Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500-900

Name: Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500-900
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ISBN: 9781903153758

Zubin Mistry

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English

York Medieval Press
19 May 2017

Early history: c 500 to c 1450&1500; Social & cultural history; Ethical issues: abortion & birth control

First full-length study of attitudes to abortion in the early medieval west.

When a Spanish monk struggled to find the right words to convey his unjust expulsion from a monastery in a desperate petition to a sixth-century king, he likened himself to an aborted fetus. Centuries later, a ninth-century queenfound herself accused of abortion in an altogether more fleshly sense. Abortion haunts the written record across the early middle ages. Yet, the centuries after the fall of Rome remain very much the ""dark ages"" in the broader history of abortion.

This book, the first to treat the subject in this period, tells the story of how individuals and communities, ecclesiastical and secular authorities, construed abortion as a social and moral problem across anumber of post-Roman societies, including Visigothic Spain, Merovingian Gaul, early Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England and the Carolingian empire. It argues early medieval authors and readers actively deliberated on abortion and a cluster of related questions, and that church tradition on abortion was an evolving practice. It sheds light on the neglected variety of responses to abortion generated by different social and intellectual practices, including church discipline, dispute settlement and strategies of political legitimation, and brings the history of abortion into conversation with key questions about gender, sexuality, Christianization, penance and law. Ranging across abortion miracles in hagiography, polemical letters in which churchmen likened rivals to fetuses flung from the womb of the church and uncomfortable imaginings of resurrected fetuses in theological speculation, this volume also illuminates the complex cultural significance of abortion in early medieval societies.

Zubin Mistry is Lecturer in Early Medieval European History at the University of Edinburgh.

By: Zubin Mistry
Imprint: York Medieval Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 531g
ISBN: 9781903153758
ISBN 10: 1903153751
Pages: 356
Publication Date: 19 May 2017
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Reviews for Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500-900

Mistry's analysis is characterized by careful and adroit readings of an unusually wide variety of sources. . . . This book is both learned and thought-provoking. JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORYBR> (A) brilliant cultural history of abortion. FRANCIA Mistry's relentless focus on early medieval sources reveals their varied attitudes to abortion, complicating the picture provided by such scholars as John Noonan, who wanted to see Catholic teaching as unchanging on the matter. His book will therefore prove valuable to early medievalists interested in marriage, sexuality, and religion. H-NET In this learned and wide-ranging study, historian Mistry examines the institutions and communities that construed abortion as a social problem c. 500-900. Recommended. CHOICE