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Pardoning Infanticide in Late Medieval France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2021

Sara McDougall
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Abstract

The handling of infanticide in late medieval France offers modern audiences an underappreciated paradox: on the one hand infant murder was deplored as grave sin and crime, on the other hand, it was a pardonable offence, even the infanticidal singlemother who had killed to conceal her sin could obtain royal grace. This is far more than the usual story of law differing from practice. Christian ideology of mercy and forgiveness for sin played a central role in shaping the regulation of illegitimate births as well as abortions, stillbirths, and infanticide. Church and secular authorities alike sought to prevent as well as punish the death of infants, but they also created and implemented systems of justice with the explicit purpose of providing mercy to the repentant murderer, even an infanticide.

Type
Forum: Rethinking the Criminalization of Childbirth: Infanticide in Premodern Europe and the Modern Americas
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 229 - 253
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2021

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Footnotes

The author gratefully acknowledges, first and foremost, the help of Gautham Rao and the anonymous reviewers, as well as her co-editor Felicity Turner. She also thanks Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Carole Avignon, Sara Beam, Véronique Beauland-Barrard, Rudi Beaulant, Judith Bennett, Peggy Brown, Sara Butler, Naama Cohen-Hanegbi, Yanay Israeli, Anne Lefebvre-Teillard, Conrad Leyser, Susan McDonough, Alexandra Pfau, Charlotte Pichot, Franck Roumy, Sara Ritchey, Quentin Verreycken, and James Whitman, as well as Peggy McCracken and the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities, where she completed this article as Norman Freehling Visiting Professor. All errors are the author's own.

References

1. Gautier de Coincy, “De une noble fame de Rome,” in Miracles de Nostre Dame, ed. Frederic Koenig, 4 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1961), 2:130–57. There are many other versions of this story, in sermons and miracle collections from Jacques de Vitry, Etienne de Bourbon, Vincent de Beauvais, and others. For miracle stories involving incest see further Elizabeth Archibald, “Mothers and Sons,” in Incest in the Medieval Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 104–44; and Lett, Didier, “l'inceste père-fille à la fin du moyen âge: un crime, un péché,” Sociétés & Représentations 42 (2016): 15–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Claude Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’: Crime, état et société à la fin du moyen âge, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 1991), 2:827, “le meurtre contre l'enfant touche bien au sacré depuis le moment où celui-ci est conçu.” Didier Lett, Les enfants au Moyen Âge Ve-XVe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1997); Charlotte Pichot, “Avortement et infanticide dans les Pays de Loire moyenne et le Poitou à la fin du Moyen Âge,” mémoire de Master 2, Poitiers, 2013, see especially ch. 1, at 20–26.

3. Peter J. Arnade and Walter Prevenier, Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble: Pardon Letters in the Burgundian Low Countries (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 106. Wolfgang Müller, The Criminalization of Abortion in the West: Its Origins in Medieval Law (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 9, 215–16. For similar understandings of infanticide in medieval France, see also Brissaud, Yves, “L'infanticide a la fin du moyen âge, ses motivations psychologiques et sa répression,” Revue historique du droit français et étranger 2 (1972): 229–56Google Scholar, 238; Sylvie Laurent, Nâitre au Moyen Âge: de la conception á la naissance: la grossesse et l'accouchement (Paris: Léopard d'Or, 1989), 155–67, at 157; Hoareau-Dodinau, Jacqueline, “La vie avant la vie: La femme enceinte dans les lettres de rémission,” Mémoires de la Société pour l'Histoire du Droit et des Institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 58 (2001): 205–27Google Scholar; Alexandra Pfau, “Crimes of Passion: Emotion and Madness in French Remission Letters,” in Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, ed. Wendy Turner (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 97–122; Alexandra Pfau, “Madness in the Realm: Narratives of Mental Illness in Late Medieval France” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008); and for a broader study of abortion as well as infanticide and their criminalization see also Wolfgang Müller's first book, Die Abtreibung. Anfänge der Kriminalisierung, 1140–1650 (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2000). For the idea that the crime of maternal infanticide was particularly difficult to accept and rarely pardoned see Gauvard, De grâce, 657–59, also especially 822–26; Claude Gauvard and Gilbert Ouy, “Gerson et l'infanticide: défense des femmes et critique de la pénitence publique, ms. London, BL Add. 29279, f. 19v-20v,” in “Riens ne m'est seur que la chose incertaine,” Études sur l'art d'écrire au Moyen Âge offertes à Éric Hicks par ses élèves, collègues, amies et amis, ed. Denis Billotte and Jean-Claude Mühlethaler (Geneva: Slatkine, 2001), 44–66.

4. On the death penalty in France see above all Claude Gauvard, Condamner à mort au Moyen Âge Pratiques de la peine capitale en France XIIIe-XVe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2018), see especially 19–54, 237–66.

5. On pardons in general, see most recently Verreycken, Quentin, “The Power to Pardon in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: New Perspectives in the History of Crime and Criminal Justice,” History Compass 17 (2019): e12575CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For medieval France see Gauvard, De grâce.

6. Gauvard, De grâce; see also James Whitman, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), ch. 1 and 2.

7. As will be explained in more detail, it is not known how these numbers compare with broader rates of prosecution and sentencing, or with actual rates of killing.

8. Müller, Criminalization, 9.

9. Bartlett, Robert, The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. Certainly miracles were quite open to interpretation, and were not always interpreted in ways that favored the accused. One example of this is found in an episode of the life of the sixth-century Saint Brice. After his election as bishop of Tours, Brice, disliked by his parishioners, and more importantly, under a curse from his mighty predecessor Saint Martin, was falsely accused of impregnating the woman who did his laundry. He managed to make the infant speak, who affirmed that Brice was not his father, and also carried hot coals as proof of his innocence. Despite this, Brice was denounced as a lying magician and cast out of his bishopric. See, for example, Voragine, Jacobus de, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, ed. Ryan, William Granger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 2:687–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. National Archives of France, Paris, Trésor des Chartres, JJ138 #272 (not foliated, paginated as p.326) Many of the late medieval royal letters of remission and other records from the royal chancery are now found on “himanis,” a site that allows for some limited but nevertheless remarkable word searching through the registers. Certainly it promises to transform our ability to understand these pardons and the other documents in the registers. Additional registers can be found at the Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux (BVMM) under Paris, Archives nationales: https://bvmm.irht.cnrs.fr/recherche/rechercheParVille.php.

The pardon cited here can be found at http://himanis.huma-num.fr/himanis/index.php/ui/show/chancery/275/336?feedback=1 (accessed June 5, 2020).

11. “…et que ledit enfant a prit bapteme et encore vit en bonne prosperite et que en ce cas appert evident miracle et grace divine…”

12. “simplesse et ignorance” made her susceptible to seduction, she is pardoned because of the miracle and because of her “jeunesse.”

13. JJ147 #240 f.109v-110r (1394).

14. He had told her that because her husband had been absent for 4 years, they could presume that he had died and that she could legally remarry, a rather specious legal claim. See Sara McDougall, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

15. This is the only example I have found of an infanticide punished by drowning. On gender and executions, and on executions for infanticide see further at notes 36 and 76.

16. “…et disent plusieurs que ce estoit miracle de dieu et de la vierge marie.”

17. Pascal Texier, “Pèlerinages imposés et perception de l'espace: La France centrale des xiv et xv siècles,” in Pèlerinages, échanges et cultures: actes du 74e congrès de la Fédération des Sociétés Savantes du Centre de la France, 25 au 27 mai 2018 à Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, eds. Fédération des sociétés savantes du Centre (Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat: Connaissance et sauvegarde de St. Léonard, 2019), 113–28. Xavier Rousseaux, “Le pèlerinage judiciaire, pratique sociopolitique, économique et religieuse dans les villes de Pays-Bas (Nivelles, XVe-XVIIe siècle),” in Un Moyen Âge Pour Aujourd'hui Mélanges offerts à Claude Gauvard, ed. Julie Claustre, Olivier Mattéoni, and Nicolas Offenstadt (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2010), 258–69.

18. Alfred Soman, “Anatomy of an Infanticide Trial: The Case of Marie-Jeanne Bartonnet (1742),” in Changing Identities in Early Modern France, ed. Michael Wolfe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 248–72. Justine Semmens, “A Thin Line Between Love and a Crime: Marriage, sexuality, and the courts in Counter Reformation France” (PhD diss., University of Victoria, forthcoming), calls into question some of Soman's findings.

19. Chamberlain, Stephanie, “Fantasizing Infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the Murdering Mother in Early Modern England,” College Literature 32 (2005): 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. On medieval ideas about infanticide and abortion in general, see Biller, Peter, The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Müller, Criminalization, ch. 1.

21. See further Pichot, “Avortement,” 36. There is some Old-English terminology mentioned in Marilyn Sandidge, “Changing Contexts of Infanticide in Medieval English Texts,” in Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 291–306, at 291.

22. On Tertullian, see most recently Julian Barr, Tertullian and the Unborn Child: Christian and Pagan Attitudes in Historical Context (Routledge, 2017); Tertullian, Ad nat. 1.15, Apol. 2 (v.197). Tertullian also wrote about the dangers of making too much of virginity, including that it might lead pregnant women who wanted to pass as virgins to abort fetuses or kill infants, De virginibus velandis 14.4 ed E. Dekkers, CCSL, 2:1224; Rabelais, Cinquiesme Livre, ed. Charles Marty-Laveaux, c. 11, at 46: “la perversité des femmes adulteres, venefiques, infanticides.”

23. Sandidge, “Changing Contexts,” 291, gives no source. See further, Kesselring, “Bodies”; Mark Jackson, “The Trial of Harriet Vooght: Continuity and Change in the History of Infanticide,” in Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 1–17, at 10–11.

24. Alexandre Mimouni, “La notion d'infanticide en droit canonique médiéval,” conference presentation, Fifteenth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Paris, July 2016.

25. Terms vaguely used to describe harm to fetuses, infants, and pregnant women include “necare” “percussio,” (encis) “oppressio,” and “aborsus.” See Pichot, “Avortement,” 19–64; Maaike van der Lugt, “l'animation de l'embryon humain dans la pensée médiévale,” in Formation et animation de l'embryon dans l'Antiquité et au Moyen Âge, ed. L. Brisson, M.H. Congourdeau, and J.L. Solère (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 233–54; Lefebvre-Teillard, Anne, “Infans conceptus. Existance physique et existance juridique,” Revue historique du droit français et étranger 72 (1994): 499–525Google Scholar; and Müller, Criminalization, ch. 8 and 9.

26. There are some earlier medieval canons, largely from penitentials, that explicitly condemn women who abort or kill to conceal illicit pregnancy. See, for example, the ninth-century Regino of Prüm, De synodalibus causis, 2.62; Burchard of Worms, Decretum, 17.54; and Ivo of Chartres, Decretum, ed. Martin Brett, 9.102, 103A (S), http://imaging.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/ivo/decretum/ivodec_9_1p0.pdf. On this and other early law on abortion see M.J. Elsakkers, “Reading Between the Lines: Old Germanic and Early Christian Views on Abortion” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2010).

27. Müller, Criminalization, see especially ch. 1–4; and Pichot, “Avortement,” ch. 1, at 19–64.

28. Gauvard, De grâce, 826. This seems quite correct. Gauvard's assumption of the rarity of remissions for child killing, meanwhile, is problematic. We have no clear sense of how many there were or if they had any relationship to the rate of actual convictions or even investigations of child killing. She links “la rareté des rémissions concernant les infanticides et les avortements” (823) to the value placed on infant life, and although infant life was clearly valued, it is not clear what the rarity of remissions means or if they were in fact all that rare relative to the rate of prosecutions or executions for infanticide. On children in the Middle Ages see further Lett, Enfants; and Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

29. Gauvard, De grâce, 826; and Pichot, “Avortement,” ch 1.

30. Arnade and Prevanier, Honor, 106.

31. Brissaud, “l'Infanticide”; John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); Gauvard, De grâce, 657–59, 823–26; Gauvard and Ouy, “Gerson”; Laurent, Nâitre, 155–67, at 157; Hoareau-Dodinau “La vie,” 205–27; Müller, Criminalization; and Pichot, “Le refus,” 2016.

32. Müller, Criminalization, 9.

33. Brissaud, for example, claims infanticide was common, whereas Boswell and Gauvard argue it was rare.

34. Müller argues that executions were rare, only inflicted upon the marginal (see Introduction, in Müller, Criminalization, especially at 9 and again at 215–16), Arnade and Prevenier suggest that executions were common: Honor, 106. On the need to reconsider some “female crimes” such as witchcraft or infanticide, and their potential mislabeling as such, and the need for more information on early modern crime in general before we try to make these categorizations, see Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4.

35. It was in this way that focused study of infanticide in medieval France began, with the pioneering work of Brissaud: “L'infanticide.”

36. See Gauvard, Condamner, ch.1 part f: “une petite nombre des femmes”; and Gessler, Jean, “Mulier suspensa. A délit égal peine différente?” Revue Belge de philologie et d'histoire 18 (1939): 974–88Google Scholar; for a critique of Gessler's interpretation, see Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden: Brill 1993), 96–98. See also Patricia Turning, “‘And Thus She Will Perish:’ Gender, Jurisdiction, and the Execution of Women in Late Medieval France,” in Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death, ed. Albrecht Classen and Connie Scarborough (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2016), 311–37.

37. Brissaud “Infanticide,” 248–50; see also Müller, Criminalization, 200–208.

38. Isabelle Mathieu, “Un infanticide à Argentré en 1470,” Bulletin de la société et d'archéologie et d'histoire de la Mayenne 27 (2006): 337–41; Véronique Beaulande-Barraud, “La grosse mère, la marâtre et la fillette : une enquête pour meurtre d'enfant en 1459,” Bibliothèque de l'école des chartes 170 (2012): 377–420; Johan Picot, “Un exemple de justice seigneuriale en Basse-Auvergne: l'enquête pour infanticide de Beaumont (1336),” Criminocorpus, 2014; Julie Pilorget, “Foles femmes et larronesses. Figures de la delinquance feminine en Picardie a la fin du Moyen Age,” Société des Antiquaires de Picardie 70 (2015): 639–58, 713–14; and Arnade and Prevenier, Honor, 107.

39. Rudi Beaulant and I are currently working together on these cases.

40. Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

41. See, for example, Barbara Hanawalt, Crime in East Anglia: Norfolk Gaol Delivery Rolls, 1307–1316 (Norfolk Record Society, 1976), 20.

42. Gauvard, Condamner, 19–54, 237–66; for women, see especially 46–51; for similar findings from a regional study, see Isabelle Mathieu, Les justices seigneuriales en Anjou et dans le Maine à la fin du Moyen Âge (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 595–96.

43. Willian Chester Jordan, “Expenses Related to Corporal Punishment,” in Prowess, Piety, and Public Order in Medieval Society: Studies in Honor of Richard Kaeuper, ed. Craig Nakashian and Daniel Franke (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 286–300.

44. Gauvard, Condamner; Quentin Verreycken, Pour nous servir en l'armée - Le gouvernement et le pardon des gens de guerre sous Charles le Téméraire, duc de Bourgogne (1467–1477) (Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2017).

45. In essence, we find women in medieval French society punished by their families and neighbors, their husbands, sexual partners, employers, or strangers. The courts were primarily used as a venue for men to use against and for other men.

46. Roger Grand, Les “Paix” d'Aurillac (Paris: Sirey, 1945) 51–165; Roger Grand, “Justice criminelle, procédures et peines dans les villes aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” Bibliothèque de l'école des chartes 102 (1941): 51–108, at 101.

47. The question of infanticide as family planning in medieval Europe, which Peter Biller addresses in his Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), remains an extremely important topic for future research.

48. Sara Butler, “Child Murder,” 69.

49. Müller, Criminalization, 9.

50. Gauvard, Condamner; Robert Jacob, La grâce des juges. L'institution judiciaire et le sacré en Occident (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2014). See further below.

51. Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, “L'intervention du genre dans l’événement. Les massacres parisiens de 1418 et le meurtre d'une femme,” in Genre et événement, ed. Marc Bergère and Luc Capdevila (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006); Karen Sullivan, “The Judge and the Maiden: Justice and Pity at the Pyre,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 2013. http://journals.openedition.org/crm/13085; DOI: 10.4000/crm.13085.

52. Cassagnes-Brouquet, “L'intervention.”

53. Peggy McCracken, The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Transgression in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 52–83.

54. Gauvard (Condamner, 48) sagely warns that we cannot really know if a king would have necessarily been more clement when judging a female culprit, but it is nonetheless worth considering the many different kinds of sources that suggest why clemency would have felt particularly appropriate for the right kinds of women.

55. Hannah Skoda, Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270–1330 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 228: “Infanticide … often was treated leniently owing to the assumption that women were unable to control their emotions and could slip easily into insanity…Nevertheless, infanticide did not always meet with leniency: e.g. a woman was buried alive for this crime in the 1300s in Ozouer-la-Ferrière, a parish of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Tanon, 334; this was a particularly tragic case, as her husband was accused of murdering his mother-in-law.”

56. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

57. Gauvard, Condamner, 202–9; Pascal Texier, “La part de l'ombre de la rémission. Remarques sur les requêtes en rémission et leurs rédacteurs,” in La Part de l'ombre. Artisans du pouvoir et arbitres des rapports sociaux (viiie-xve siècle), ed. Jacques Péricard (Limoges: PUL, 2014), 183–206; Claude Gauvard, Violence et ordre public au moyen âge (2005), 245–64; and Otis-Cour, Leah, “Les limites de la grâce et les exigences de la justice: l'entérinement et le refus d'entériner les lettres de rémission royales d'après les arrêts du Parlement de Toulouse à la fin du Moyen Age,” in Recueil de mémoires et travaux publiés par la société d'histoire du droit et des institutions des anciens pays de droit écrit 16 (1996): 73–89Google Scholar.

58. Arson, rape, and other technically “unpardonable” crimes could be pardoned nonetheless, see Verreycken, “The Power,” 6; and Gauvard, Condamner, 202–9.

59. For example, infanticide had a larger role in late medieval French pardons than was found in subsequent centuries, although it still represented still a tiny fraction of the overall thousands of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century pardons granted mostly to men for their acts of homicide and other violence. Compared with in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, scholars have found many more pardons for this “female crime,” but far fewer records of prosecution and punishment.

60. Gauvard, , “Grâce et exécution capitale: les deux visages de la justice royale française à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Bibliothèque de l'école des chartes 153 (1995): 275–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 279–80.

61. Arnade and Prevenier, Honor, 1–13; and Gauvard, De grâce, see especially 802–22.

62. JJ160f74v #96.

63. Laurent, Nâitre, 155–56; and Gauvard, , “Honneur des femme et femme d'honneur,” Francia 28 (2001): 156Google Scholar, 159–91.

64. X 5.10.1, Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Friedberg, 2:792; see further Holzmann, “Die Register Papst Alexanders III. in den Händen der Kanonisten,” Quellen ung Forschungen aus italienishen Archiven und Bibliotheken 30 (1940): 13–87; and JL 10607. Arguably even more important in terms of the extent to which it appears in subsequent texts and commentary is the handling of a priest who caused his mistress to miscarry. X 5.12.20, see further Müller, Criminalization, 25, 53–56.

65. It is the first of the three decretals under the rubric of “de his, qui filios occiderunt,” the second does not allow a husband to separate from his wife and remarry if she has killed their infant, and the third addresses parents who smother their children in their sleep by rolling over on them in the bed, “overlaying.” On Alexander III and infanticide see further Anne Duggan, “Alexander ille meus: the Papacy of Alexander III,” in Alexander iii, 46; PL 200, 849–52 no. 975 at 850; and Webb, Diana, Medieval European Pilgrimage (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 56Google Scholar: Alexander III in 1171 advised the archbishop of Uppsala to send persons guilty of parricide, infanticide, incest, and bestiality to “visit the shrines of the apostles Peter and Paul, that in the sweat of their brow and labour of the road they may avoid the wrath of the heavenly judge and earn His mercy.”

66. Decretalium Gregorii Liber V 1692, in Corpus juris canonici emendatum et notis illustratum. Gregorii XIII. pont. max. iussu editum. Romae: In aedibus Populi Romani, 4 vols. 1582.

67. Ibid., 688: “interfecit” Sic indi c prox. De poena istius habes C.eod.tit l. unica. Secundum canones non ita puniuntur quia Deus non vult mortem peccatoris, sed ut convertatur, & c 26.a.6.agnovimus & 23.q.ult. his a quibus (Ezekiel 33:11).

68. This is an interesting contrast to in England, where abortion and infanticide were prosecuted in ecclesiastical courts as well as in secular courts. It may well be that these kinds of cases were also handled by French church courts, but there is no evidence of it at present. On church court (and secular court) prosecutions in England see especially Butler, Sara, “A Case of Indifference? Child Murder in Later Medieval England,” Journal of Women's History, Special Issue: Domestic Violence in History 19 (2007): 59–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69. Véronique Beauland-Barraud, Les péchés les plus grands: Hiérarchie de l’Église et for de la pénitence, France, Angleterre, XIIIe-XVe siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2019).

70. The joint endeavor of Rowan Dorin and Christine Barralis has revolutionized scholars' ability to search through synodal statutes. https://cosyn.hypotheses.org/author/rdorin. I have only found one French synodal statute that explicitly condemns mothers pregnant from fornication who abort or kill: Joseph Avril, ed., Les Status synodaux français du XIII siècle 4: Les Statuts synodaux de l'ancienne province de Reims (Paris: CTHS, 1995), 246: Noyon (1280–85) (57) “De inquisitione conceptionis in fornicatione. Nonnulle siquidem mulieres Medee vestigiis inherentes, conceptos in fornicatione partus per se et per alios sue culpe conscios procurant fieri abortivos, natos etiam perimunt vel exponunt.” Some women who, following in the foodsteps of Medea, the infant conceived outside marriage they or those knowing of the sin attempt to abort it, or even kill or abandon it if it is born. In England, by contrast, there seems to have been an emphasis on the culpability of mothers in particular in infant death from accident or negligence. See Danielle Griego, “A Mother's Guilt: Female Responses to Child Death in High and Late Medieval England,” in Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern Childhoods, ed. Naomi Miller and Diane Purkiss (New York: Palgrave, 2019), 261–74.

71. Helmholz, “Infanticide,” 375–90.

72. Helmholz cites “X 5.10.3 “de infantibus autem qui mortui reperiunter cum patre et matre et non apparet, utur a patre vel a matre oppressus sit ipse vel suffocatus, vel propria morte defunctus, non debent inde securi esse parentes, nec etiam sine poena.” See for example, Hostiensis, Commentaria in Libros Decretalium (Venice. 1581) who so concludes X 5.10.3 no. 1: “Qui non adhibet omnem diligentiam quam potest in levi saltem culpa est.”

73. French secular laws such as the Etablissements de Saint Louis sometimes stipulate that such offenders could be sentenced to execution only upon the second offense, possibly a way to address the considerable difficulty of proving intentional killing in the absence of obvious proof or a confession. See further Pichot, “Avortement,” 54–64; for synodal statutes and cases reserved to the bishop for absolution see Beaulande, Les Péchés, 68, 93, 111, 121, 131–37.

74. Pichot, “Avortement,” ch.1, 71–130 and appendix for examples; Müller, Criminalization, 174–76, 233–34. There are several pardons for accidental or negligent killing of an infant (or pregnant woman, or of causing a miscarriage or stillbirth by rape or attempted rape) perpetuated by men and women, and in every decade for which we have records. Violent fathers all too often feature among these, in pardons that portray the father accidentally killing an infant or child while beating his wife. See at notefor examples of men accused of killing infants or provoking stillbirths or abortions.

75. See notes 57 and 58.

76. JJ66f.263v #626 (1332), JJ98f.105r #306 (1365), JJ110f.68v #117 (1376), JJ110f.196r #341 (1397), JJ119f.159r #246 (1381), JJ124f.191r-191v #337 (1384), JJ133f.7v #18 (1388), JJ145f.40 #89 (1393), JJ146f.154#294 (1394), JJ148f.20v#36 (1395), JJ155f.73#126 (1400), JJ155f.142 #231 (1400), JJ158f.158v#293 (1404), JJ159f187#315 (1405), JJ160f.286v#413 (1406), JJ164f.42r #72 (1409), JJ200f.65r (1467), JJ200f.72 #132 (1467), JJ196f.164v (1470), JJ195f.328v #1445 (1475), JJ206f.229v #1063 (1477), JJ206f.105r #455 (1479), JJ206f.105r #455 (1479), JJ206f.156 #696 (1480/1), JJ207f.35r #73 (1480), JJ211f.159 #279 (1485), JJ225f.139#652 (1489), JJ227f.247 #478 (1497), JJ233f.54#130 (1499), JJ234 f.206v #378 (1499). There are likely many more; this list includes only those cited by Pichot, Müller, Gauvard, and Brissaud, as well as several additional records of pardons that I found while working through the “himanis” collection of digitized letters. All are on himanis.org and the BVMM except JJ225–JJ234, which are available on microfilm at the national archives in Paris. For a useful English comparison, see Butler, Sara, “Abortion by Assault. Violence against Pregnant Women in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England,” Journal of Women's History 17 (2005): 9–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77. On this, see especially Pfau, “Madness,” 234–37, and Pichot, “Avortement,” 108–30.

78. Working from other scholars' references to royal pardons and digging though the magnificent resource, http://himanis.huma-num.fr/himanis/. I have found just over 100 records of pardons for infanticide and related offenses from between the mid-fourteenth and the late fifteenth centuries (largely infant murder but also some abortion, miscarriage, and stillbirth), and there are likely more.

79. Most of the cases I have found, particularly those involving illicit pregnancy, concern what is now called “neonaticide.” For an example of a mother who killed her daughter several weeks after she gave birth, when, according to her confession, the putative father refused to help with supporting the child, see JJ 208 f.27r #48.

80. JJ210 f.14r #19.

81. JJ210 f.35v-36r #62.

82. JJ121 #172 f.92v. http://himanis.huma-num.fr/himanis/index.php/ui/show/chancery/241/188?feedback=1, “honte & grant vergoingne, & de la cremeur de ses dis pere & mere…par temptacion de lennemy.” See also Brissaud, “L'infanticide,” 238.

83. JJ206 f.156 #696. I have found no traces of any legal proceedings for her, but Pierre Charbonnier assumes that she was executed, because the pardon said as much. See Charbonnier, “Les limites du pardon des violences dans les lettres de rémission du xve siècle,” in La violence et le judiciaire: Du Moyen Âge à nos jours. Discours, perceptions, pratiques (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008).

84. JJ184 f.208v #303. Consent is of course an issue of critical importance to this subject, and one I hope to address in future research. Many of the pardons claim that sex took place against the woman's wishes, or that she was seduced with false promises. These claims could have been strategic or they “just” reflect the sad reality of widespread sexual exploitation and abuse in medieval France. Certainly many women who admitted to consensual—or at least less obviously coerced—illicit sex also obtained pardons.

85. JJ195 f.268r #1201 (1474).

86. Bartlett, The Hanged Man.

87. Whitman, Origins.