Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- Note on Translation
- Introduction Thinking about Abortion in the Early Middle Ages
- 1 From Hope of Children to Object of God's Care: Abortion in Classical and Late Antique Society
- 2 The Word of God: Abortion and Christian Communities in Sixth-Century Gaul
- 3 Church and State: Politicizing Abortion in Visigothic Spain
- 4 Medicine for Sin: Reading Abortion in Early Medieval Penitentials
- 5 Tradition in Practice: Abortion under the Carolingians
- 6 Legislative Energies: Disputing Abortion in Law-Codes
- 7 Interior Wound: The Rumour of Abortion in the Divorce of Lothar II and Theutberga
- 8 Unnatural Symbol: Imagining Abortivi in the Early Middle Ages
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - From Hope of Children to Object of God's Care: Abortion in Classical and Late Antique Society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- Note on Translation
- Introduction Thinking about Abortion in the Early Middle Ages
- 1 From Hope of Children to Object of God's Care: Abortion in Classical and Late Antique Society
- 2 The Word of God: Abortion and Christian Communities in Sixth-Century Gaul
- 3 Church and State: Politicizing Abortion in Visigothic Spain
- 4 Medicine for Sin: Reading Abortion in Early Medieval Penitentials
- 5 Tradition in Practice: Abortion under the Carolingians
- 6 Legislative Energies: Disputing Abortion in Law-Codes
- 7 Interior Wound: The Rumour of Abortion in the Divorce of Lothar II and Theutberga
- 8 Unnatural Symbol: Imagining Abortivi in the Early Middle Ages
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The following lines come from the Sibylline Oracles:
Those who defiled their flesh with vicious acts,
And who undid the belt of maidenhood
In secret union; who their unborn load
Aborted, or cast out the child, once born,
Unlawfully; witches and poisoners
Them too the wrath of heavenly, deathless God Shall fasten to the pillar, where a stream
Of quenchless fire flows round[.]
The second book of the Sibylline Oracles was composed by Hellenistic Jews at some point between 30 BCE and 250 CE, and was later heavily redacted by Christian hands. Whether written by Jewish authors or Christian redactors, this graphic visualization of the punishment awaiting those who practised abortion represented a response to abortion which was genuinely distinctive in Greco-Roman society. Yet the authors wrote in Ancient Greek, a lingua franca of the Roman Empire; in hexameters, the metre of classical epic; and in the guise of the Sibyls, the famed prophetesses of Greco-Roman religion. In some manuscripts the second book of the Sibylline Oracles was interpolated with a passage from the Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides, another Hellenistic Jewish composition, though some scholars once believed it was the work of Christians. Written in the name of Phocylides, an archaic Greek poet, the Sentences bluntly rejected abortion and infant exposure: ‘Do not let a woman destroy the unborn babe in her belly, nor after its birth throw it before the dogs and the vultures as a prey’.
The Early Middle Ages inherited only fractions and fragments of networks of ideas on abortion from classical and late antiquity. The categories by which scholars have attempted to impose order on this huge body of material – Roman, Jewish, Christian, with further subcategories like Stoic, Hellenistic, Gnostic, and so on – approximately correspond to real intellectual and social boundaries. But the Sibylline Oracles and Sentences are reminders that these boundaries were both mobile and porous – and that the early medieval inheritance was partial.
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- Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500–900 , pp. 23 - 55Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015