Abortion In Early Modern Italy

A comprehensive history of abortion in Renaissance Italy. In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the “traditional family.” Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its practice varied. Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives alongside a social and cultural history of sexuality, reproduction, and the family, Christopoulos offers a nuanced and convincing account of the meanings Italians ascribed to abortion and shows how prevailing ideas about the practice were spread, modified, and challenged. Christopoulos begins by introducing readers to prevailing ideas about abortion and women’s bodies, describing the widely available purgative medicines and surgeries that various healers and women themselves employed to terminate pregnancies. He then explores how these ideas and practices ran up against and shaped theology, medicine, and law. Catholic understanding of abortion was changing amid religious, legal, and scientific debates concerning the nature of human life, women’s bodies, and sexual politics. Christopoulos examines how ecclesiastical, secular, and medical authorities sought to regulate abortion, and how tribunals investigated and punished its procurers—or did not, even when they could have. Abortion in Early Modern Italy offers a compelling and sensitive study of abortion in a time of dramatic religious, scientific, and social change.

Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries explores attempts by church, state, and medical authorities to regulate and professionalize the practice of midwifery in Italy from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Medical writers in this period devoted countless pages to investigating the secrets of women’s sexuality and the processes of generation. By the eighteenth century, male practitioners in Britain and France were even successfully advancing careers as male midwives. Yet, female midwives continued to manage the vast majority of all early modern births. An examination of developments in Italy, where male practitioners never made successful inroads into childbirth, brings into focus the complex social, religious, and political contexts that shaped the management of reproduction in early modern Europe. Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy argues that new institutional spaces to care for pregnant women and educate midwives in Italy during the eighteenth century were not strictly medical developments but rather socio-political responses both to long standing concerns about honor, shame, and illegitimacy, and contemporary unease about population growth and productivity. In so doing, this book complicates our understanding of such sites, situating them within a longer genealogy of institutional spaces in Italy aimed at regulating sexual morality and protecting female honor. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of medicine, religious history, social history, and Early Modern Italy.

In the tumultuous period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when ecclesiastical reform spread across Europe, the traditional role of the bishop as a public exemplar of piety, morality, and communal administration came under attack. In communities where there was tension between religious groups or between spiritual and secular governing bodies, the bishop became a lightning rod for struggles over hierarchical authority and institutional autonomy. These struggles were intensified by the ongoing negotiation of the episcopal role and by increased criticism of the cleric, especially during periods of religious war and in areas that embraced reformed churches. This volume contextualizes the diversity of episcopal experience across early modern Europe, while showing the similarity of goals and challenges among various confessional, social, and geographical communities. Until now there have been few studies that examine the spectrum of responses to contemporary challenges, the high expectations, and the continuing pressure bishops faced in their public role as living examples of Christian ideals. Contributors include: William V. Hudon, Jennifer Mara DeSilva, Raymond A. Powell, Hans Cools, Antonella Perin, John Alexander, John Christopoulos, Jill Fehleison, Linda Lierheimer, Celeste McNamara, Jean-Pascal Gay

This text traces the history of contraception and abortifacients from ancient Egypt to the 17th century, and discusses the scientific merit of the ancient remedies and why this knowledge about fertility control was gradually lost over the course of the Middle Ages.

What is abortion? A convenience to society? A legal offense? Murder? The twentieth century is not the first to face these questions. Abortion was a common practice two thousand years ago. The young Christian church, growing up in influential centers of Greco-Roman culture, could not ignore the practice. How would church leaders define abortion? Gorman examines Christian documents in their Greco-Roman context, concluding that Christians held a consistent position throughout the church's first four hundred years.

Since World War II, abortion policies have remained remarkably varied across European nations, with struggles over abortion rights at the forefront of national politics. This volume analyses European abortion governance and explores how social movements, political groups, and individuals use protests and resistance to influence abortion policy. Drawing on case studies from Italy, Spain, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the European Union, it analyses the strategies and discourses of groups seeking to liberalise or restrict reproductive rights. It also illuminates the ways that reproductive rights politics intersect with demographic anxieties, as well as the rising nationalisms and xenophobia related to austerity policies, mass migration and the recent terrorist attacks in Europe.

In 1563, the Council of Trent published its Decrees, calling for significant reforms of the Catholic Church in response to criticism from both Protestants and Catholics alike. Bishops, according to the Decrees, would take the lead in implementing these reforms. They were tasked with creating a Church in which priests and laity were well educated, morally upright, and focused on worshipping God. Unfortunately for these bishops, the Decrees provided few practical suggestions for achieving the wide-ranging changes demanded. Reform was therefore an arduous and complex process, which many bishops struggled to accomplish or even refused to undertake fully. The Bishop’s Burden argues that reforming bishops were forced to be creative and resourceful to accomplish meaningful change, including creating strong diocesan governments, reforming clerical and lay behavior, educating priests and parishioners, and converting non-believers. The book explores this issue through a detailed case study of the episcopacy of Cardinal-Bishop Gregorio Barbarigo of Padua (bp. 1664-1697), asking how a dedicated bishop formulated a reform program that sought to achieve the Church’s goals. Barbarigo, like other reforming bishops, borrowed strategies from a variety of sources in the absence of clear guidance from Rome. He looked to both pre- and post-Tridentine bishops, the Society of Jesus, the Venetian government, and the Propaganda Fide, which he selectively emulated to address the problems he discovered in Padua. The book is based primarily on the detailed records of Barbarigo’s visitations of rural parishes and captures the rarely-heard voices of seventeenth-century Italian peasants. The Bishop's Burden helps us understand not only the changes experienced by early modern Catholics, but also how even the most sophisticated plans of central authorities could be frustrated by practical realities, which in turn complicates our understanding of state-building and social control.

Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice also traces shifting attitudes toward illegitimacy and paternity from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Both the Catholic Church and the Republic of Venice tried to enforce moral discipline and regulate sex and reproduction. Unmarried pregnant women were increasingly stigmatized for engaging in sex. Their claims for damages because of seduction or rape were largely unproven, and the priests and laymen that they were involved with were often acquitted of any wrongdoing. The lack of institutional support for single motherhood and the exculpation of fathers frequently led to abortion, infant abandonment, or even infant death.