New from the University of Pennsylvania Press:
Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic, by
Doron S. Ben-Atar (Fordham University) and
Richard D. Brown (University of Connecticut). The Press explains:
In 1796, as revolutionary fervor waned and the Age of Reason took
hold, an eighty-five-year-old Massachusetts doctor was convicted of
bestiality and sentenced to hang. Three years later and seventy miles
away, an eighty-three-year-old Connecticut farmer was convicted of the
same crime and sentenced to the same punishment. Prior to these criminal
trials, neither Massachusetts nor Connecticut had executed anyone for
bestiality in over a century. Though there are no overt connections
between the two episodes, the similarities of their particulars are
strange and striking. Historians Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown
delve into the specifics to determine what larger social, political, or
religious forces could have compelled New England courts to condemn two
octogenarians for sexual misbehavior typically associated with much
younger men.
The stories of John Farrell and Gideon Washburn are
less about the two old men than New England officials who, riding the
rough waves of modernity, returned to the severity of their ancestors.
The political upheaval of the Revolution and the new republic created
new kinds of cultural experience—both exciting and frightening—at a
moment when New England farmers and village elites were contesting
long-standing assumptions about divine creation and the social order.
Ben-Atar and Brown offer a rare and vivid perspective on anxieties about
sexual and social deviance in the early republic.
A few blurbs:
"Taming Lust performs a remarkable double feat of historical
reconstruction. On the one hand, it uncovers the tangled roots of a pair
of highly anomalous trials for bestiality in late eighteenth-century
New England. On the other, it unfolds a broad panorama of the social,
political, and sexual culture of an entire era. These paired objectives
inform a writing that is strongly constructed, elegantly expressed, and
larded with fascinating detail."—John Demos
"Strange sexual perversities can provide a window into basic values of ordinary people at a particular time and place. Taming Lust does just that, offering a perceptive peek at New England near the end
of the eighteenth century, and doing so in prose that almost
sings."—Joseph J. Ellis
More information is available
here.
