Child exposure and abandonment

Abstract

The topic of infant abandonment in western Europe is one well served by scholars of the early modern and contemporary eras. For earlier periods, a possible historian might seem to be John Boswell, whose work The Kindness of Strangers (1988) purports to cover the incidence of child abandonment from antiquity to the Renaissance. But Boswell may not be an ideal choice. To highlight his avowed intention, which is to make sense of a complex of social practices that could not be justified by duress alone, he uses the example of Rousseau, who abandoned no fewer than five children,1 but this frame of reference is ill chosen. There are fundamental, demonstrable differences between the Roman world and mediaeval and early modern western societies. And Boswell’s book, which is not grounded in a critical source-basis, displays the major flaw of equating texts of diverse nature and different epochs, consciously taking literature as a reflection of its society.