This book treats a most unusual offense—one that evokes laughter for some and disgust in others.¹ Our account of John Farrell and Gideon Washburn, two elderly New England men tried separately for bestiality in the 1790s, runs counter to the instinctual sense of what it means to be human, while also reminding us of the animalistic demons we hold in check. Researching and writing about bestiality, even reading this book, is an act of transgression—an affront, perhaps, to the good taste that seeks to keep the unseemly part of human existence hidden.

Prepare to be startled. Some of...

Interspecies intercourse is part of the foundational mythologies of Western civilization. Cave paintings depicted men mounting animals. Cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world frequently depicted half-human–half-animal creatures, and in Greek and Roman mythologies animals and humans frequently have interspecies sex yielding heroic offspring. Shows at the Roman coliseum included sex between animals, domesticated and wild, and human partners. Centuries later, Rashi, the most important medieval Jewish interpreter of the Bible, commented that the Genesis creation story implied that before God created a woman, ‘‘Adam attempted to find [a mate] amongst all the animals and beasts and he was not...

The story of John Farrell begins in the hardscrabble farming town of Leverett, located about 105 miles west of Boston in the eastern hills of Hampshire County, the countryside that had so recently supplied foot soldiers for Daniel Shays’s army of insurgents. First settled around 1750 and incorporated in 1774, the town of Leverett erected a meetinghouse by 1776. But the parish, which could never provide a handsome livelihood, did not secure a regular pastor for almost a decade, until 1784, when the Reverend Henry Williams settled there. Williams was ordained, but he was not a college graduate. Over the...

Within the space of three years New England courts just seventy miles apart sentenced two octogenarians to hang for a rare and bizarre crime. John Farrell had, so far as we can discover, no criminal record, and although Gideon Washburn had been convicted for counterfeiting some fifty years earlier in a different county, that fact seems entirely unrelated to his sexual misbehavior. Whereas Farrell was without family, a transient who lived as a boarder, Washburn was surrounded by family, living with his wife, their son and his wife, as well as his grandchildren. Ethnicity also separated the two men. Farrell...

In the late 1790s Massachusetts and Connecticut bore little resemblance to either revolutionary Paris or Georgian London; but developments in those trendsetting capitals—political, religious, social, and sexual—ignited alarm and even panic in the minds of the region’s self-styled guardians. Vices, they knew, were contagious; and if virtuous men did not fortify defensive battlements and guard them vigorously, the nation’s newborn state republics would fail. These were the lessons taught by the Bible, by ancient and modern history, and by the frightful news they read in the press. Given the Protestant diversity that now pervaded their states, and the...

In second half of the 1790s highly placed New Englanders believed that forces beyond their grasp had launched a broad assault on their world. They watched the resurrection of the old Gallic peril, and this time it was even more menacing than it had been in papist garb; for now it was spreading vicious anti-Christian ideas by musket, sword, and cannon. They suspected that the American fifth column, the Jeffersonians, or as they called it, the French party, was poised to deliver New England’s old bastions of the true faith to the ranks of apostasy. Simultaneously they saw their communities...