Dr Frederik Pedersen (University of Aberdeen, em.),

This talk challenges the assumption that medieval and early modern European courts routinely subjected animals to criminal trials. I argue that E. P. Evans’s The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906) inherited a nineteenth-century historiographical construction created by French and German scholars who conflated fundamentally different evidence. Roman and canon law denied irrational animals culpability, while medieval law generally treated them as property. Juristic consilia, narrative accounts, and spectacular animal executions likewise provide little evidence of criminal proceedings. Even celebrated examples—the Falaise pig and Barthélemy de Chasseneuz’s supposed defence of the Autun rats—rest on financial records or later narrative traditions rather than trial documentation. Antiquarians including Berriat-Saint-Prix, Ménabréa, and Karl von Amira combined animal destruction, forfeiture, proceedings against vermin, juristic hypotheticals, and folklore into “animal trials.” Disaggregating these sources reveals instead diverse legal, administrative, ritual, and social responses to animal-caused harm. The talk is based on my forthcoming Speculum article ‘The Last Animal Trial’: The Evidential Basis and Historiographical Construction of “Animal Trials”, which is due to be published in volume 103 in July next year.

Frederik Pedersen graduated from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto in 1992. He is emeritus President of European Academy of Religion and a former member of the History Department at Aberdeen, where he specialised in Canon Law, medieval marriage and gender, and Scandinavian history. He currently holds a grant from British Academy to transcribe, edit, and publish the surviving fourteenth-century marriage cases from the archdiocese of York.