Adoption and Fosterage Practices in the Late Medieval and Modern Age by Maria Clara Rossi Marina Garbellotti

Author:Maria Clara Rossi, Marina Garbellotti [Maria Clara Rossi, Marina Garbellotti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Medieval, Modern, General, Social History
ISBN: 9788867286218
Google: 12ohEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Viella Libreria Editrice
Published: 2016-02-25T23:00:00+00:00

Giuliana Albini

From Abandonment to Fosterage: Stories of Children in Late Fifteenth Century Milan

Simone, Giacomina, Margherita, Ambrogina, Pietro, Leonardo, Giovanni, Agnesina, Ludovica… these and many others are the names of children, more than a thousand of them, remembered in the pages of a Milanese registry book of the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century:335 in the brief lines devoted to each of them, either unconscious infants or children and adolescents, who were already aware of what was happening to them, we can catch a glimpse of stories lived, of a difficult past and a hopeful future. These are stories which, for the most part, we can only intuit and which appear frozen at a very particular moment in time: when one or more persons declared that they wished to take care of these children. These acts of fosterage certainly don’t tell us everything we would like to know about the social condition of the families they mention, about the motivations that led many to take in an abandoned child (out of love or charity or the desire to exploit), on the past relationships between foster parents and children, on the guarantees (mostly legal) on behalf of the latter or on other aspects. And yet, even as they stand, these documents can help add more detail to the picture we already have about the placement of foundling children with families. The reflections which follow draw on two currents of research that have developed in the past decades.

On the one hand, we have studies of child abandonment336 which have been conducted mostly as part of research on charitable assistance and which have devoted special attention to late medieval Italy and the circumstances that gave rise to new forms of relief for foundlings.337 It was, in fact, as part of the process of rationalising fifteenth century hospital administration (culminating in the so-called reform) that the need to come up with a solution to the serious problem of abandonment engendered new fosterage practices for foundlings placed with families who, once the period of breastfeeding was over, chose to take care of the children who had been living with them under (more or less clearly defined) forms of adoption/fosterage.

On the other hand, a growing number of studies on the history of childhood338 and especially on “transfers of children” from their natural parents to other persons (or organisations) have stressed the complexity of practises that were characterised by a renunciation on the part of the original family to take care of these infants. As is well known to those studying this field,339 the Middle Ages were an interesting period in this regard since there is no doubt it was the time when new bonds of filiation emerged that did not easily fit into the legal categories of Antiquity. The most recent scholarship has therefore acknowledged this extreme variety of situations and has accordingly developed broader and more flexible categories. Studies have pointed out340 how the creation of a variety of new forms of filiation moved between two poles: true

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.