Equine Erotics, Possible Pleasures: Early Modern Bestiality and Interspecies Queerness in Plate Five of L’Academie des dames

The growing scholarly interest in erotic literature from the early modern period raises a rich debate on the question of normativity: do these works ultimately challenge or uphold the sexual and social order? Answers tend to address only human subjects, despite the presence of animals in certain erotic or pornographic images across the period. This essay integrates current animal studies research and early modern perspectives on bestiality to offer a reading of an engraving from the notorious erotic text attributed to Nicolas Chorier, L’Academie des dames, which shows a horse positioned erotically in relation to its riders. Situating this image alongside early modern legal codes on bestiality, equine manuals, and literature, this essay suggests that varied early modern perspectives on horses allow the possibility of animal pleasure in the erotic relationship between horse and rider in Plate Five, even as the acknowledgment of interspecies erotics threatens to destabilize the sexual and species binarism promoted by bestiality discourses. By rendering visible the spectrum of pleasurable interspecies interactions with horses in the early modern period, this essay seeks to recuperate a sense of historical interspecies queerness that challenges the notion of a clear separation of experience between human and animal subjects.