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Kindness of Strangers, by John Boswell
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In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell argues persuasively that child abandonment was a common and morally acceptable practice from antiquity until the Renaissance. Using a wide variety of sources, including drama and mythological-literary texts as well as demographics, Boswell examines the evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted children, "exposing" them in public places, donating them to the church, or delivering them in later centuries to foundling hospitals. The Kindness of Strangers presents a startling history of the abandoned child that helps to illustrate the changing meaning of family.
- Sales Rank: #382815 in Books
- Brand: Pantheon
- Published on: 1989-01-28
- Released on: 1989-01-28
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- Great product!
From Library Journal
The author of the widely acclaimed Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (LJ 6/1/80) has now given us this original and fascinating work on abandoned children. It should be made available to every student of medieval and early modern Europe. And at a time when abortion, child abuse, and abandonment are much in the news, the book should have broad general interest. Abandonment of children--by leaving them, selling them, or consigning them to someone else--was practiced from Greek antiquity to early modern times by parents of all social classes, because of poverty, incest, shame, self-interest, inheritance, or to improve the child's future. Most children were rescued and survived due to "the kindness of strangers." Based on a careful exploration of ancient and medieval sources, this book will deservedly win a wide audience.
- Bennett D. Hill, Georgetown Univ., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Highly original, learned, and skillfully written. . . . A mine of fascinating and surprising information about every aspect of the history of family limitation in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance Europe." (Bernard Knox New York Review of Books)
"A formidably learned, ingenious, at times eloquent investigation. Professor Boswell is a young historian of rare force and originality." (George Steiner New Yorker)
"Bold, original and, very likely, controversial. . . . This is a pioneering work of large importance, the first to map out and explore a tangled, mysterious region of human experience." (Mary Martin McLaughlin New York Times Book Review)
About the Author
John Boswell (1947-94) was the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale University and the author of "The Royal Treasure," "The Kindness of Strangers," and "Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe,"
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
The Strangeness of Times Past
By Gio
If you read thsi book at all, read it slowly and thoughtfully. Don't rush to assume that it reveals an anti-Catholic bias, as other reviewers have, and don't facilely dismiss the author's theses about long-term trends of illegitimacy, child abandonment, and infanticide being in lock-step with the structures of the Christian religion. Boswell is a very thorough scholar; before you challenge his conclusions, you'd better try the same research.
This is a study of oblation and the historical attitudes toward childhood that the practice of oblation exposes. An "oblate" is by definition any person who gives her/himself to the church, but in Boswell's sense an oblate was a child given or abandoned to the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. The majority of oblates grew up in and became lifetime members of monastic communities. Conversely, in some cases, the majority of the inhabitants of monasteries had entered the Church as oblates, often as infants. Imagine! A Medieval monastery was not just a cloister of chanting monks or nuns. It was also an economic community, with only a select elite of chanters and scribes, and a larger population of workers and servants not in tonsured sanctity, and of all things, a throng of children! a nursery!
"Them that's got shall get," goes the old blues song. It was surely so in the case of oblates. Families who could donate resources - land especially, or money - along with their child could insure that child a place of status in the religious community. Infants left in the baptismal font would wind up as "lay brothers" tending the grange, milling, or manufacturing the products their monastery sold to outsiders.
Boswell discusses the reasons for oblation, the role of oblation in dealing with inheritance problems of land-owning families, the possibility that oblation was effectively a method of population control, and the eventual abuse and decline of the practice in later centuries. One of the striking effects of oblation was the frequency of handicapped and deformed persons in monastic settings, since imperfect children were routinely abandoned, killed, or given to the Church! Boswell also describes the conditions of life that oblates enjoyed or endured, and the mutual obligations between cloistered monks/nuns and their birth families, especially those of the nobility. Like the practices of money-lending, land-leasing, and endowment-after-death, oblation created linkages between the "religious" and the secular, of great importance in both directions. The Medieval monastery was not as isolated or insulated from the world as many of us imagine.
The monasteries of the Middle Ages were enormously important in the total social economy of the regions where they grew, to a degree that hugely differentiates their world from ours. This dense, challenging, unaccomodating book is perhaps one of the best introductions to the real Middle Ages precisely because it is unabashed in detailing those differences.
The Kindness of Strangers is a seminal work in family history. Though massively footnoted, it's not laborious reading. I've only hinted at the wealth of narrative and illustration it contains. I first encountered it when I was preparing a performance of a French liturgical drama, not the Play of Daniel but something similar. Can you guess the connection? Perhaps you'll need to read this book to understand the rebirth of drama in Europe. Five stars in Boswell's crown!
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
The fate of children
By FrKurt Messick
This book of Boswell's is a fascinating history of an previously unknown and essentially overlooked piece of history -- the situation for children, and what happened to them should they become orphaned or abandoned. Boswell's particular period and geographic centre is in Europe of Late Antiquity to the Renaissance.
Beginning by looking at the ideal of family structure and responsibilities in the Roman Empire (the dominant model throughout the western world), Boswell proceeds through time periods to the Renaissance, examining literary and legal documents for narrative stories of children and caretakers, and for the general policy of church and state organisations toward care or neglect of such. One such narrative as example will serve to illustrate:
'...in Fresne (The Ash Tree) a married woman has maliciously spread the tale that the birth of twins means that the mother has slept with two men, and when she herself then bears twins, she must face an opprobrium of her own creation. She contemplates killing one, but--significantly--her companions dissuade her from this, arguing that it would be a sin. Abandonment, however, was not...'
The woman gives a child to her maid who then leaves it in a church -- while the story turns out badly, it is not due to the abandonment, which was considered in this High Middle Ages tale quite natural and proper.
Boswell's antipathy toward the Catholic church shows forth a bit in his interpretation (which may nonetheless be valid) with statements such as: 'Christianity may well have increased the rate of abandonment, both by insisting more rigidly than any other moral system on the absolute necessity of procreative purpose in all human sexual acts, and by providing, through churches and monasteries, regular and relatively humane modes of abandoning infants nearly everywhere on the continent.'
A wonderful glimpse into a shadowy world at the sidelines of history, yet one of crucial importance for those of us who live in a 'family values' historical period. If we do not know our past, how can we be sure of our present?
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Staggering Erudition
By mOjo Cosgroove
First, let me explain that I am not using this book in any class I teach(unlike the other 2 previous reviewers). I read this out of my own interest. Second, it is odd that only 2 prior reviews exist on this site, since I believe this to be an important book by the author of two well-known and controversial works about homosexuality and Christianity.
Third, allow me to rebut the negative review below. It is unclear how "college students" could fully evaluate Boswell's scholarship. While his numerous and lengthy footnotes can be a chore, his meticulous referencing of sources is admirable. And he quotes those sources in their ORIGINAL languages in many cases:Greek, Latin, Italian, Irish, Norse, Icelandic etc. How did the college students mentioned above possibly find his references "contradictory and wrong??"
In sum, this book is provocative and original. It would take scholars in the field of child history (granted a small field, if it indeed could be deemed one)an entire year to fully digest this tome and scrutinize its sources. Any thinking person interested in the evolution of human attitudes towards adoption, the protection and rearing of children, and child abuse MUST reckon with this marvelous work.
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