![trials](http://uploads.neatorama.com/images/posts/288/52/52288/1347468242-0.jpg)
In
medieval Europe, it was common for animals to be put on trial and
sentenced to punishment as if they understood the proceedings. Livestock
and wild animals would be tried for assault or murder of a human,
insects and rats were prosecuted for destroying crops, and livestock
could be put to death for bestiality along with the human perpetrator
(although a beast could prove innocence with witnesses to its virtue).
There were unspoken reasons behind these shenanigans, in the days when
the separation of church and state was nonexistent. The church could lay
blame for bad events on people or animals, and take credit for doling
out justice.
Animal trials certainly solidified the
church’s power, but they also made sense of an unknowable world by
turning freak accidents into understandable events, with guilty parties
and paths to justice. Our grain stores are gone because God is punishing
us, or, alternatively, because Satan is toying with us; we must atone
and pray. The pig killed my child because it is a common criminal; it
must be punished. In this sense, animal trials were not unlike that
other great, barbaric version of rudimentary legal justice: the witch
hunt, which also reckoned with inexplicable phenomena by targeting
scapegoats. Indeed, Evans writes, during witch hunts animals were often
punished alongside all those single women and healers, in keeping with
the belief that Satan commonly possessed creatures like goats, ravens
and porcupines.
Drew Nelles writes about a variety of such animal trials at
MaisonNeuvue magazine.
No comments:
Post a Comment