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Sex with animals constitutes a problematic field of study in the history of sexuality. Based on 101 cases of prosecution for engaging in sex with animals in early modern Russia, the article examines legal and cultural approaches to cross-species sexual relations that became visible in the course of prosecution for sex with animals. The analysis reveals that sex with animals was stigmatized as an impermissible sexual practice degrading for humanity, which was put in the form of “pakost’” (filth) and “skvernost’” (foulness), and as a form of animal abuse that revealed proto-modern approaches to the notions of consent and abuse as crucial for constructing the new “man”. The discussion is contextualized in broader literature on sex with animals to highlight how European and colonial societies dealt with common concerns about sex with animals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and if, how and why Russian way differed from other contexts. Russian evidence points to the anxieties over observing strict boundaries between species, that might result in cross-breeding. Russian courts approached sex with animals as a type of abuse of one’s body and the body of an animal focusing on ways to justify the lack of consent by blaming it on alcohol or other impairments of the faculties. It reinforced the idea that cross-species copulation was not a choice but rather the absence of it.

Sex With Animals in Early Modern Russia: Legal Spaces of Negotiating the Boundaries of Humanity