Sara Beam, “Missing Babies and Tacit Tolerance of Infanticide in Early Modern Europe”
HSSB 4080 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United StatesAggressive criminal prosecution of unwed mothers who killed their newborns in early modern Europe (1550-1750) has led historians to assume that Europe was less tolerant of illegitimacy and infanticide than other pre-modern societies, including China and Japan. New research throws this assumption into question. In early modern Geneva, authorities often turned a blind eye to […]