Investigating the invisible

Among surviving seventeenth-century ballads is a copy of a 1640 work about an infanticide said to have taken place in Lancashire. Where the narrative draws to its close, the paper is worn and eroded on the right-hand side of the sheet. The ballad is reduced to incomplete lines which deteriorate into disjointed words and letters which no longer convey the writer's meaning, though the shadow of sense remains:

The page could serve as a metaphor for the study of infanticide. Some material survives allowing a partial picture to be seen, but there are gaps, missing details and uncertain outcomes, so that investigating the subject is frequently a study of voids. Perhaps it is these voids, and the tendency for hazy pictures to develop within them, which have drawn authors across time to create works about the crime, and drawn academics to study it. From Greek tragedy to the Bible, through the Middle Ages to the early modern period and on to the present, the murder of children is a recurring literary subject. Alongside these mainly elite written representations, with their parallels in the visual arts, are the folkloric tales of dead infants, whose origins are lost in time.