It’s good to hear that someone who knows about it thinks it’s genuine.
I remembered having heard it , and when I googled it and saw the source, I didn’t know the context, so I thought I had to qualify it, since Cristian chroniclers are not always reliable sources on pagan practices.
yet we never ask for a show of hooves to kill them and eat them.
I am so not looking that up on urbandictionary…
Shouldn’t you do something about that?
It isn’t all that bad and been there done that.
ETA and I bet you have too… (well betting on the odds of you being a hetero male)
Little gun shy of looking things with clever names up (thanks Miguel, I had no reason or inclination to know what a “cleveland steamer” was…).
I’m going to argue if anyone’s not done that, then you need to communicate a bit better with your lady friend. (and thus the argument that we really don’t need clever names for things like this)
Who’s to say he doesn’t have a big glitter ball at the ready?
I cannot speak for Athelard of Hoarwithy, so I shall remain silent.
So, animal husbandry doesn’t mean… ?
Oops.
The original tweets doesn’t say anything about medieval Europe so unless there is a context not shown the attack is somewhat unfair. The Romans and Greeks, for example, were known to have a more relaxed view on sex, with Gods taking the shapes of animals to fornicate with women and art depicting bestiality (the latter for a long time hidden in the cellar’s of museums, not considered apropriate to show to the public).
When Janega get into how the medieval church cared about how animals can’t give consent, she kind of forgot how often the animals would be executed.
Interesting idea. I heard that they got kicked out because they ate an apple from the tree of knowledge. No sex involved.
Until someone can explain this idea, I hesitate to consider anything else this historian says about religion, and in extensio about why things happened in medieval time.
There’s this thing at the end of the Book of the Dun Cow, where, in Latin the author professes the Christian faith, but the Irish text below it says, in essence, “nah, this is all for the priesty idiots.”
(edit to add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebor_na_hUidre)
Two points.
No. I’m not sure why this article needed to be written. To the best of my knowledge (as a medievalist) no one is arguing that medieval people were ok with bestiality and there isn’t any evidence that would suggest it.
It’s problematic to assume that proscriptive documents actually reflected popular opinion, or were heeded. There were a wide variety of prohibitions around sexual activity and there is every reason to believe that they were only followed by portions of the population. Just as many contemporary Catholics practice forms of birth control prohibited by their Church, so too did medieval people do any number of things that they were told they should not. Some of them may have had qualms about the activities, but many don’t seem to have been too bothered.
I feel like we sorta buried the lede here- according to the law at the time, animals had more right to consent than, say, women.
Well, come on, though. Pagan medieval Ireland was like Atlantic City in the '70s. If some foreign priest is scribbling field notes about me, I’ma fuck a horse just on the principle of the thing. PUT THAT IN YOUR BOOK, FRANCIS.
So… so you don’t need this flux capacitor?
But as disconnected as people might have been between communities, communities themselves were far more tightly knit, and had greater knowledge of what’s happening in other people’s homes… there was no sense of “privacy” as we understand it today. So while your neighboring community 10, 20, 50, 100 miles away was not aware of what life was like, your direct neighbors had a greater sense of events in your life than we do today. Unless your neighbors are good friends or family, there is probably a great deal you don’t know about them, because you likely don’t need to. Not the case back in the middle ages. We know this in part, because the community had a larger say over moral behavior and that was quite a big deal in regulating daily life. Not so much today, though.
Well, WTF! Did not know that! I’d say that some medieval ways of thinking were still influencing daily life.
The question is how do THEY see it within the framework of their time - likely they did not see it as “witchcraft” as defined by the church. Let’s not let our modern conceptualization of witchcraft (largely shaped by the Wiccan faith) cloud our understanding of the past.
Which if you go back and read my comments on this, you will see I argue.
Yes, we should very much imagine that this is a deeply biased source.
Yeah, agreed. But someone asked the question, so yes, some people today clearly believe it to be the case. I do think that part of this is our modern propensity to believe that we are superior today, and that people in the past were backwards and superstition, etc, etc. Part of that problem is from the enlightenment view of historical change, that we’re all progressing to some “end of history” and so by definition, the present MUST be better than the past, more enlightened, etc.
Also agreed. I try to express this to my students each semester - that top down documents can be as much reactive to the masses as they are attempting to control the masses. If we take the “reading against the grain” method of looking at sources, we can see what the masses might have been doing by what the elite are discussing - it’s not fool proof, but in some cases, with a largely illiterate population, that’s the best we can do.
I thought “forbidden fruit” was an allegory.
If we’re talking about Thomas Granger, late of Duxbury,
He was this year [1650] detected of buggery (and indicted for the same) with a mare, a cowe, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey.
Give the kid his due. The turkey was just the grand finale of his pan-species erotic tour de force!
I’ve always thought a lot of the Church railing against witchcraft was just them trying to reduce the competition. If you believe in witchcraft, and you have a problem and you can find a witch, you can maybe work a deal to see if the witch can help with that problem. And a lot of “witches” were just people who knew more about how to make herbal remedies and things like that. When the problem was preventing pregnancy, or some kind of ailment, a witch sometimes really was able to help. But if there’s no witches, poor people with no education had no way to try to get help except to go to church and pray. So eliminating witches was a way the church could ensure itself a captive audience.
