The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance

by John Boswell

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 examines 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, European History, Medieval History, Ancient History, Sociology

506 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

John Eastburn Boswell was a prominent historian and a professor at Yale University. Many of Boswell's studies focused on the issue of homosexuality and religion, specifically homosexuality and Christianity. Boswell graduated from the College of William & Mary and earned his phd at Harvard. He died in 1994, age 47.

Librarian note: There is more than one author by this name in the database. See authors with similar names.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Western societies today recoil in horror, mostly, at the idea of abandoning a child. The exception is safe haven laws: the U.S. has decriminalized baby abandonment (or “relinquishment,” as the safe haven people prefer to call it) in all 50 states and the District of Columbia; you can leave a newborn at a hospital, and in many states other places such as fire stations or police stations, and in Vermont and New Hampshire, churches. In some states the infant can’t be more than 3 days old; in other states, 10 days, 14 days, 30 days, 60 days. In North Dakota, you can abandon a baby up to one year old. Nebraska, oddly, wrote its law to allow abandonment up to 18 years old, then was surprised when suddenly a rash of parents took advantage of it. Over the first four months of the law, 35 children who were not babies were dropped off at Nebraska safe-haven facilities. (Some children even came from out of state.) One man whose wife had just died dropped off nine of his ten children, ages 1 to 17. The law was quickly changed to a 30 day limit. No one keeps accurate statistics, but it’s thought that between 1,500 and 3,000 infants have been “relinquished” since the first safe haven law in 1999.

Late antiquity and the Middle Ages were different times. John Boswell suggests that 20-40% of urban children were abandoned during the first three centuries of the Christian era in Rome, for a wide variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. Abandonment was so commonplace that several church fathers argued against men going to brothels and prostitutes because of the risk that they might end up having sex with their own biological sons or daughters. Although he uses the terms “abandoned” and “exposed” interchangeably in many situations, most parents did not intend for the exposed child to die. Many or most were abandoned in public places in cities, where they would be found quickly: civic buildings, the columns in the Forum, beside well-traveled roads, suspended in trees to keep them from wild animals. Even children left on dung heaps would be found, since they were frequented by human scavengers. As Europe entered the Middle Ages, they were also abandoned at parish churches.

Boswell finds no evidence that girls or children of the poor were more likely to be abandoned (in the contemporary fictional literature, more boys than girls are abandoned), although during these eras many adults could barely (or not even) eke out a subsistence living for themselves, so feeding and caring for offspring was impossible.

Abandonment included the selling of children. Selling was legal in many places and times because it was understood that the alternative was probably death. Children could also be pawned, or left with a creditor until the debt was repaid. Abandoned children in antiquity might end up free, or slave. Sometimes the parent would leave a token with the child which might accompany them through life so they could be reclaimed later: a piece of jewelry, a specific cloth such as silk, or the fabric they were swaddled in might serve to identify them later. Tokens were also intended as an incentive to treat the child well. Parents wishing to reclaim a child would often have to reimburse the foster family for the years of raising and upkeep.

The wealthy abandoned children to decrease the number of heirs and thereby provide larger inheritances to a smaller number of offspring. Or, if a wealthy woman was unable to produce an heir or her children died, a “substitution” might occur: she would feign a pregnancy and an abandoned infant would be obtained.

Oblation, Boswell suggests, was a special case of abandonment. Literally, parents could make an “offering” (oblatio) of a child to the Church – a monastery or convent. For wealthy parents, it also meant donating for the upkeep of the child, a far smaller expense than whatever portion of an inheritance might be due it. Hildegard of Bingen, the tenth child of a noble family, was given to a convent at age eight as a tithe. St. Thomas Aquinas was given to the Monte Cassino abbey at age six. Sometimes oblation was outright donation, other times it was more akin to foster care. Throughout the Middle Ages, ecclesiastical authorities became concerned that it served as a dumping ground for deformed or unintelligent children; also, as it became a financial drain for some institutions, rules limiting oblations to children of nobility were put in place. When times were flush economically, outright abandonment decreased, and most abandonment came in the form of oblation by the upper classes.

What a modern reader will notice in Boswell’s book is not so much the contemporary attitudes toward abandonment, but a focus on what seem to be tangential issues: the Church was more concerned with whether an abandoned or exposed infant had been baptized, and a jurist might be more concerned with a woman passing off someone else’s child as her own. Certainly this suggests that people were not so much riled up about abandonment itself. While there was not uniformity across Europe during this long time period, it was usually either legal, not illegal, or there were no penalties for child abandonment or exposure. Romans during antiquity were not required to keep any children born to them. Norway's was probably the first European legal code to prohibit abandoning children, although only healthy children. Severely deformed children could be exposed to death as long as they had been baptized first. The seriousness of abandoning healthy children can be measured by comparing the fine St. Olaf imposed for it with that for eating horseflesh and eating meat on Fridays: they would each cost you three marks.

By the 14th century (earlier in some instances), many large Italian, French, and German cities had foundling hospitals, and as the number and awareness of them increased, fewer children were exposed. The Innocenti foundling hospital in Florence opened in 1445 to take the overflow of the city’s other two orphanages; within fifty years, it was accepting nine hundred children annually. The death rates at these institutions, primarily caused by communicable diseases but also to some degree neglect, are shocking: at the La Scala hospital in Florence in the 15th century, only 13% of the foundlings reached age six. In the 18th century in Paris, 77% of children in foundling hospitals died before age twelve (as compared to 28% of Parisian children reared at home).

The book is a bit of a slog since half of it is footnotes, but it remained interesting throughout. Boswell was a painstaking historian, meticulous about what he accepted as truthful from sources and what he doubted. You can learn a lot about historiography from reading him, including how to interpret literary sources (as opposed to purely historical sources) and how much weight to give them.

[Wealhtheow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using old records and tales, Boswell traces one of the main fates of unwanted children: abandonment. From antiquity through the end of the Middle Ages, European parents of every social standing, in every circumstance (from rape to incest to adultery to married couples), abandoned or sold their children, in expectation that they would be adopted or raised elsewhere. The rates were highest from the late Roman Empire (beginning around 250 AD) through the eleventh century, dipped during the next two prosperous centuries, and then started to rise again around 1200. "At no point did European society as a whole entertain serious sanctions against the practice. Most ethical systems, in fact, either tolerated or regulated it...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..." The main change in abandonment from antiquity to the Middle Ages is that with increasing worth put upon lineage and birth, adoption of abandoned children decreased in both rate and the value people placed upon it. Before, adopting a child meant that the parent-child bond was even more powerful, since it was chosen; after, adopted child-parent bonds were considered inferior. During antiquity, children survived via the kindness of individuals, and added to a parents' glory. Later, they were usually given to the Catholic church as oblates, were they were forced to live the rest of their lives as monks or nuns. In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, European cities created foundling hospitals, which took in hundreds of infants a year but killed most of them through communicable disease.

Boswell lays out his arguments, interpretations, and sources with meticulous detail and a wonderfully dry, sarcastic style. See my status updates for statistics or anecdotes that particularly struck me.

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Boswell writes "From Roman times to the late Middle Ages, children were abandoned throughout Europe...in great numbers, by parents of every social standing, in a great variety of circumstances." If this passage evokes images of suffering, despair and death, Boswell postulates that from the standpoint of the family and social contexts (if not from the standpoint of children from their social niche and limiting their chances of marriage and reproduction, it curtailed the number of heirs without actually eliminating OH, really?] the children." Abandonment allowed parents " to correct for gender, shift unwanted children to situations where they were desired or valued.." The practice was widespread. Rousseau bragged of throwing his five children to foundling homes. ( “Rousseau wrote that he persuaded Thérèse to give each of the newborns up to a foundling hospital, for the sake of her "honor")* Children were regarded as property' in Roman times and the father had absolute authority. Christian parents, too, abandoned children, although many were concerned lest the fathers later risk incest upon meeting their daughters unknowingly in the local brothel! Boswell suggested the church unwittingly encouraged abandonment by its emphasis on procreative sexuality and its opposition to abortion and infanticide.

It seems to me that abandonment should be viewed less as demographic and cultural relief mechanism, than as a social disaster. By the early 15th century when evidence becomes more substantial we learn rates of mortality in and out of orphanages were very high. Certainly the religious institutions of the times must bear a large share of the blame for not encouraging a sense of individual responsibility. They supported profligate procreation rather than careful recreation. There is a lesson in that which we as a society have yet to learn.

[Benjamin Abelow · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvelous education about child abandonment in the West from the Roman period till the modern--and an amazing feat that Boswell could get it all into one fairly readable book.

But a caveat is in order. Boswell's scholarship and facts have generally been accepted by scholars. However, his overarching interpretive thesis, reflected in the title of his book, that abandoned children were often rescued out of “kindness,” and his supposition that a substantial fraction of abandoned children survived, is overly sanguine and has, to my knowledge, generally been rejected by scholars of child abandonment. Having spent several years reading deeply in the history of childhood in the West, with a particular focus on child abandonment and corporal punishment, I would concur with this rejection.

To better understand this issue, see this article: Tilly, L. A., Fuchs, R. G., Kertzer, & Ransel, D. L. (1992). Child abandonment in European history: A symposium. Journal of Family History, 17, 1-23. See in particular the discussions in this article by Fuchs (p. 12) and Kertzer (pp. 17-18).

If you have other good suggestions for scholarly responses to Boswell's work, please don't hesitate to list them in the comments to this review!

[Rick Sterling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boswell examines the abandonment of children in ancient times through the Middle Ages. He relates that he assumed that the ancient references to "exposing" children meant they were left to die (as did I). But he discovered that children were usually left in a public place where they would be found and claimed by others. They might be found by childless people wanting a family or someone who would bring them up as a slave or prostitute. And there were the legends of children abandoned, like Oedipus or Romulus and Remus, who grew up to greatness.

Boswell shows what happened to these children, discusses the moral codes -- both pagan and Christian -- that condoned abandonment, and the arguments on all sides of the issue concerning the rights of children, the rights of parents, the protection of property from being divided, and many more. An interesting study of a subject ignored and unexplored in most history books.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a rather academic work. Still, the writing is engaging enough and after a while I get used to half or more of each page being footnotes. This is something like the Roman centuries before Christ to the 1500s... Infanticide via very late term abortions of abandoning unwanted/ unsupportable infants to their fate, often hanging from trees in bags. Often, these are marked with salt. This was a sign they were baptized as Catholic era was mostly concerned about that, and also how rescued infants generally ended up in brothels and men availing themselves of male or female prostitutes could be committing incest. These were the concerns that made it to published law. Funny to me hearing current Christian wailing about safe abortion procedures and this hell was going on while Jesus was upending moneychanger tables yet the later authors who lived with this as normalcy felt no need to record any commentary on it.

Case in point, advancing Christianity could only taken up in Iceland if the acceptable practice was taken off the table.

On the edges of Europe, where the increase in prosperity was felt late or not at all, and where subsistence farming or even more precarious modes of support remained general means of livelihood, the anonymous exposing of infants remained common throughout the High Middle Ages. When the Icelanders agreed to accept Christianity around 1000,

it was made law that everyone should be Christian, and that those in the country who had not been baptized should now accept baptism. But in regard to the abandoning of children and the eating of horsemeat the old law should remain in force

[Frostik Dar · Rating 5 out of 5]

One suspects that the four-star-of-five rating this book is receiving is a result of the disturbing topic. We probably do not like very much what a long, long history of abandoning unwanted children we have. Boswell is remarkably positive about the practice -- at least until after the 13th century, when the church and its religious were supplanted by the secular foundling "hospital."

[Helga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not nearly as dry as you'd expect a book full of footnotes to be. A suprisingly quick read, too!

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is interesting that when Professor Boswell wrote a copy suggesting that at one time within the early Christian Church and society that there might have been a form of recognised 'marriage' for same sex couples there was hysteria and numerous weighty academics and historians rushed to denounce the work and less learned commentators were scandalised at this uppity faggot professor casting ugly aspersions and suggestions against the early Christian folk and church. But when he wrote a book revealing that from late antiquity, i.e. early Christians and church treated children as easily discarded encumbrances and only worried that, if you were going to abandon a child you ensured it was baptised and were Sainted churchmen took a less benign view they regarded it as an offence comparable to eating meat in Lent. No outrage or shock. Interesting.

Well this fascinating book is an account of that story of European society under the guidance of the christian church adopted an attitude towards the young that can only be called materialist and mechanistic. We are not talking about widespread abandonment by the poor - the vast majority of the evidence concerns those who had, not the have-nots, and those included the very richest who found to many children a drain on inheritance capital and likely to become adults who if they did divide up estates would cost money to maintain. They liked 'giving' their young to monasteries were for a fraction of the cost of keeping them at home they would be maintained educated and pray for their luckier siblings.

This is an academic tome, but it is not written in that academic language that is soporific even for other academics. It is lively, interesting - indeed fascinating - but it is fully footnoted proper history. If you don't understand why there are footnotes in books like this maybe it is not for you. But if you can handle grown up books this is a joy of what great history can be.

[K.S. Trenten · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a difficult read. Most of the story was sucked out of these historical accounts, leaving dry, arid facts about child abandonment in Roman and medieval times, often in long, cumbersome sentences. The footnotes were placed in a jarring position which impeded my flow of reading. Much effort was made to verify the facts offered in this book, which slowed me down further. Not all of the facts seemed quite sound in spite of the effort. It was still an educational read in which I learned something I didn’t know. I’m relieved to have finished this, grateful for what I’ve learned, and determined in the future to look for historical biographies or at least historical accounts which attempt to tell a true story rather than present a collection of facts.

[Annette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not recommended for lay readers.

A foundational text in the field, although a little outdated now. Establishes a continuity in abandonment practices between antiquity and the Middle Ages. Perhaps exaggerating a little in comparing early modern mortality rates in foundling hospitals to earlier abandonment practices, especially as we do not have the data to make an accurate comparison. It would have been better to compare attitudes toward foundling hospitals to earlier attitudes toward abandonment practices as that would have been more consistent.

[Joshua Horn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book very helpful. It goes in deep into the topic, and deals with the surviving sources pretty comprehensively, all the while keeping things moving pretty quickly. That said, I found him to be quite biased against Christians. This effects not just his conclusions but even his handling of the sources. For instance, he says that Augustine wrote in favor of prostitute and abortion. I found this surprising, and when I checked his footnotes on these points, it seems he was just twisting what Augustine was saying.

[Pj Mensel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another astonishing book by an author taken too soon. Again, he chooses unusal topics - this one on the abandonment of children in early Europe but his scholarly approach and incredibly clear writing is of such high quality that if I were a history professor at a University, I wuld require them to read at least ne of his works to truly understand how history should be dne. This guy was brilliant!

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read (and loved) Boswell's other two books, and this one is just as good. I did notice that this one seems to have been written more for an audience of people who are interested in learning from his methods and thought processes (the author bio mentions that he was massively popular as a teacher). The other books are famous for being "controversial," and not everyone who read them was interested in learning anything.

[Micebyliz]

I read this some time ago but decided a reread was in order. It's very disturbing yet informative and important book. Every page is filled with insight and illumination (not to be funny, we are discussing the Middle Ages here) but seriously, it is just the book for anyone who is studying more deeply their religion or beliefs.

[Pat Carson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow! This is the side of history that is carefully hidden on a back shelf.

[Robert Showers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book for my final exam at Université Fribourg (Lic.Theol.) in 1989. Well written; I learned a lot.

[Mathew Powers · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only complaint with this book involve the use of extensive annotations and notes. While I'm a huge fan of that type of research and diligence in regards to source material, on several occasions, the content within the notes clearly should have just remained in the actual body of the monograph. I do not understand why some pages only had 2 sentences, followed by notes that were not source material, but additional information. I would just prefer it remain as part of the argument, itself.

Despite this, fantastic book, terrific arguments. Even when I disagreed, I can fall back to his original statement in his intro that this type of work is MEANT to be dissected, discussed, reexamined, and taken as one step in the process.

Loved the ability by Boswell to study a rather broad timescale while also examining variances in types of abandonment (not to mention reasons, methods, and more..).

Totally recommend this book...brilliant book.

[Joy Lynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am still reading, so these are preliminary thoughts. I was intrigued by the topic of this book when I came across it at a used book store. In the introduction the author goes into helpful detail regarding how he used a combination of literary and historical records to reach conclusions about a subject where not a lot of empirical data exists. However when I got to the section of the book regarding the early church, his conclusions in that section made me doubt his conclusions in the other parts of the book. I am not familiar enough with the sources he discussed in the section on ancient Rome to question his interpretation of those sources, but with the way he took verses of the Bible completely out of context, I would not be surprised if he did the same thing for the ancient Roman sources.

[Emily Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is all footnote! seriously, when your footnotes take up 2/3 of the page, just put it in the text!!! otherwise, pretty interesting for facts here and there, but the gist of it is people abandoned their children during all times and usually weren't punished for it. if i owned a copy of this book, i would finish it, but it's such a tome that i gave up halfway through.

[altsapiens · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book. However, the author needs to seriously consider rewriting the work to include the information in the footnotes. I mean seriously, pages that were 1/2 to 3/4 footnote were not uncommon. The footnotes often had interesting tidbits, but I had to force myself to stop reading them otherwise my reading became too disjointed and flow was lost.

[Kersplebedeb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is like a can opener for opening your mind as to new ways of looking at things. Its an incredibly original study (at least from my limited experience) of ordinary people choosing to take in abandoned children. Boswell argues this was more common than we would think...

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

read in July 1994
very interesting rebuttal of the folklore about children abandoned on dung heaps and how most were not "eaten by wolves, etc.", but taken in by strangers and about the laws that covered such "adoptions"

[Max Carmichael · Rating 1 out of 5]

This would seem to be a poorly written doctoral dissertation that, unfortunately for the lay reader, bypassed its committee review and went straight to press ;-)

It's doubly unfortunate because the subject is of inherent interest, especially if it were followed into modern times.

[Ameliedanjou]

This was the book I'd been looking for while planning my masters paper -- it hadn't quite been published yet or my subject might have been different. I'd sensed Philip Arles was out of date but had no other proof -- well this was what I'd wanted.

[Natalee Caple · Rating 4 out of 5]

and excellent detailed history of the oblate.

[Suzie Fusaro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really poorly written. The information provided is so interesting but written in a very wordy burdensome way.