Infanticide in England did not take place in a temporal or geographical vacuum but was connected to laws and developments in other times and other countries. This chapter therefore looks back at other centuries, and beyond at other places, to put the crime in context. It sets out attitudes in continental Europe in both the Middle Ages and the early modern period and looks at the crime in medieval England. A chapter which touches on locations as northern as Iceland and as southern as Rome, and a 2000–year period of history, inevitably can only skim the surface. However, it does give an indication of the variations and commonalities in attitudes toward infanticide.

Infanticide in medieval Europe

In medieval Europe, the church and civil authorities avoided unwanted intrusion into family control, including the ways in which married couples sought to manage the size of their families. They felt able to accept the idea that some women avoided childbirth by abortion, a subject which is closely linked to infanticide, although the topic was debated. Arguments revolved around questions of when the unborn foetus became a person, its ability to survive outside the womb, the existence of the soul, when it first moved, and the number of days since conception – all questions which continued to be asked in the early modern period and are considered in more detail in Chapter 3.