Abstract
This article examines the consequences of extramarital pregnancy for women in late medieval France. Pregnancy outside marriage is typically thought of as a disaster for women and children alike and for their families. However, careful analysis of records of royal pardon, other legal and prescriptive sources, and a wide range of other materials all suggests otherwise. The article demonstrates that, at least for some single mothers in late medieval France, illicit pregnancy did not necessarily mean disaster at all. Pregnant women could help themselves, and were helped by others. All this has important implications for our understanding of the regulation of sexuality and reproduction in late medieval France, and of the role of mercy in medieval justice.
Cet article examine les conséquences des grossesses illicites pour les mères célibataires dans le Nord de la France à la fin du Moyen Age. La grossesse hors mariage est traditionnellement considérée comme une catastrophe pour les mères et les enfants, ainsi que pour leurs familles. Une analyse des documents relatifs à la grâce royale, d'autres sources juridiques et normatives et d'un large éventail d'autres documents suggère tout le contraire. L'article montre que, du moins pour certaines mères célibataires de la France médiévale tardive, une grossesse illicite ne signifie pas nécessairement une catastrophe. Les mères pouvaient s'aider elles-mêmes et étaient aidées par d'autres. Cette conclusion a des implications importantes pour la réglementation de la sexualité et de la reproduction, et pour le rôle de la miséricorde dans la justice médiévale.
When considering women's prospects in medieval Europe, historians generally assume the worst. There are good reasons for such pessimism. The Middle Ages are infamous for violence and misogyny. In this patriarchal world order, sexual purity had paramount importance for a woman's reputation and honor.1 As some scholars have asserted, even an unsubstantiated rumor that a young woman had engaged in premarital sex could have serious consequences, risking her marriage prospects and perhaps even condemning her to the brothel.2 Most dangerous of all, it is commonly thought, was out-of-wedlock pregnancy, described as a disaster, even a “supreme disaster,” for the pregnant woman and also for the infant.3 It is easy to imagine ostracism, poverty, despair, and death.
An account of an act of infanticide carried out by an unhappy mother in the northern French town of Chinon seems, at first glance, to offer ample evidence of this. The pardon, granted by Louis XI in 1481, documents a tragic act in the final decades of the Middle Ages.4 It also narrates a complex and revealing history, one indicating that such pregnancies did not necessarily end in tragedy. Despite illicit pregnancy, female honor could be maintained or, if lost, restored.5
Marie Ribou was a poor young woman, about twenty-four years old. “Orphaned of her father,” she had spent most of her life in domestic service in Chinon. Already a mother of two children, she had killed her infant daughter in a fit of melancholy, rage, and despair. Her confession explains how all this had come to pass. “Simple and without malice,” she had been seduced at twenty by a cleric who lived in the same household. As a result, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son, for whom she somehow provided. Three years later Marie was pregnant again, though in what at first seemed to be more promising circumstances than her earlier seduction. In this second instance, a man referred to in the pardon letter only as “—— des Prez” spoke to her of marriage and took her from her place of employment, maintaining her as his mistress. When Marie realized she was pregnant and told des Prez, he brought her to the home of one of his relatives in the nearby village of Cande, so they could keep the pregnancy a secret and “to protect her honor.” Marie gave birth to a daughter and had her baptized. Marie then arranged for her host's sister, who lived outside Saumur, to act as wet nurse for one year for the infant, promising to pay her one hundred sous. After recovering from childbirth, Marie returned to Chinon, where she found a far less willing partner in des Prez. He denied any marriage promises, claimed he was no longer sure he was the father of her infant, and refused to provide any financial support. He also refused to return to her the savings from her wages that she had left with him. Realizing that she had been “deceived, lost, and dishonored” by des Prez, Marie went to Saumur, paid the wet nurse what she could, and collected her daughter. She planned to confront des Prez with the child, but on her return to Chinon, near a church on the bank of the river, overcome by “melancholy” and “at a loss to think with what she could provide for her daughter,” enraged at des Prez's “trickery and deception,” and overwhelmed by demonic temptation, she cast her infant into the middle of the River Vienne, drowning her.6
Scholars have understood infanticide in medieval France primarily as a tragic outcome of illicit pregnancy, the desperate act of a singlewoman whose pregnancy put her in a desperate situation.7 This interpretation depends largely on analysis of royal pardons like the one granted Marie Ribou. Such pardons are essential for our understanding of infanticide in France before the sixteenth century, as very few records of the investigation or prosecution of infanticide are known to have survived from this earlier period.8 These pardons typically present the confession a young and often poor woman who had concealed her pregnancy, gave birth alone, killed her infant, and tried to hide the body. In some instances the woman then took flight to avoid the dangers of prosecution, and she or her family then sought her pardon while she remained in sanctuary or in exile. In other cases, the discovery of the corpse, the woman's own weakened and lactating body, or rumors or denunciations led to the woman's arrest and prosecution. Scholars have debated the frequency of such acts of infanticide in medieval Europe, but not the predominance of illicit pregnancy as motive. It is also assumed that this indicates the dire circumstances unwed mothers faced.9
This article makes use of the 1481 royal pardon for Marie Ribou not to study infanticide but instead as a foundation to explore the meaning and social consequences of illicit pregnancy in late medieval France. While disaster might certainly have befallen a woman pregnant out of wedlock, we should not be so quick to assume the worst. As Judith Bennett wrote, “Out-of-wedlock pregnancy was more a difficulty than a disaster in most late medieval English communities.”10 There are many reasons to think the same of late medieval France, where women and their communities made use of a range of strategies to overcome the difficulties posed by illicit pregnancy.11
Marie Ribou's pardon is unfortunately the only source we have on her life and on the events that led her to drown her infant daughter. We know almost nothing about criminal prosecution in fifteenth-century Chinon or the broader Touraine region.12 Few judicial sources survive for the region at this time, a particularly frustrating loss well beyond the concerns of this article, as Tours functioned as King Louis XI's capital, the main site in which he exercised his royal authority.13 The records of the Paris Parlement from 1479 to 1482 do not appear to include Marie's case, even though her sentence was appealed to that court.14 Fifteenth-century notarial registers from the Touraine seem to offer no trace of her either, nor any of the other people mentioned in her pardon.15 Understanding Marie's history, therefore, as well as the circumstances of other unwed mothers, requires the casting of a rather broad net.
As a starting point, I suggest we read the royal pardon of Marie Ribou as it was intended: as request for royal grace. A request for pardon asked a king to consider not just the criminal act but the person: in this case, the woman herself, her life and character. Despite her failings and her crime, a pardon asks that the ruler not only mercifully spare her execution but also allow her reintegration into society. Recognizing this text and others like it as requests for pardon that the ruler granted, legal acts that rehabilitated rather than condemned, helps us better understand the handling of extramarital pregnancy at the time. Looking beyond the tragic act of infanticide and instead considering in careful detail the events listed in Marie's confession yields some surprising and important results. It opens a window on the many possibilities for how late medieval French communities responded to illicit pregnancy. In particular, it nuances the dark picture that usually predominates in the few scholarly sources to address the topic.
Singlewomen and Single Mothers in Medieval France
To understand illicit pregnancy and its consequences for singlewomen, we must first review what we know about singlewomen in medieval France. Unfortunately the current scholarship on the subject is sparse enough to be quickly summarized. The lack of scholarship is not surprising, for singlewomen did not constitute a distinct category in medieval French society. As Sharon Farmer has explained, the legal, theological, and political structures of that society defined women by their relationships to men: a husband's wife or widow, a father's daughter, or a “Bride of Christ”: a nun.16 Women who functioned outside these categories could find themselves counted among prostitutes, or at least at risk of being defamed as immoral and dishonorable. One additional reason for this easy association between unattached women and sex is that, since they were so economically disadvantaged, they did, if with unknown frequency, engage in informal sex work, as well as move in and out of licensed brothels.17
As hard as scholars must work to find and study the singlewoman, the single mother like Marie Ribou is even further out of reach. Almost all medieval prescriptive discussions of pregnancy, childbirth, and parents' obligations to their children appear under the rubric of marriage. In these sources and beyond, the mother of an illegitimate child remains in the shadows.18 It is far easier to find the fathers of illegitimate children, laymen and clerics alike, whose paternity might appear documented in a wide range of sources, from testaments and bequests to efforts to discipline priests who had multiple illegitimate children with different mothers. Easiest to find among these men are royal and noble fathers, men like Louis XI, who pardoned Marie Ribou. Louis XI had three illegitimate half sisters, whom he royally provisioned and married off to members of the French high nobility. He himself fathered at least four illegitimate daughters, who were similarly provided for.19 Noblemen of the sword as well as the robe, and their emulators, too, regularly acknowledged and provided for at least some of their illegitimate children. In some cases they even raised their bastards alongside their legitimate children. Whether the children were kept close or raised elsewhere, the fathers, their wives, and other kin provided for them in many ways: endowing them with property or wealth and arranging their marriages, purchasing their legitimacy from the king, or seeking papal permission to make illegitimate sons into bishops or abbots and illegitimate daughters into abbesses.20 All these illegitimate children obviously had mothers, but it is much more difficult to find them.
Illicit Sex and Pregnancy in Medieval France: Law and Legal Practice
One of the few places we can begin to locate evidence for illicit sex and pregnancy in medieval France is the judicial sources that document punishment for illicit sex. If and how local courts punished women for engaging in illegal sex matters for the purposes of this article because it helps us better understand the possible consequences for women like Marie Ribou who became pregnant outside marriage. With so few judicial court records from the Touraine to analyze, we can only turn to its neighboring regions for some insight. These sources, where they survive, document various efforts to restrain female sexuality to marriage, or at least to menace with punishment or to punish female offenders.21 Usually the penalty was a small fine, though in some cases courts punished with larger fines, whippings, banishment, imprisonment for a few months, or penitential processions and offerings. On the whole, to use the distinction between disaster and difficulty made by Judith Bennett in her analysis of the consequences of illicit pregnancy, prosecution by a French secular or church court for illicit sex could qualify as disastrous in at least some cases but on the whole seems more like a difficulty.22
Scholars dispute the role of gender in the policing of illicit sex. Some maintain that women were punished more often and more harshly than men for sexual delicts.23 Others have demonstrated that judicial punishments for women's “sexual deviance” are not quite as common or as severe, that men were actually punished more often, and that practices changed over time.24 Certainly one explanation for this disagreement is that definitions of crime, prosecutorial priorities, and treatment of women did differ over time and space, from court to court, in urban or rural settings, and in times of war and hardship or prosperity.
Generally speaking, in northern France, as I have argued, late medieval French church and secular courts alike prosecuted and punished far more men than women for sexual offenses, and men usually paid larger fines.25 There are many reasons for this. While courts had greater economic incentives in pursuing men, as men would have had more money to pay the courts that pursued them, there is an additional, largely cultural and social explanation for this judicial focus on regulating male sexual behavior: the sexual activity of men, especially violent and coercive sex, was of greater concern. Women were temptresses, easily made use of by the devil to lead men astray, but it was men who were generally considered the dangerous instigators of sex, and above all the instigators of violent disputes over sex. Women, meanwhile, were considered weak and irresponsible. They were therefore not capable of exerting the same control over themselves as men and therefore were not to be treated the same as responsible adult males.26 Such ideas about female irresponsibility, especially when combined with an interest in handling female offenses against family honor privately, contributed to a general inclination to shield women from formal prosecution and punishment. It left women forever vulnerable, however, to domestic violence or even femicide.27
Royal pardons, as is demonstrated in this article, are another important judicial source for the study of unwed mothers. They are important above all in that they offer narrative accounts of women's lives. These accounts, fictive but plausible, on occasion describe an illicit pregnancy and its consequences. They provide the context of a life lived long before, and sometimes after, an encounter with justice, rather than the curt records of sentencing typical of documents in the judicial records of prosecution and punishment. “Pardon tales,” as Natalie Zemon Davis described these supplications for royal pardon, grace, or remission, are discourses in which a story is carefully crafted so as to seem to merit mercy, though always with the constraint that letters challenged as false or fraudulent could be rejected.28 Pardons were granted not just for homicide but for a wide range of offenses in medieval France, including theft, rape, and treason. Such pardons allowed the accused to escape capital punishment, but the culprit might still be sentenced to pilgrimage, imprisonment, or fines, paid either to the crown or to the opposing “injured” party, as a condition of the pardon or the resolution of a separate civil suit.29
These pardons are difficult to evaluate. They pose interpretive challenges particularly because we have evidence only for the requests that met with royal favor, not those that were rejected. It is therefore very hard to know how to evaluate the seriousness of a given offense or what kinds of justifications might not qualify an act or person as pardonable. Another complication is that there are relatively few pardons for infanticide compared to other crimes. Scholars have typically interpreted this small number as indicative of how reluctantly kings granted pardon for infant murder.30 We should consider, however, that this number might also reflect a relative rarity of prosecution and sentencing for the crime. And with this many unknowns, we are quite obviously far from any clear indications of the so-called dark figures of actual crime rates.
Taken on their own terms, these pardons offer useful guidance but must be interpreted with care. We must not assume these formulaic accounts of wrongdoing are truthful accounts, of course. They were embellished to cast the best possible light on what was often some very bad behavior. Nonetheless, they offer what ought to have been a plausible account of the circumstances that might lead up to an act of murder, circumstances that merited forgiveness.
To be sure, they demonstrate that some number of women pregnant from illicit sex, like Marie Ribou, concealed pregnancies and killed their infants. Women who obtained royal pardon for these offenses regularly claimed that they had acted out of desperation, fearing total ruin. These women or, rather, the advocates who petitioned on their behalf frequently and rather formulaically stated that they had concealed pregnancy and killed their infants because of their great fear of dishonor or shame, as well as fear of the violence that a husband, parents, or even the child's own father might inflict.31 These women had good reason to be frightened.
At the same time, we risk distorting our evidence when we rely too heavily on these pardons to imagine the circumstances of women pregnant outside marriage. A woman at risk of execution for her offense had ample incentive to overstate how dire her circumstances had seemed to her when she killed her infant or concealed a stillborn child. Women and their advocates had every reason to present themselves as in gravest peril. But we must interpret these texts with care. It is possible that these pregnancies would not have been as ruinous as these women claimed. Consider also the other details of Marie's pardon, which documents a first pregnancy she seems to have managed, and the account of her killing of her daughter as well, which stated that she acted out of rage, despair, and fear that she could not provide for her daughter. It is not having given birth outside marriage but feeling tricked and at risk of economic ruin that is offered as motivation for her desperate act.
There are further reasons to question patterns these sources evoke. One example of this is the frequent claim that the woman gave birth alone. Certainly, many pardons seek to mitigate the culpability of the suppliant. But it is also often the case with pardons that the person seeking royal grace is presented as having acted alone or as instigator, and we can suspect that this is also strategic, an effort to avoid criminal responsibility for anyone else who may have been involved. We should wonder, therefore, if there is strategy in claiming that a woman gave birth alone and without help as an effort to mitigate not just her responsibility but that of anyone else who may have been present. As we know from other examples, and from investigations in local courts, there were many paths to stillbirth and infanticide.
Royal pardons also offer narratives that describe how people in a woman's family and community responded to her illicit pregnancy. Several pardons, like that of Marie, include accounts in which women pregnant outside marriage had the help—welcome as well as unwelcome—of other people, sometimes the putative father, their kin, and others. There are pardons not just for infanticidal mothers but also for grandfathers and grandmothers, the mother's parents and siblings, and even her future in-laws. All these men and women confessed and obtained pardon for their efforts to provoke an abortion or miscarriage or for concealing the corpse of an infant. In some of these pardons the penitent offenders admit that they had sought to terminate a pregnancy or to destroy a fetus. In other examples, however, we find descriptions of efforts to conceal the pregnancy and to find someone willing to take in and raise the infant, efforts that came to an end only because of a miscarriage or stillbirth that they had not intended.
Illicit Pregnancy in Its Medieval French Context
As these accounts of plans to discreetly raise an illegitimate infant outlined in royal pardons suggest, we can excavate from the sources a number of alternatives to abortion or infanticide. We should recognize as potentially quite widespread a premodern practice that anthropologists have identified as the circulation of children: children, legitimate as well as illegitimate, rich and poor, were often raised by people other than their parents, circulating within large kin groups and communities.32 Moreover, as I have shown, parents had a wide range of possibilities for raising and providing for illegitimate children in medieval society.33 As concerns these children's mothers, I argue that we can locate evidence for their “circulation” as well. Extramarital sex certainly could be damaging and dangerous for women, but its consequences have often been exaggerated or applied too widely to too many situations, without sufficient attention to social status and regional differences or to the role of penance and mercy in their judicial systems, and in their world more broadly.
For medieval society could forgive the sexual sinner, even the female sexual sinner. To be sure, this forgiveness could be motivated more by practical than by charitable considerations. Recent scholarship, for example, has cast doubt on the alleged importance of virginity for female honor and for women's marital prospects, in at least some medieval communities, such as poorer rural societies or regions where concubinage or premarital relationships were common.34 Moreover, at every level of the social hierarchy, fertility was greatly prized. Demographic and economic conditions would have had an impact, as would Christian ideology that so exalted celibacy. It is nevertheless true that medieval Christians were generally eager to “increase and multiply,” or at least eager that some members of their kin group did so.35 It seems possible, at least in some communities, that proven fertility could have mattered more than virginity.
Christian doctrine valorized marriage as essential for sex without sin and mandated matrimony to ensure children's legitimacy. It nonetheless played a somewhat surprising role in the formation of attitudes toward virginity. The rules governing marriage in medieval Christian Europe did not allow for much room for error. Marriages could not be dissolved because of childlessness. With the ability to have children of such fundamental importance, and with marriage so difficult to bring to an end with any legal right to remarry, particularly for people without a great deal of money or political power, a woman who had proven fertility might have had greater “value” on a marriage market than an “untested” virgin whose infertility might prove far more damaging to a family's interests. Certainly a widow could offer the same demonstrated ability to become pregnant without any stain of dishonor for having engaged in premarital sex. However, if children from her previous marriage survived, they might have automatic claims on her property and various other legal rights. In some property regimes these stepchildren might even be able to make claims on the property a man hoped to pass on only to his own children.36 A young singlewoman without any legal descendants from prior unions, and especially one generously provided for by her former lover, could therefore have seemed a quite appealing prospect as a bride. All this might have outweighed any threats to honor posed by rumors of a bride's premarital sex with another man. We should recognize all of this when we consider the range of the possible for women like Marie Ribou.
We should also recognize another important but understudied factor in these calculations: the use that medieval society made, for better or worse, of women and children as workers. As Barbara Hanawalt has written, “In a largely rural economy, which Europe had throughout the period under discussion, all labor was essential; wealthier households often did take into their care the superfluous or orphaned village children.”37 As all this suggests, even single mothers like Marie Ribou could have had real alternatives to abandonment or infanticide. Marie and other women in similar circumstances may have wanted to conceal a pregnancy to protect their honor, but it could have been easier to find a place for a child than we might assume, though of course a good deal depended on the economic and demographic environment the pregnant woman lived in. In times of extreme poverty, famine, plague, or overpopulation, a poor singlewoman surely struggled, as did other vulnerable or indigent persons.38
In times of prosperity as well as hardship, women and children, despite being dismissed as irrational and irresponsible, were nonetheless considered useful members of society. That children were made to work and that women engaged in less well paid or unpaid labor are disturbing if unsurprising features of medieval life.39 It is also disturbing that work could begin extremely early in life. It was common practice to have a child observe and mimic the labor that he or she—and tasks were often gendered, of course—would be expected to take up from a very young age, even as young as three or four, as analysis of miracle stories and other sources has demonstrated.40 By age six to eight, children often had responsibilities including watching over livestock or still younger children, running errands, and cooking and cleaning.
There is good alongside the bad in that children were considered useful workers. Of course, we in the modern West believe that children should spend their youth otherwise. Even so, the value of medieval children as workers could have meant that people, even poorer people, were willing to incorporate infants and children into their households. Children and even infants in medieval Europe were considered potentially useful. Moreover, opportunities for infants and children could also mean opportunities for their mothers.
The Pregnant Singlewoman and Her World
Having taken stock of the legal and social context of illicit pregnancy in medieval France, we can now return to Marie Ribou and consider her history in more detail. “Orphaned of her father,” as the pardon letter puts it, Marie was in service by the age of thirteen or fourteen. Many young women shared a similar fate, in towns and cities as well as the countryside, and well before fourteen. The conditions of this labor varied tremendously. Marie's letter stated that she always worked in respectable houses, and presumably this information was offered to demonstrate her good moral conduct in general. Taverns would have been less respectable places of employment, for example. But even in the most upstanding of households there was always the possibility of sexual exploitation by employers. Marie did not complain of that, but other women in her circumstances did. So too did preachers and other authorities, who urged employers to keep a careful eye on the women in their service, to ensure that they were kept a safe distance from all men in the household: husbands, sons, fellow servants, and visitors.41 Almost always the man is described as instigator of the relationship, which comported with the general understanding at the time of sex as something one person did to another: the active and dominant male with a passive and submissive woman.42
Marie's pardon in no way explicitly suggests coercion, though she does insist she was misled. In a first deviation from an otherwise moral and honest life, she was seduced when she was about twenty, by a cleric living in the household she worked for in Chinon. We know nothing about this cleric, and there is no mention of any talk of marriage in this first relationship. Perhaps the man was a priest, or hoped to become one, in which case he could not have married Marie without ruining his career prospects.43 He may have hoped for employment in the service of the church as a beneficed priest and so avoided marriage to keep that option open. It is also possible that Marie was too far down the social hierarchy for him, though we know even less about her social status than his.
If Marie or the unnamed cleric suffered any consequences for having engaged in illicit sex, we are not told. Church court records from other parts of France record many summonses and fines for clerics accused of having sex outside marriage, and also for the women they had sex with.44 There may well have been religious or secular officials in the Touraine who made it their business to police extramarital sex. The customs of the region offer little guidance on local handling of sexual crime.45 Certainly both regional customs and royal ordinances from across the kingdom claim jurisdiction over adultery, defloration, and rape. There are royal pardons for defloration, rape, and related acts of violence from the Touraine, including violent responses to adultery, but we lack evidence for the handling of fornication or of adultery by local secular officials. As for local ecclesiastical responses to illicit sex, synodal statutes from the region offer the usual condemnations for sex outside marriage. The chief mandate, as ever with medieval church statutes, was for priests to know which offenses required episcopal or papal attention, for example, sex involving priests or nuns or the crimes of rape, incest, or defloration.46 While this could have also meant the assignation of fines, as in the nearby archdiocese of Chartres or in Rouen, Paris, Troyes, Cambrai, and other dioceses, it also may not have.47 Once again, we have no way to know if or how these rules were applied in Chinon. Certainly, with or without this kind of judicial regulation of illicit sex, Marie might have had more difficulty keeping or finding work as a result of getting pregnant, though she does not say so. Instead, somehow, life went on for Marie. An unmarried young woman in service, she became pregnant, gave birth, and went back to work.
Marie's confession also does not describe how or where she gave birth to her first child. Some women in similar situations, particularly those who concealed their pregnancies, continued to work up to the day or even moment they went into labor. The circumstances in which they gave birth vary and are often extremely difficult to imagine without concern for the safety of the women as well as the fetuses. Women gave birth wherever they were, in the fields while looking after livestock, in latrines, in bed at night, and alone. They did so both by accident, as there was no one nearby to help, or by design, not willing to seek help, as they still hoped to keep the pregnancy a secret. Other women pregnant from illicit sex nonetheless gave birth at home, in the care of relations and women from the community and, in the best of circumstances, in the care of women with some medical expertise and training as midwives.48
But there was another alternative, one that has yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves: the hospital or, rather, the many different institutions and less formal establishments in which travelers, the infirm, and the needy could seek shelter and care. There are a number of excellent studies on medieval French charity and hospitals.49 That number continues to grow, but thus far the role of pregnant women as recipients of care has not been fully incorporated and has sometimes been mischaracterized. In fact, while women probably gave birth at home when they could, they also gave birth in hospitals, which appear to have made a more regular practice of assisting with pregnancy than typically thought. Certainly some hospitals made efforts to bar pregnant women from entry.50 Other hospitals throughout France not only admitted pregnant women but even specialized in doing so, taking in pregnant women, women recovering from pregnancy, or both, along with their infants.51 It seems quite possible that unwed mothers may have been among the intended recipients of this care, since women who could give birth at home generally did so.
Acting on the dictates of Christian theology and law concerning the sacredness of life and the essential importance of baptism to ensure the salvation of infants, French hospitals regularly received pregnant women, a practice we can find early traces of in the twelfth century in the hospital established in Jerusalem.52 The late thirteenth-century statutes of Vernon, to give one of many examples, mandated that pregnant women be received for childbirth and that they be cared for at the expense of the hospital for three weeks after the pregnancy.53 Beginning particularly in the thirteenth century, charitable bequests not infrequently list care for pregnant women among the works of mercy the hospital was expected to perform. French testaments included bequests specifically designated for the dowries of unmarried women or for the care of pregnant women in need.54 Queen Jeanne de Navarre of France stated in her testament of 1305 that the hospital she founded at Château-Thierry should take in poor pregnant women and provide for them during their recovery.55 The Aumône Notre-Dame in Chartres, in 1386, expressly included both abandoned pregnant women (povres gesines) and abandoned children (povres enffans trouves) among the intended recipients of its care.56
In 1406 the eminent theologian, university chancellor, and preacher Jean Gerson deplored the failure of the royal family and others to do more to provide for the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, of which he was one of the directors. Gerson urged in particular that they recognize the plight of the many poor and pregnant women who sought what aid the hospital could provide with its limited resources.57 In the late fifteenth century one of Gerson's successors, Jehan Henry, explained how pregnant women, “malades de maladie originale,” ought to be received and provided for, along with their infants.58
Much harder to find, but of obvious value, are actual records of the reception and care of pregnant women. Annie Saunier offers a unique and rich study of the fifteenth-century accounts of a hospital that specialized in caring for pregnant women and abandoned children, the hospital of St. Thomas Argentan in Brittany.59 Dijon's hospitals also had in their employ women with expertise in childbirth, and even in some positions of authority, as found with the fascinating references to the “mistress of the hospital of St. Esprit” or “matrons charged with delivery of infants” among those working for other hospitals and parishes, who assisted with pregnancies, including those of unmarried women, in the second half of the fifteenth century.60
These, then, are the possibilities we know of for Marie's first pregnancy: a hospital, her lover's home, her employer's house, or wherever she happened to be when she went into labor.61 She gave birth to a son and presumably baptized him, as happened later with her daughter, but we do not know precisely what she did next beyond her claim that she continued to provide for the boy, who at the time of her royal pardon would have been about five years old. Perhaps the boy's father helped her financially, or she could provide for one child, at least, with her own resources.
As Marie evidently needed to work to live, she or the boy's father would likely have placed their son in the care of kin or hired a wet nurse, paid for by Marie or by the father, much as later happened, at least initially, with Marie's daughter. Single mothers who could afford this form of child care could then return to work. This could include work as wet nurses for other women or at hospitals.62 As an unmarried woman, Marie was in principle a less desirable candidate for a position as a wet nurse. There was some concern, for example, that the moral laxity of a wet nurse might, through her milk and bad example, negatively affect the child she cared for.63 But just as with the marital prospects of women who gave birth outside marriage discussed earlier, this too was overlooked in practice. Not all people who had infants in need of milk could afford to be so scrupulous about the moral quality of the women they hired, and both households and hospitals employed them.64 Also, there could be advantages in hiring a woman who did not have a legitimate child to provide for or a husband who might also demand her attention and care.
Some mothers in Marie's circumstances did abandon their children, though this is a subject we know very little about for medieval northern France. Until the mid-sixteenth century there were no homes dedicated to the care of abandoned children in the north, in contrast with the earlier foundations in the Mediterranean, of which the Italian examples are best known.65 Instead, parishes, municipal authorities, and lords all had a responsibility to care for any infants abandoned within their borders.66 Hospitals, churches, and convents took in abandoned children and had wet nurses on salary, as well as midwives. If the infants survived, they would typically work for the hospital, be found apprenticeships, or be placed in domestic service. In some cases we have records of hospitals providing the dowry and trousseau of women they had raised and celebrating their marriages to local men. It seems possible that these smaller and more informal organizations had a better chance of ensuring an infant's survival than the larger institutions in Italy, which had heartbreakingly high infant mortality rates.67
Mothers who could not raise their own children could turn to hospitals and abandon newborn infants there, perhaps even without risk of prosecution or punishment, but there were limits. A few mothers who abandoned their children at the home of a high-status man were punished, mostly likely because their actions had impugned the honor of important men.68 It might also have been more acceptable to abandon infants in the first few days after childbirth but not subsequently. This delay, the alleged ability of the mother to provide for the child, interest in punishing that woman as marginal for some other reason, or a combination of these factors was what led to these exceptional prosecutions for abandonment. In general, abandonment seems to have been tolerated, not least as a lesser evil than killing the child or abandoning it in a place it might not be immediately found and provided for. In fact, abandonment was not usually associated with the mothers in the prescriptive law, which discusses the responsibility and consequences of abandonment for men, for fathers and masters, not for mothers.69 As all this suggests, abandonment of children is a topic that needs further research.
To return to Marie, all we know is that at the age of about twenty-four she had a young son whom she somehow cared for while working in a house in Chinon. About three years after her first pregnancy passed, somehow, and then Marie met the mysterious des Prez. The scribe who recorded the pardon left a blank space in the place of his name, offering only “des Prez.” Someone made the choice to maintain this anonymity for him. It could have been Marie; it could have been those seeking the pardon on her behalf, here “family and friends,” which for all we know could have included des Prez himself, or at least someone who wanted his identity protected. He might therefore have been a person of some importance, though it is also possible that he was only of slightly higher social status than Marie and that his name is left out of the pardon for some other reason. Indeed, it is relatively rare that we are given the name of the putative father in infanticide pardons.
This des Prez had offered Marie, at least for a time, a new life. He took her from the place she worked and maintained her, speaking to her of marriage. Perhaps they lived together, or he lodged her in a discreet place where he could visit her. Either way, she may have been able to stop working. Either way, she became pregnant. Pregnancy could well have been welcome news for Marie, at least at first, for if des Prez had truly intended to marry her, or had been willing to do so, the pregnancy would have provided incentive, could have pushed him to honor his promises and take her to the altar all the faster. A speedy marriage would have legitimated her position as lawful wife with rights to share and inherit property. It would have also legitimated her unborn child.70
But des Prez, according to the royal pardon, wanted the pregnancy kept secret. As for Marie, her pardon does not offer insight on her own wishes. She complied, possibly because she had concerns about her honor, but perhaps more likely because she wanted to accommodate the man she claimed she had hope of marrying, or at least hope of remaining his mistress. The letter describes Marie's second pregnancy as a source of shame and dishonor, but it is hard to say quite how shaming, quite how damaging socially or economically. In any case, des Prez clearly did not want her pregnancy known to others and arranged to shelter her with a member of his family in the nearby village of Cande. This man's name, at least, appears in Marie's pardon: Giles Chasteau.
Here we see the real importance of help for the pregnant woman, ideally from the man she recognized as the father. That Marie could take refuge with des Prez's family was clearly important, a path that other pregnant women had taken before her. The most famous medieval example is that of Héloïse, who in the twelfth century gave birth to her son Astrolabe in the care of her lover Peter Abelard's sister in Brittany. Astrolabe would later make his way in the employ of the church, with the help of both of his parents.
When a putative father refused his help, or when a woman could not or would not seek his help, her own family might also play a vital role, or a woman's employers, friends, or neighbors. Other pardon letters and investigations from fifteenth-century France describe pregnant women returning to their parents' home to give birth, assisted by their mothers and neighbors, or, for those women who remained in service, being cared for by their employers and other women working there, sometimes with the additional and valuable help of a midwife.71 Childbirth, in principle, was something women should have had help with regardless of the circumstances in which she had become pregnant.
It is in this tradition that Marie gave birth to her second child, in what she described as comfortable discretion. After her lying in, Marie returned to Chinon in hopes of marriage, or at least in hopes of financial support from des Prez, who greatly disappointed her. What stands out most prominently in this moment is a path not taken, des Prez's sudden refusal to provide for Marie and for her daughter, via either marriage or a financial settlement. We know from a range of other sources that women in these circumstances were not necessarily without recourse. It could not have been easy, but pregnant women could seek help from their communities, as well as from church courts, and perhaps also secular courts, in demanding that the men they considered the fathers of their children either marry them or help them.72 Scholars working on southern France, particularly in Mende and in Montpellier, have discovered in notarial records several agreements by which men promised financial support to women for childbirth and child support. Most often, it seems, the putative fathers either paid the women something and then took full charge of the child, or just took full custody of the child.73 We know of at least a few comparable arrangements from northern France.74
One, from 1491 in Tours, brings us as close in time and space as I can come to Marie Ribou. It demonstrates what women in Marie's circumstances in the Touraine might hope for and might have actually attained. As the notarial record reports, on September 28, 1491, Pierre Verges of Esves, acting on the behalf of his brother Jehan, also present, swore that he would give to Jehanne Gasuye of the same parish eight livres, provisions, a bed with a pillow, and more. This was due Jehanne because Jehan, they agreed, had impregnated Jehanne. They swore to pay her and swore also that they would pay for the costs of Jehanne's pregnancy and that Jehan both recognized his paternity and agreed that he would provide for the child's nurture. All this was arranged with witnesses and obligations, as recorded by the notary Jehan Jaloignes.75
In addition to these sorts of arrangements, French church court records include documentation of a handful of paternity suits from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Paris, Troyes, Cambrai, Tournai, and Rouen.76 As the legal historian Anne Lefebvre-Teillard explains, women or their kin could sue a man for defloration, impregnation, and paternity, in each case demanding compensation.77 In these cases women, alongside officers of the church court, accused men of sexual relationships and sometimes also marriage promises. In at least some instances a woman was first prosecuted for illicit sex; in other cases we know only about the civil and criminal proceedings instigated against the man held responsible. The accused might then be detained while the investigation took place, particularly if he denied the accusations. Confrontations between accused and accuser could follow, as well as witness testimony. If enough evidence suggested that the man had sex with the woman around the time she would have become pregnant, and if he could not prove by witness testimony that she had also been having sex with other men at the same time, the court might order the man to pay for the costs of her pregnancy and recovery and for the support of the child. If the accused agreed to marry the complainant, however, and such a marriage was legally possible, none of this would be necessary. The woman, or whoever brought suit on her behalf, might also withdraw the complaint if the man or one of his relatives agreed to pay compensation.
If the pardon letter reflects at least some of the real circumstances, Marie had ample grounds to bring a legal case against her lover. According to the general principles by which church courts seem to have operated in these circumstances, if des Prez had promised marriage before they had sex, Marie could have sued to enforce a marriage. She might not have won her suit, but she may not have actually wanted matrimony and might still have come away with what she hoped to obtain. Indeed, Charles Donahue Jr. and Ruth Karras have both suggested that, in some of the disputed marriage cases they studied, marriage to a reluctant spouse was not the goal so much as financial support or child care. To that end, Marie could have also brought a case alleging paternity of her child.
There are many possible reasons that Marie did not do this. One may have been the lack of a nearby venue to bring her case, with the closest church court that might have had competence over such a matter likely in Tours.78 Also, it must have been quite difficult to bring such a suit. Initiating these legal proceedings might have come with real financial hardship and social costs for women, along with risks of being detained during an investigation and some possibility for fines or other punishments for having engaged in illicit sex or secret marriage promises. Women who somehow managed to bring these cases stood to gain a great deal, and the standards of proof appear to have been rather generously stacked in their favor.79 But perhaps even with a favorable judgment, women could not hope that the men would actually be forced to pay and might not be willing to risk the legal costs or publicity. Such matters were most likely usually handled out of court, if at all. We know also of informal practices elsewhere in which the women of a community would act as enforcers, taking the baby to the door of the father's home and insisting that he provide for the child.80 We simply do not know if any of this took place with any regularity in Chinon, or why it did not happen for Marie.
What we are told, in heartbreaking detail, is that Marie planned to confront des Prez with the baby but that she changed her mind. Having collected her infant daughter from the wet nurse in Saumur, Marie walked the roughly sixteen miles back, along the Loire and then the Vienne, in the company of a man called Jehan le Moine. When they reached the faubourg of Saint Jacques across the Vienne from Chinon, she told Jehan to go on ahead as she did not want to be seen in Chinon with the baby and would wait until nightfall to enter the city. She then walked on toward Notre-Dame de la Rivière, one of the oldest churches and pilgrimage sites of the Touraine.81 Legend had it that in the fifth century a shepherdess had discovered a wooden statue of the virgin floating in the river, inspiring the foundation of the church, which also became known also as a site of healing for children.82 Marie's designation of this holy site of miracles and of healing as the place in which she cast her daughter into the river is a final, painful mystery. It could perhaps mean—or at least might have been intended to signal—that Marie meant to entrust her daughter to the Virgin's care, if not in this life then in the next. Or perhaps Marie had intended to enter the church and pray to the Virgin before melancholy and rage inspired her terrible act, a crime for which she was ultimately pardoned. Spared execution, Marie was instead to perform a penitential pilgrimage to the Church of Saint Hilaire in Poitiers. Most likely the king chose this site of pilgrimage due to the proximity of the feast day for this early Christian bishop, January 13 or 14. We might nevertheless recognize, even if Louis himself likely did not, that this same Saint Hilaire was one of the most important early sources for the subsequent popularization of the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery whom Jesus had refused to pass judgment on (John 8:7).83 In Saint Hilaire's and other writers' appropriation of this episode, a relatively late addition to the Gospels, the message for judges remained consistent: let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
Conclusion
In the communities of late medieval France even bastards were thought worthy of care. Canon law mandated that all parents had an obligation to provide for all children, legitimate or not. Pregnant women were urged to take precautions to protect a child in the womb, for example, to not engage in heavy labor. It was of paramount importance that the child live and be baptized. All children, no matter who the parents and how conceived, ought to be raised as Christians and provided for.
It is far from clear how much help mothers of illegitimate children had in this Christian duty. As described above, in principle the father had moral obligations, and if a man proved reluctant to help, there were ways to put pressure on him. Church courts did offer opportunities for women to sue for breach of marriage promises or defloration. In and out of court, women could seek recognition of paternity and child support. Their family, friends, or employers could exert pressure on the putative fathers, which may have had more favorable results than a courtroom proceeding. And if these formal and informal mechanisms were not tried or could not work, hospitals in principle might provide shelter, as might religious houses. While court records all too often reveal the worst of a society, we can also find in them accounts of how families, employers, neighbors, and clergy provided refuge to the poor and pregnant. Once again, we are left wondering why some women but not others benefited from this kind of help.
One of the most disturbing features of the pardon letters for infanticidal mothers is the common expressions of fear: fear of parents and kin, what they might do if they discovered the pregnancy, but even more a general fear of shame, of disgrace. Women who gave birth in secret and killed their infants claimed they did so not out of fear of royal justice but because they feared discovery by their kin, their husbands, or their employers. Marie's letter at least evoked not fear of violence but, rather, dishonor, melancholy, anger at her erstwhile lover, and concerns that she could not afford to support her second child alone. We should also recognize what is sadly timeless about these accounts: there is nothing specifically medieval about a mother killing her infant in despair or depression.
We are far from understanding the meaning and consequences of illicit pregnancy for mothers in late medieval France. In great part this is because of the wide range of possible responses. Some women in these circumstances were not just ostracized or beaten but killed by their kin, their husbands, or their lovers. Other women were cared for by their parents or kin or husbands, who also helped raise—or abandon or kill—the child. Some women had the support of church courts, which mandated that men marry them or provide for them and the children, though these same courts might fine the women for sexual sin.
Finally, I suggest that in moving forward we need to reconsider the workings of medieval justice. Marie Ribou confessed to having done a terrible thing. The sinful sex she had engaged in with two different men could be atoned for, at least. She had evidently done right by her first child and tried to do right by her second, seeking to meet her obligations as a mother, but in that moment of melancholy and despair, she had killed her own daughter. Such an act could have been punished by execution, but instead the king chose mercy. Medieval society, deservedly infamous as violent and vengeful, was inconsistently so. Christian teachings, canon law, and secular authorities advocated mercy over justice, and these principles were applied in pardoning Marie Ribou. To understand the consequences of illicit pregnancy, we must also take seriously the role of mercy in medieval justice. For now, we can at the very least assert that female honor could in fact survive illicit pregnancy in late medieval France.
Appendix
Registres du Trésor des chartes, JJ 208 fol. 27r–v no. 48, January 1481, at Saint-Epine (Touraine)
. . . Let it be known to all present and to come that we have received the humble supplication of the kindred of Marie Ribou, poor girl aged about twenty-four years, living in Chinon. It is contended that eleven years ago the said Marie, orphaned of her father, was put into service in the said city of Chinon where she remained ever after, in many reputable houses where she served and always conducted herself well up to the age of twenty when the said Marie, who is simple and without malice, was seduced by a young cleric in the house where she was living, to such an extent that she gave herself to him and had a son with him, who she still provides for as best as she can. Since that time the said Marie always comported and conducted herself well up to very recently, when a man named des Prez with sweet talk and persuasion and under promises to marry the said Marie, that des Prez took her from the place where she worked, kept her [as his mistress] for some time and impregnated her with a child, saying that he wished to protect her honor and so that no one would know of her condition in the said city of Chinon, that des Prez took her and led her to the home of one of his kinsmen residing at Cande, named Giles Chasteau, and in the house of that Chasteau Marie soon after gave birth to a daughter, who was baptized, and then Marie placed her daughter in the care of a wet nurse, a woman living near Saumur and the sister of that Chasteau, whom Marie promised to pay 100 sous for a year of wet nursing. And after Marie recovered from her childbirth she returned to Chinon and went to see that des Prez and reminded him of the promises that he had made to marry her and to care for her and her child and that he should do these things, but that des Prez did not, and what is worse he refused to return to her the money that she had earned and saved from her work that he had taken and extorted from her fraudulently and wrongfully during the time that he had been keeping her, and however many times Marie persisted in reminding him he continued in making the wrong response saying that the infant girl was not his but that Marie had been impregnated by another man and that he would not give her one penny, at these responses Marie realized that she had been deceived and dishonored in all and she decided to go and fetch her daughter and take her to des Prez so that he would have pity and compassion and so that he would want to help her raise the baby, and in fact she went to collect her daughter and compensated the wet nurse who had been caring for her daughter as best as she could and took her baby to Saint Jacques on the outskirts of the said city of Chinon and she arrived in this faubourg . . . [illegible] she said to one called Jehan le Moine, who had accompanied her when she went to fetch her daughter, that he should go ahead of her because she really did not want to go into Chinon before nightfall, so that no one would see her carrying the baby, and she left the said faubourgs in the direction of the Reyneau [?] and went toward the church of Notre Dame of the River and there, alone, holding her daughter in her arms, she was overcome by melancholy and rage at being deceived, at the manner in which des Prez had cheated and deceived her, and could not think how she could manage to raise her daughter, and was so greatly tempted by the devil that she took her daughter, unwrapped her from the cloth she was swaddled in, and threw her into the middle of the River Vienne which she was near, and in which the baby drowned. After this Marie, miserable and totally dejected at what she had done, returned to Chinon where she was taken and imprisoned by Justice, and interrogated concerning the case and she confessed in the manner just described, and by the bailiff of Touraine or his lieutenant of the same place of Chinon this Marie was condemned to die by burning, and the sentence of execution was appealed to Parlement, and since this Marie was at risk of being executed and so miserably end her days, if we did not exercise our grace and show mercy, our pardon was humbly requested and supplicated, Concerning which we, in honor and reverence for the glorious Virgin Mary and the glorious confessor and Friend of God Monsieur Saint Hilaire of Poitiers in whose church rests his precious body, we remit and pardon this Marie . . . on the condition that this Marie go to the Church of Saint Hilaire of Poitiers to render thanks to God and to the glorious Saint Hilaire there in that church of Poitiers. . . .
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the anonymous reviewers above all, as well as the editors of the journal. She also thanks Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Carole Avignon, Sara Beam, Rudi Beaulant, Michael Breen, Elizabeth A. R. Brown, Sara Butler, Naama Cohen-Hanegbi, Sharon Farmer, Joel Harrington, Carissa Harris, Emily Hutchison, Anne Lefebvre-Teillard, Conrad Leyser, Susan McDonough, Alexandra Pfau, Charlotte Pichot, Sara Ritchey, Franck Roumy, and James Whitman.
Notes
Lett, Hommes et femmes, 168; Gauvard, “Honneur de femme,” 159; Gradowicz-Pancer, “Honneur.”
Gauvard, “Honneur de femme,” 163. On women being reduced to prostitution as a result of rape, see also Roissaud, La prostitution, 46–47.
Cartlidge, “‘Alas, I Go with Chylde,’” 411; Bardsley, “Women's Work Reconsidered”; see also Clark, “Mothers at Risk of Poverty.”
For other scholars' work with this pardon, see Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 1:75, 418; and Pichot, “Le refus.”
I use the term illicit to address every possible genre of extramarital pregnancy, including those of illegal marriages, and to attempt to avoid referring to pregnant women as mothers until after childbirth. I hope that for a medieval context my use of pregnant women as opposed to pregnant persons causes no offense.
See the appendix for the translation. Archives Nationales de France, Registres du Trésor des chartes, JJ 208 fols. 27r–v no. 48 (himanis.huma-num.fr/himanis/index.php/ui/show/chancery/415/55?feedback=1). This grant of royal remission, or pardon, is one of thousands of letters recorded by the French royal chancery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many of these pardons are now digitized and available online and are somewhat searchable by word, the early fruits of a pioneering project (www.himanis.org).
Brissaud, “L'infanticide”; Boswell, Kindness of Strangers; Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 2:657–59, 823–26; Laurent, Nâitre, 155–67; Hoareau-Dodinau, “La vie”; Müller, Die Abtreibung; Müller, Criminalization; Pichot, “Le refus.” I use the term singlewoman, even though there was no such category as femme sole in medieval France, to associate my work with earlier scholarship on women without husbands. See esp. Bennett and Froide, Singlewomen.
To better understand and contextualize these pardons, scholars have looked to records of the prosecution of infanticide in early modern France and in medieval and early modern England. Scholars of medieval France have found several pardons for infant and child murder; I have found roughly a hundred, but only a handful of infanticide investigations and prosecutions. So far these cases have not been the subject of a focused study, but see Beaulant, Criminalité et justice échevinale à Dijon, as well as my own forthcoming article, “Pardoning Infanticide.”
Brissaud, “L'infanticide,” 238; Laurent, Nâitre, 157; Hoareau-Dodinau, “La vie”; Pfau, “Crimes of Passion”; Pfau, “Madness in the Realm”; Arnade and Prevenier, Honor, 106; Müller, Criminalization, 9, 215–16. For the idea that maternal infanticide was particularly difficult to accept and rarely pardoned, see Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 657–59, 822–26; and Gauvard and Ouy, “Gerson et l'infanticide.” For examples of local investigations, see Beaulande-Barraud, “La grosse mère”; Picot, “Un exemple”; Mathieu, “Un infanticide”; and Pilorget, “Foles femmes et larronesses.”
Bennett, “When Maidens Speak,” 193.
Indeed, if anything, women pregnant out of wedlock and their illegitimate children fared better in France than in England. Among other differences, there is no sign in France of the practice of forcing women to pay fines for extramarital pregnancy. On this practice in England, see esp. Bennett, “Writing Fornication.”
According to the inventory of the civil archives of the Touraine, the archives of Chinon, among them its ecclesiastical records, were destroyed in 1793 by the Vendéens. See Grandmaison, Inventaire sommaire, 10.
For scholarship on the fifteenth-century Touraine, primarily Tours, see Chevalier, Histoire de Tours; and Chevalier, Tours, ville royale.
See the appendix for the translation of the case, which mentions an appeal to Parlement and Marie's transfer pending final sentence.
Indexing and summaries of the entries in these notarial registers are provided by the remarkable database Ressources Numériques pour l'édition des Archives de la Renaissance (RENUMAR; renumar.univ-tours.fr). In addition, the Archives Départmentales d'Indre-et-Loire have recently digitized their fifteenth-century notarial registers (archives.touraine.fr/search/form/29953614-e788-47c1-9eac-e058c7f27197); in principle, they are almost all included in the RENUMAR database. See further at n. 75.
Farmer, “‘It Is Not Good.’”
Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman.”
Lee, “Unwed Mothers,” 218–19.
Van Kerrebrouch, Brun, and de Mérindol, Nouvelle histoire généalogique, 118–56.
Harsgor, “L'essor”; Autrand, “Naissance illégitime”; Courtemanche, Œuvrer pour la postérité, 97–125; Courtemanche, “Quelle famille?” See also Avignon, Bâtards et bâtardises; and McDougall, “Bastard Priests.”
Viollet, Les établissements, 2:24–25.
McDougall, “Opposite of the Double Standard”; McDougall, “Transformation of Adultery in France.” Some exceptional cases did result in prison sentences, huge fines, or the loss of benefice for a priest as punishment for persisting in an illegal relationship. Certainly, if a priest feared for his benefice and drove his mistress and their children out of his home without giving them financial support, that could mean disaster. But that must have depended on what other options (e.g., means of support or employment prospects) the mother and children had.
Porteau-Bitker, “Criminalité”; Tabbagh, “Recherches,” 400; Carlier, “Paternity.”
Otis-Cour, “‘De Jure Novo’”; Naessens, “Judicial Authorities' Views.” On women and crime more generally, see also Gonthier, La châtiment; Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 1:302; Toureille, Vol et brigandage, 86–87; and Pilorget, “Foles femmes et larronesses.”
McDougall, “Opposite of the Double Standard.”
Pilorget, “Foles femmes et larronesses,” 651; Skoda, Medieval Violence, 228.
Naessens, “Judicial Authorities' Views,” 67; Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 386; Otis-Cour, “‘De Jure Novo,’” 368–81. On domestic violence more generally, see esp. Skoda, Medieval Violence.
Davis, Fiction in the Archives.
Charbonnier, “Les limites du pardon.”
Arnade and Prevenier, Honor, 106; Müller, Criminalization, 9, 215–16; Gauvard, “De grace especial,” 1:75. Indeed, part of the difficulty in reconstructing medieval infanticide cases from medieval France is that most of what we know comes not from records of investigation or punishment but from royal pardons.
See esp. Hoareau-Dodinau, “La vie”; and Laurent, Nâitre.
For application of these ideas to the study of abandonment of children and infanticide in medieval France, see Lester, “Lost but Not Yet Found”; and Harrington, Unwanted Child.
McDougall, Royal Bastards; McDougall, “Bastard Priests.”
Poska, Women and Authority, 75–111.
Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 87–90.
See generally Cavallo and Warner, Widowhood.
Hanawalt, “Child in the Middle Ages,” 37.
For canon law on the “deserving poor,” see Tierney, “Decretists.”
On women's labor, see Bardsley, “Women's Work”; Farmer, Surviving Poverty; Farmer, “Parisian Merchant Women”; and Pilorget, “‘For Their Trouble and Labour.’”
Alexandre-Bidon and Lett, Les enfants; Hanawalt, Ties That Bound. In the record of an investigation from northwestern France, we read that an aunt placed her one-year-old orphaned niece into the custody of a future employer, thus beginning a life in service for that child: Archives Départmentales de la Mayenne, 179J23, fol. 49; Mathieu, Les justices seigneuriales. Moreover, we know from the work of Debra Blumenthal and others that children and young girls made up a significant portion of the enslaved population in the medieval Mediterranean. See, e.g., Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars.
Farmer, “‘It Is Not Good That [Wo]Man Should Be Alone.’”
Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe.
See also Müller, “Yes and No.”
McDougall, “Opposite of the Double Standard”; McDougall, “Transformation of Adultery in France”; Beaulande-Barraud, “Les sanctions.”
Viollet, Les établissements 1: book 1; Baillet and Burdelot, Le coustumier de Touraine; d'Espinay, La coutume de Touraine, 93: “fort peu de dispositions sur le droit pénal.”
Beaulande-Barrard, Les péchés les plus grands. Rowan Dorin and Christine Barralis's joint project of digitizing and making word-searchable a vast corpus of synodal statutes, including the Touraine, has revolutionized our ability to study synodal statutes. See corpus-synodalium.com.
Donahue and McDougall, “France and Adjoining Areas.”
Pichot, “Avortement”; Pichot, “Le refus”; Hoareau-Dodinau, “La vie,” 206–12. The best evidence for this comes from the records of the procureur of Burgundy; see Beaulant, Criminalité et justice échevinale à Dijon. On midwives in late medieval France, see also Pilorget, “Comment meraleresse”; and Vann Sprecher and Karras, “Midwife.”
See most recently Davis, Medieval Economy; and Ritchey, “Affective Medicine.” See also Ritchey and Strocchia, Gender, Health, and Healing; and Ritchey, Acts of Care.
The Hôpital Notre-Dâme in Mâcon, for example, attempted in the late fourteenth century to limit the entry of pregnant women to those who had the permission of the hospital director. Archives Municipales, Mâcon GG 159 10, 1–10 (1369–90). For other examples, see Davis, Medieval Economy, 143–44; for England, see Rubin, Charity, 159.
On hospitals and pregnancy in France, see above all the work of Saunier, “Le pauvre malade”; Saunier, “La clientèle”; Billot, “Les enfants abandonnés”; Broomhall, Women's Medical Work, 170; and Farmer, Surviving Poverty, 88.
The hospital maintained in Jerusalem by the military orders provided care for both pregnant mothers and abandoned children, according to a remarkably detailed pilgrim's account from the 1180s. See Kedar, “Twelfth-Century Description.”
Le Grand, Statuts d'Hôtels-Dieu, 162. Paris, Angers, Poitiers, Pontoise, Montreuil-sur-Mer, Lille, Arras, Hesdin, Narbonne, and many other French cities had hospitals that explicitly provided care for childbirth. The records for the construction work at Beauvais included a building founded to house women in childbirth. See Leblond, Les deux plus anciens comptes, 6.
Archives Départmentales Indre-et-Loire, G 144, the 1384 testament of Jean Gervaise, canon of Tours, included one hundred livres for the dowries of twenty-five young women.
Archives Nationales de France, J403, no. 16. My thanks to Peggy Brown for sharing her transcription and expertise with me.
Billot, “Les enfants abandonnés.”
Gerson, Œuvres complètes, 7:2 no. 359, 714–17: “Poures femmes grosses qui n'ont ou soy recevoir et hebergier, elles sunt ycy a grant nombre” (715).
Candille, Etude du livre de vie.
Other hospitals' records include regular payments to midwives or wet nurses kept on staff or described the pregnant women themselves as providing milk for the newborns. See, e.g., Saunier, “Le pauvre malade”; and Bavoux, “Enfants trouvés.” Saint-Esprit in Paris also provided care for women, especially young women, who sought shelter, including expectant mothers.
Archives Municipales, Dijon B II 360/12, 1472. See also Beaulant, Criminalité et justice échevinale à Dijon.
We know anecdotally of many hospitals throughout the Touraine, including at Chinon, but their medieval records do not survive.
For examples of this from seventeenth-century Geneva, see Beam, “Turning a Blind Eye.”
Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents,” 142; Winer, “Conscripting the Breast”; Winer, “Mother.”
For examples, see Winer, “Conscripting the Breast.”
See Trexler, “Foundlings,” among others, and most recently Presciutti, Visual Cultures.
Saunier, “De l'enfant”; Lester, “Lost but Not Yet Found”; Otis-Cour, “Les ‘pauvres enfants exposés.’”
Saunier, “De l'enfant.”
There are a handful of investigations and prosecutions of mothers who attempted to abandon their children and were prosecuted for it in these circumstances. See, for example, the prosecutions of Colette la Buquete and Colette Phelipe in Duples-Agier, Registre criminel, 2:119–29, 525–33. On the whole, it seems that abandonment was tolerated, as long as the infant was left in a place where it would quickly receive the help it needed, ideally a church or hospital that regularly took in infants and had wet nurses ready to provide care.
For a discussion of the canon law on abandonment, see Demoulin-Auzary, “L'abandon des enfants.”
Lefebvre-Teillard, “Tanta est vis matrimonii.”
See n. 48.
For the sixteenth century, see esp. Broomhall, “Le prix de l'amour.” See also Hardwick, “Policing Paternity.”
Maurice, La famille en Gévaudan; Laumonier, “Bâtards et enfants naturels.”
Karras, “Telling the Truth,” 80; Pommeray, L'officialité archidiaconale, 384, 576.
Archives Départmentales Indre-et-Loire, 3E 1/4 fol. 21r. archives.touraine.fr/ark:/37621/c25zxbwmj6f4/aa315f72-e009-460d-8bb5-cc373128a091. See also, for a summary, renumar.univ-tours.fr/xtf/view?docId=tei/TIPO470344.xml;chunk.id=n1.2;toc.depth=1;toc.id=n1;brand=default.
Lefebvre-Teillard, Les officialités, 207–21.
Lefebvre-Teillard, Les officialités, 207–21. See also Lefebvre-Teillard, “La maternité”; Lefebvre-Teillard, “La responsabilité de l'enfant”; Pommeray, L'officialité archidiaconale, 392–400; Donahue, Law, Marriage, and Society, 351–56; Karras, “Telling the Truth,” 75–79; Karras, Unmarriages, 174–208; and Karras, “Regulation of Sexuality.”
No records from the medieval officiality in Tours are known to have survived, despite what is thought to have been considerable activity. See Chevalier, Tours, ville royale, 116.
If a woman could prove, by witness testimony or other means, that a man had been having sex with her around the time she would have conceived, this could suffice for a court order that the man provide at least for the costs of pregnancy and lying in, and perhaps also child support. See Lefebvre-Teillard, Les officialités, 207–21.
Lefebvre-Teillard, Les officialités, 209–11, 220; McDougall, “A la recherche,” 211.
For images of this church, a description, and maps, see touraine-insolite.clicforum.fr/t1336-Eglise-paroissiale-Notre-Dame.htm.
Bonnery, Pages oubliées, 148–54; Feneant and Leveel, Le folklore de Touraine, 346–47.
Knust and Wasserman, To Cast the First Stone, 2–3, 211–12.
