Encountering wildness through the lively legalities of the animal trials

Keywords: animal trials, law, wildness, capitalist natures, witch trials, continental Europe
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 2

Abstract

Animal trials were arguably commonplace across continental Europe from the 13th-18th centuries. Individual domesticated animals were tried in secular courts and groups of wild animals in ecclesiastical courts, both complete with paid judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers. Through a focus on ecclesiastical trials of “pests” accused of property damage, we explore how these trials mediated and are implicated in the historical construction of capitalist natures, specifically through the disenchantment of ecological commons and the transformation of certain forms of wildness into an abject animal threat (e.g. vermin). The trials reveal that both these processes were contested, even within formal legal structures that coalesce around liberal rights and property. In particular, the trials involve legal, political economic, and ethical negotiations of and with animal agency. Both the defense and prosecution in the trials at times tacitly acknowledge animal being and its material and spatial entitlements - for example, weevils' right to sustenance via their portion of the commons. This raises the possibility of animals’ potential legal subjectivity, while also, of course, spotlighting their eventual banishment from it in the totalizing reduction of nonhuman life to property under neoliberal capitalism. In constructing this analysis and argument, we draw from emerging lively legalities scholarship as well as feminist political economies of the witch trials, another transitionary juridico-political economic phenomenon that was spatially and temporally coincident with the animal trials and that provides, we suggest, insights into the legal management of wildness within capitalist social relations.