In which I am responsive to audience interests
I have already posted in various contexts about the question I was once asked after a public lecture, 'What abaht bestiality, then?'
Let no-one say I do not take on board concerns raised in discussions.
The New! Revised! Textbook will now include a few sentences pertaining to Victorian zoophilia.
Though detailed historiography of the subject is still lacking: someone needs to trawl through the police and court records of some of the more rural areas of the UK...
Research reading has recently included an item from a rather rare journal of Welsh social history, in which the author remarks on the mindset that the rural parts of Wales were pure and moral, unlike the industrial areas and those contaminated by too much English presence.*
However, he then goes on to examine the extraordinarily high illegitimacy rate of the relevant counties in the C19th (higher than the more urbanised ones): fair enough, useful work, but I wish someone would also turn to consideration of the sheep (or other animal)-shagging stats.
*In spite of their reputation beyond the Channel and the North Sea as the uptight buttoned-up prudes of Europe, the English were regarded in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, including Northern Ireland, as dastardly libertines of loose morals and promiscuous ways, introducing sexual immorality into these previously pure parts... (Reading a stack of articles on Scottish resistance to homosexual law reform, the failure to establish VD clinics in large parts of N Ireland because 'not a local problem', and the position of the unmarried mother in Victorian Wales, etc, not to mention a book on prostitution in Ireland, will give you that sense.)
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