Posted on 07/17/2023 11:41:47 AM PDT by aimhigh
‘Routine’ infanticide of newborns by married parents in early modern Europe was a much more widespread practice than previously thought, a new book posits. This fresh insight sits at the heart of a new book, Death Control in the West 1500–1800: Sex Ratios at Baptism in Italy, France and England, by Gregory Hanlon and contributors. The French-trained behavioural historian explains: “In most cases, infanticide was a crime leaving no aggrieved party seeking revenge if it was committed right away. It could be overlooked and forgotten with the passage of time.”
Hanlon, who is Distinguished Research Professor at Dalhousie University in Canada, calls attention to the limited scope of existing scholarship, which has never focused on sex ratios of infants brought for baptism within hours or days after their birth. These records reveal startling spikes in the number of male baptisms in the aftermath of famines or diseases.
He notes: “Historians in the West have relied almost exclusively on records of criminal trials in which unwed mothers or married women carrying progeny not sired by their husbands hid their pregnancies and killed their newborns alone or with female accomplices. Married infanticidal mothers may have been a hundred times more numerous.” Hanlon’s research suggests that in rural Tuscany at the height of infanticide the victims might have constituted up to a third of the total number of live births.
Using baptismal registers and ecclesiastical censuses drawn from scores of parishes in Italy, France and England, Hanlon shows similar infanticide patterns across city and country, for Catholics, Calvinists and Anglicans alike. In Italy’s rural 17th century Tuscany, Hanlon suggests that parents seemed willing to sacrifice a child if they were a twin, opting to keep just one of the newborns. In the north Italian city of Parma, Laura Hynes Jenkins found that working-class parents preferred girls over boys.
Contributor Dominic J. Rossi finds a clear pattern of a preference for girls in the French town of Villeneuve-sur-Lot after 1650. Rossi – one of the five former students who contributes to the book – posits the idea that ‘the lower-status families would want to marry their daughters up at the same time as economic conditions allowed them to make long-term plans for social movement’. Meanwhile Evan Johnson, another contributor, finds evidence to demonstrate that upper-class parents in rural Mézin showed a clear preference for keeping newborn males.
Death Control in the West 1500-1800 shines a light on the many infants whose existence went unrecorded and whose deaths remained unpunished. Hanlon calls attention to lax punitive measures taken for crimes of infanticide, and notes: “Tribunals operated against single mothers almost exclusively, but only if they killed the newborn deliberately. Simple abandonment was not a comparable offense.”
The roles of the state and criminal justice system are rigorously examined in the study, alongside realities of poverty and social class structures. The book draws parallels between histories of infanticide and present discussions of reproductive rights. “Infanticide is murder, of course, but people did not consider this murder to be a crime,” explains Hanlon, who says ‘most people could live with it as an unpleasant fact of life’.
Together, Hanlon and his contributors invite readers to reckon with infanticide beyond a moralistic approach, in order to understand the social practice’s ramifications for our present times.
Attempted normalization of abortion?
They're trying to make abortion trends magically re-appear in the past just like they try to make prior warming periods magically disappear (so that the Modern Warm Period seems unprecedented).
Disgusting
This is not historically surprising whatsoever. Back 300 years Europeans ate children when famine presented itself. Cannibalism was perfectly OK when the NKVD sent by Stalin and Lenin to the Ukraine to seize all seed grain, grain products and the tools needed to raise the crops they seized. Intentionally starving to death a minimum of 10 million in that location, The Holodomor. In other locations throughout Soviet Communist Russia it wasn’t even named— but carried out as political murder far worse than the German National Socialist Worker’s Party did for the Hitler regime. Far worse and not as documented, as well.
Abortion as politically sanctioned murder— fits the World Socialist Agenda which requires the destruction of respect and awe of new human life- and reduces children to less than animals. For the “good” of the Statists and their State power.
More like, Ireland. See: Potato blight and famine and clearances of starving tenants. Good ole UK.
Strikes me as that.
Did you miss the Holodomor story somewhere since Stalin and Lenin in history? The only reason we know about it— is not because of Walter Duranty (the Pulitzer “winner” of the NYTimes who was their chief in Moscow, a massive pervo controlled by Stalin/NKVD)saying whatever Staling told him to report to the West. “there is no famine....” etc.
Gareth Jones, Welsh freelance reporter went to Moscow, faked out and got to Ukraine to report the horrors. NYTimes tried to shut him down (sound familiar?). Jones pursued William Randolph Hearst and Hearst published the entire story in all of his vast network of newspapers. The NYTimes still will not remove Duranty’s “pulitzer” to this day because they are one of... his type.
The NKVD/Stalin never forgot Jones. He was in Manchukuo (the fake country setup by Imperial Japan in Manchuria where the created a throne for the last true Emperor of China, Pu Yii, to be ruler. Jones was covering all this- was kidnapped and murdered by NKVD agents in Port Arthur.
Think a meme makes your post funny? You’re gonna need more than a 44 if this Socialist crap continues in the US. Wonder which side you’d be on then. Bye.
Chill, dude. I try to find a little humor in lots of situations. I also dont get wound up over things I cant control. Evils of European history fall into that category. Go have a beer (not bud) and cool down.
Exactly....
Chill yourself. These ARE things we can control and requires serious policy and actions. Nothing can be “the same” anymore.
"in rural Tuscany at the height of infanticide the victims might have constituted up to a third of the total number of live births"
Wow! Those babes were no shrinking violets!
Listen to this Victor Davis Hanson, on the off chance you’ve no idea how this crap has been injected into the US:
The Worst Thing Any President Has Done in My Lifetime-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faPNpovMeuU
Laying the groundwork for first the decriminalization and later the normalization of INFANTICIDE by claiming it to be the normal “Christian” way.
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