Animal Husbandry: Bestiality in Medieval Culture, ed. Jacqueline A. Stuhmiller. Explorations in Medieval Culture. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2025, xiv, 279 pp., 19 ill.

In a dialectical fashion, human society has always been fascinated with and horrified by sexual deviations, although bestiality has mostly been identified as the worst transgression and sin possible. Although it was treated with great horror, and although the representatives of the Church and the secular authorities made many efforts to repress it entirely, a closer look at medieval art, literature, science, and even theology can reveal that bestiality was practiced, at least in the margin, in hiding, or was minimally present in people’s imagination. Modern society is not far away from this medieval and early modern stance, as Jacqueline A. Stuhmiller outlines in the introduction to this fascinating volume, and as Joyce E. Salisbury confirms in her concluding essay. Both parts nicely bookend this volume, which contains a variety of insightful, provocative, and informative studies breaching a topic that is mostly considered completely taboo, both among the lay public and even academic scholarship.