Death Control in the West 1500–1800

Employing a rigorous methodological approach and analysing a vast body of sources from towns and regions in Italy, France and England over 300 years, this book hints at the extent of "routine" infanticide of newborns by married parents in early modern Europe, a practice ignored by contemporary tribunals. Death Control in the West 1500–1800 examines baptismal registers and ecclesiastical censuses across a score of communities in Catholic and Protestant Europe. Married women had little reason to h