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Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500-900 (Hardcover)
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Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500-900 (Hardcover)
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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, University of Edinburgh.
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