Sara Peck’s Dog and the Baptism of Animals in the Long Seventeenth Century

Concurrent with pamphlet wars about the fitness of infants for baptism and with the debates in the New World about the conversion of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Americans, seventeenth-century England saw a rash of attempted, affected, or alleged baptisms of animals. Theologically, these so-called baptisms seem to come about alongside a deterioration of the very clear distinction between a human person and an animal, and socially, they appear to be motivated by a drive for social critique, an inclination toward wanton revelry, or (rarely) a sincere desire to appropriate the power of the sacrament. But the stories of people baptizing animals have a power of their own, and some used slanderous accounts of their enemies’ baptism of animals as an effective weapon against them.