Animal Crimes
Sponsoring Organization(s)
International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS)
Organizer Name
Melissa Ridley Elmes
Organizer Affiliation
Lindenwood Univ.
Presider Name
Melissa Ridley Elmes
Paper Title 1
Reading Legal Bodies: Interrogating the Animal Trials as Literary Scholars
Presenter 1 Name
Crystal N. Beamer
Presenter 1 Affiliation
McMaster Univ.
Paper Title 2
Objectification and Non-Human Execution in Fifteenth-Century Flanders
Presenter 2 Name
Mireille Pardon
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Yale Univ.
Paper Title 3
Premodern Animal Trials and the Question of the Human-Animal Divide
Presenter 3 Name
Anna Czarnowus
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. of Silesia
Paper Title 4
The Green “Mayster Herte”: The Deer as Iconic Object and Perpetrator of Crime in Select Robin Hood Narratives and Film
Presenter 4 Name
Lorraine Kochanske Stock
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Univ. of Houston
Start Date
11-5-2019 3:30 PM
Session Location
Schneider 1120
Description
Outlaws and outlawry are commonly associated with the human; yet, throughout the medieval period, animals were both the subject of crime, as when they were stolen, maimed, or killed, and its perpetrator; for example, the sow and piglets put on trial for murder for killing a 5-year old boy in Savigny, France in 1457. Documented legal trials from a variety of cultures featuring pigs, goats, horses, dogs and cows suggest that medieval understandings of the moral agency, ethics, and politics of outlaws and outlawry was decidedly not simply a human affair, but extended to our animal counterparts. Papers might consider the historically-documented or literary or textual (re)imagining of a trial or set of trials featuring an animal or animals; how animals interact with outlaw humans; the moral agency of animals on trial; the ethics of putting animals on trial; the ethics of outlawing animals; how animals can be constructed as outlaws philosophically, legally, or by other means, how and where animals appear in laws, the treatment of animal outlaws, animal exiles, and similar. Melissa Elmes
Animal Crimes
Schneider 1120
Outlaws and outlawry are commonly associated with the human; yet, throughout the medieval period, animals were both the subject of crime, as when they were stolen, maimed, or killed, and its perpetrator; for example, the sow and piglets put on trial for murder for killing a 5-year old boy in Savigny, France in 1457. Documented legal trials from a variety of cultures featuring pigs, goats, horses, dogs and cows suggest that medieval understandings of the moral agency, ethics, and politics of outlaws and outlawry was decidedly not simply a human affair, but extended to our animal counterparts. Papers might consider the historically-documented or literary or textual (re)imagining of a trial or set of trials featuring an animal or animals; how animals interact with outlaw humans; the moral agency of animals on trial; the ethics of putting animals on trial; the ethics of outlawing animals; how animals can be constructed as outlaws philosophically, legally, or by other means, how and where animals appear in laws, the treatment of animal outlaws, animal exiles, and similar. Melissa Elmes