiality occurred in seventeenth- and eighteenth century Sweden was exceedingly persuasive due to the amount of primary source documents, trial records, and evaluations from other scholars. Liliequist’s argument that the culture in Sweden at the time was prone to bestiality was solid, with environmental, biological, physiological, and historical reasons as to why it occurred in such a manner. Males were not directly trying sin against God or break the law; they were merely curious and had needs that they felt were satisfied through the act of bestiality.