The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance |
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The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance
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by John Boswell
Sales Rank: 226966
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List Price: $22.00
$19.80
At Amazon
on 11-27-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 506 pages
Published by: University Of Chicago Press November 1, 1998
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0226067122
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0226067124
Book Dimensions:
7.8 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
Weighs: 1.2 pounds
From Library Journal
The author of the widely acclaimed Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (LJ 6/1/80) has now given us this original and fascinating work on abandoned children. It should be made available to every student of medieval and early modern Europe. And at a time when abortion, child abuse, and abandonment are much in the news, the book should have broad general interest. Abandonment of children--by leaving them, selling them, or consigning them to someone else--was practiced from Greek antiquity to early modern times by parents of all social classes, because of poverty, incest, shame, self-interest, inheritance, or to improve the child's future. Most children were rescued and survived due to "the kindness of strangers." Based on a careful exploration of ancient and medieval sources, this book will deservedly win a wide audience.
- Bennett D. Hill, Georgetown Univ., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell argues persuasively that child abandonment was a common and morally acceptable practice from antiquity until the Renaissance. Using a wide variety of sources, including drama and mythological-literary texts as well as demographics, Boswell looks at the evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted children, "exposing" them in public places, donating them to the church, or delivering them in later centuries to foundling hospitals. The Kindness of Strangers presents a startling history of the abandoned child that helps to illustrate the changing meaning of family.
"Highly original, learned, and skillfully written. . . . A mine of fascinating and surprising information about every aspect of the history of family limitation in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance Europe."—Bernard Knox, New York Review of Books
"A formidably learned, ingenious, at times eloquent investigation. Professor Boswell is a young historian of rare force and originality."—George Steiner, New Yorker
"Bold, original and, very likely, controversial. . . . This is a pioneering work of large importance, the first to map out and explore a tangled, mysterious region of human experience."—Mary Martin McLaughlin, New York Times Book Review
Reader Reviews
This book of Boswell's is a fascinating history of an previously unknown and essentially overlooked piece of history -- the situation for children, and what happened to them should they become orphaned or abandoned. Boswell's particular period and geographic centre is in Europe of Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. Beginning by looking at the ideal of family structure and responsibilities in the Roman Empire (the dominant model throughout the western world), Boswell proceeds through time periods to the Renaissance, examining literary and legal documents for narrative stories of children and caretakers, and for the general policy of church and state organisations toward care or neglect of such. One such narrative as example will serve to illustrate: '...in Fresne (The Ash Tree) a married woman has maliciously spread the tale that the birth of twins means that the mother has slept with two men, and when she herself then bears twins, she must face an opprobrium of her own creation. She contemplates killing one, but--significantly--her companions dissuade her from this, arguing that it would be a sin. Abandonment, however, was not...' The woman gives a child to her maid who then leaves it in a church -- while the story turns out badly, it is not due to the abandonment, which was considered in this High Middle Ages tale quite natural and proper. Boswell's antipathy toward the Catholic church shows forth a bit in his interpretation (which may nonetheless be valid) with statements such as: 'Christianity may well have increased the rate of abandonment, both by insisting more rigidly than any other moral system on the absolute necessity of procreative purpose in all human sexual acts, and by providing, through churches and monasteries, regular and relatively humane modes of abandoning infants nearly everywhere on the continent.' A wonderful glimpse into a shadowy world at the sidelines of history, yet one of crucial importance for those of us who live in a 'family values' historical period. If we do not know our past, how can we be sure of our present?
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The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance
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Price: $19.80
Updated on 11-27-2008.
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