Medieval Family Roles by Jorgensen Itnyre Cathy;

Author:Jorgensen Itnyre, Cathy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1099136
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

INFANT DEATH IN LATE MEDIEVAL FLORENCE

THE SMOTHERING HYPOTHESIS RECONSIDERED1

Philip Gavitt

The current quest for the child in history is missing the point by not considering boys and girls separately.

—Richard Wall

The tendency to conflate abandonment and infanticide has as one of its most powerful expressions the figure of the smothering wet nurse. Infanticide committed by parents, the argument runs, became supplanted by infanticide committed by institutions and, specifically, by those institutional mother-substitutes, wet nurses. These wet nurses had a financial interest in infanticide, as one historian of Renaissance Italy noted, because “the supply [of babies] from the parish wardens was unlimited.”2 The malfeasance of wet nurses was a staple of contemporary writing as well, and fifteenth-century parents were so convinced that babies sent to a wet nurse were vulnerable to accidental or deliberate smothering that Tuscans invented the arcuccio, a bassinet with an arched rib so that it would be impossible for a nurse to roll over in bed and accidentally smother a child.3 As Barbara Kellum’s work on England has suggested, early medieval penitentials recognized the problem of overlaying and prescribed relatively lenient penalties.4 In the late Middle Ages also, theologians and bishops even warned parents not to bring their small infants into bed with them, and doing so made parents (or wet nurses) automatically culpable.5

Taking such sources at face value, a surprising number of historians have worked the smothering parent and the smothering wet nurse into larger arguments concerning the lack of an affective dimension within the premodern family, suggesting that high infant mortality was at the root of a seriously depraved indifference to infant human life. Emily Coleman’s study of the ninth-century polyptychs of Saint Germain-des-Pres, for example, noted serious discrepancies in gender ratios on manses: the smaller the land area, the fewer the females. Coleman concluded from this that early medieval parents practiced widespread female infanticide to confront the economic necessity of limiting population growth.6 John Bos well—in his more recent study, The Kindness of Strangers—has pointed out that such conclusions assume that there was no movement of labor from one manse to another, and he suggests convincingly that to some extent larger landholders absorbed the excess female population of the smaller ones.7 Boswell also dismisses the argument that evidence from Icelandic sagas proves the practice of infanticide, arguing instead that children left exposed were meant to be found.8 Although Carol Clover argues cogently and persuasively that the sagas describe intentional infanticide, it is still salutary to heed Boswell’s cautions concerning the nature of literary source material.9 Barbara Kellum’s study of England was able to find considerable evidence of the accidental death of older children, but in her own words:

Estimating from the number of times overlaying and infanticide appear in the penitential context alone, it would only seem likely that similar cases would be mentioned in the contemporary coroners’ and judicial records. Instead, they are conspicuously absent. Not one case of what now could technically be termed infanticide—the killing of a child under a year old—is reported in the Coroner’s Rolls (A.

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