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

Portada
University of Chicago Press, 1998 - 488 pàgines
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.

Des de l'interior del llibre

Continguts

Introduction
3
Ancient Patterns
51
The Early Middle Ages
181
The High Middle Ages
267
The Later Middle Ages
395
Appendix of Translations
435
Frequently Cited Works
463
Index
475
Copyright

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Sobre l'autor (1998)

John Boswell (1947-94) was the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale University and the author of The Royal Treasure, The Kindness of Strangers, and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.

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