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Wolfgang P. Müller is Professor of History at Fordham University. He is the author of Huguccio: The Life, Works, and Thought of a Twelfth-Century Jurist and coeditor of Medieval Church Law and the Origins of the Western Legal Tradition.
The Criminalization of Abortion in the West examines the processes which led to the voluntary killing of a human fetus becoming a crime, as opposed to a sin or a wrong compensable by a money payment....This book should be regarded as essential reading for those studying the interface between law and medicine in medieval Europe, to legal historians and social historians. -- Gwen Seabourne * Social History of Medicine * Muller traces the tortuous path of the treatment of abortion as a public crime (felony) between the late 12th and early 16th centuries.... He succeeds in demonstrating the shift in the settlement of disputes from the pre-12th-century local control of justice depending on local power and the strength of family status to a more public hearing under the control of centralizing authorities.... Added to these public tribunals to investigate abortion as a crime was the widespread public attitude that regarded it as no more than a sin, if that, subject to confession to a priest and the performance of penance. * Choice * [T]he argumentation is intricate. To put it differently, this reader found that the importance of Criminalization rose to the surface upon a second reading. For, this is an important book, which will interest historians across the sub-disciplinary spectrum and not only late medievalists. It provides a stimulating account of the theoretical and practical development of medieval criminal justice and will become a sine qua non in the history of abortion. -- Zubin Mistry * The Mediaeval Journal *
