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dc.contributor.authorWade, Erik
dc.date.accessioned2022-11-10T18:21:41Z
dc.date.available2022-11-10T18:21:41Z
dc.date.issued2020-07-29
dc.identifier.citationErik Wade; The Beast with Two Backs: Bestiality, Sex Between Men, and Byzantine Theology in the Paenitentiale Theodori. Journal of Medieval Worlds 29 June 2020; 2 (1-2): 11–26.en_US
dc.identifier.eissn2574-3988
dc.identifier.doi10.1525/jmw.2020.2.1-2.11
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7892
dc.description.abstractToday, the comparison of male homosexuality to bestiality is unfortunately too well-known from homophobic polemics. Yet this comparison has a history in the Anglophone world, and it emerged in the early European Middle Ages seemingly not in order to dehumanize men who had sex with men but in order to make bestiality appear serious by comparing it to male-male sexual acts. The eighth-century Paenitentiale Theodori—which collects the judgments of the Byzantine-born Archbishop Theodore—is the earliest extant English text to connect male-male sexual acts with bestiality. This comparison does not occur in the previous penitentials, but, after its appearance in the Paenitentiale, this comparison traveled throughout Western Europe. No scholarship to date examines the global origins of such a comparison. This paper argues that later medieval views of bestiality as perverse and as a serious sexual offense emerged from bestiality’s early comparison to same-sex acts (rather than vice-versa). Prior to the Paenitentiale Theodori, European theologians described bestiality as a minor sin akin to masturbation. Theodore borrowed the comparison of bestiality and male-male sex acts from a Latin mistranslation of the 314 Greek Council of Ancyra and from the Byzantine theologian St. Basil the Great. Since the early penitentials accorded male-male sexual acts some of the most serious penances, the comparison of bestiality to these acts elevated bestiality for the first time in Western Europe to the status of a serious and unnatural sin. Through connection to effeminizing male-male sexual acts, bestiality gained a reputation as a serious, boundary-violating sin in its own right.en_US
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of California Pressen_US
dc.relation.urlhttps://online.ucpress.edu/jmw/article/2/1-2/11/110810/The-Beast-with-Two-BacksBestiality-Sex-Between-Menen_US
dc.rightsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International*
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/*
dc.subjectTheologyen_US
dc.subjectBestialityen_US
dc.subjectMale-Male Sexual Actsen_US
dc.subjectPenitentialsen_US
dc.subjectByzantiumen_US
dc.subjectEnglanden_US
dc.subjectTheodore of Tarsusen_US
dc.titleThe Beast with Two Backs: Bestiality, Sex Between Men, and Byzantine Theology in the Paenitentiale Theodorien_US
dc.typeArticle/Reviewen_US
dc.source.journaltitleJournal of Medieval Worldsen_US
dc.source.volume2
dc.source.issue1-2
dc.source.beginpage11
dc.source.endpage26
dc.description.versionVoRen_US
refterms.dateFOA2022-11-10T18:21:42Z
dc.description.institutionSUNY Oswegoen_US
dc.description.departmentDepartment of English and Creative Writingen_US
dc.description.degreelevelN/Aen_US


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