2025/10/10 by Hauck, Jasmin
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies #Historical Economic and Legal Thought #Historical Legal Studies and Society
paper · doi:10.17885/heiup.mial.2025.2.25256
This article traces the path of a tale in Aristotle’s ‘Historia animalium’ that illustrates the connection between sexual taboo and punishment in the animal kingdom and became a major reference in medieval learned literature. It appeared in discussions of the incest taboo in natural philosophy, learned law, and theology alike. The aim of this article is to examine the varying details and overall narrative transformation of the Aristotelian tale, which has spread across various disciplines and centuries. In doing so it will also examine the extent to which the premodern debate of sexual norms and deviance depended on specific logics of diverse disciplines and cultures of knowledge.