The Basilisk and Rattlesnake or a European Monster Comes to America

Boria Sax
MERCY COLLEGE

This article looks at legends of the basilisk, a fabulous creature of ancient and medieval lore that was believed to kill with a glance, and shows how many characteristics of the basilisk were transferred to the rattlesnake in the New World. The deadly power of "fascination," also known as "the evil eye," which legend attributes to both basilisk and rattlesnake, was understood as an expression of resentment over the perceived lack of status of reptiles in the natural world and directed at so-called "higher" animals. The persistence of such legends suggests some of the limitations of capitalistic American society in dealing with inequalities.


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The "Disgusting" Spider: The Role of Disease and Illness in the Perpetuation of Fear of Spiders

Graham C. L. Davey
THE CITY UNIVERSITY, LONDON

Recent studies of spider phobia have indicated that fear of spiders is closely associated with the disease-avoidance response of disgust. It is argued that the disgust-relevant status of the spider resulted from its association with disease and illness in European cultures from the tenth century onward. The development of the association between spiders and illness appears to be linked to the many devastating and inexplicable epidemics that struck Europe from the Middle Ages onwards, when the spider was a suitable displaced target for the anxieties caused by these epidemics. Such factors suggest that the pervasive fear of spiders that is commonly found in many Western societies may have cultural rather than biological origins, and may be restricted to Europeans and their descendants.


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The Law is an Ass: Reading E.P. Evans' The Medieval Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals

Piers Beirne
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE

In this essay I address a little-known chapter in the lengthy catalogue of crimes against (nonhuman) animals. My focus is not crimes committed by humans against animals, as such, but a practical outcome of the seemingly bizarre belief that animals are capable of committing crimes against humans. I refer here to the medieval practice whereby animals were prosecuted and punished for their misdeeds, some aspects of which readers are likely to have encountered in the work of the historian Robert Darnton (1985).


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Biting the Hand that Heals You: Encounters with Problematic Patients in a General Veterinary Practice

Clinton R. Sanders
UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT

This discussion focuses on veterinary practice as a form of service delivery. Based on data collected during a year of participant observation in a major veterinary hospital in the northeast, the paper examines the criteria veterinarians routinely used to define nonhuman patients as problematic and the means they employed to deal with troublesome animals. The conclusion frames veterinarians' tactics for evaluating and controlling patients within the larger context of how rule-breakers are identified in everyday interactional settings and the routine approaches used in the exercise of social control.
 

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