Infanticide tuscany

Infanticide by married couples in Early Modern Tuscany

Gregory Hanlon

Dalhousie University

September 2002

(An Italian version of this article was published in Quaderni Storici in 2003)

Infanticide by married couples in Early Modern Tuscany

Scipione Bargagli, a Sienese humanist intellectual living at the twilight of the sixteenth century, left a poignant testimonial to the fragility of families in his day. Stricken ill and moved to pen his own will he described how his whole noble lineage was on the verge of extinction, despite the fact that his father left three prospering adult sons.

The patriarch invested his eldest son Celso (also a noted humanist scholar) with a wife and an entail, which endowed him with the major share of family property. But he died without siring an heir.

Scipione’s brother Claudio was an educated bachelor, but was not concerned with his sibling’s legal entanglements enough to help him sort them out. Scipione had no way to pass on his very keen sense of dynasty.

Then one day, a year before he penned his will, he encountered an abandoned infant boy (fanciullino) outside the Ovile gate, too small to say who his parents were or where he came from. Bargagli took the tot home and hired the married wife of a water-carrier to nourish and care for him. The boy, whom he named Bentrovato (happily found), possessed enough spirit, good looks and natural grace that Scipione got his hopes up. “I have invested much affection in him, and having high hopes for his good qualities . . . and loving him like my own son, I wish he would be recognized and accepted as such by my kin and servants (attinenti).”

Scipione’s close friend, the humanist Belisario Bulgarini, he exhorted to see to the boy’s education. The ailing aristocrat left the foundling a podere (an autonomous sharecropping farm) and all the livestock on it, the belongings and the furniture; the livestock of two other poderi, together with the furniture and equipment; all the household belongings in the family palazzo, and the cash and silver. This considerable property was to be sold and the money invested in a Sienese bank in Bentrovato’s name until the lad’s eighteenth year. Then, the young man bearing the noble Bargagli name was to marry a woman of noble (gentile) birth, and inherit another podere, a house in Siena, and another in the town of Asciano. To cap the dynastic improvisation, Scipione left two portraits, one of himself, and another of his father, which were to be passed on to Bentrovato’s own legitimate children.^¹^

Foster parenting was fairly widespread in Roman times, and Scipione Bargagli was probably familiar with classical references to it. Abandoning children in the street or outside a gate left a child’s destiny to chance. The elegance of this solution was common enough in medieval and Renaissance Italy as well.^²^ Given the high rates of infant mortality and highly unpredictable life-spans for both rich and poor, the measure is not that difficult to understand. German historian Arthur Imhof has made the point that, before the extension of life span for the great majority of adults, life was a lottery. There were no average destinies.^³^ A more typical fate for Bentrovato, however, would have been to be left at the door of a church or a foundling hospital by his parents or temporary guardians. He would have been cared for in the institution or given out as a ward of the city to a wetnurse, before returning to the institution for his education and apprenticeship. It was the destiny of thousands of Tuscan children in the aftermath of a brutal famine beginning in 1590. Foundlings appear frequently in city life. They were recognizable by their last names, Innocenti in Florence, (after the city’s Ospedale degli Innocenti), or Scala in Siena, (after Santa Maria della Scala). If such infants survived their childhood, they often became employees of the hospital or the municipality.

Infant abandonment from the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century has fixed the attentions of numerous historians.^⁴^ Foundling hospitals created in cities like Siena and Venice as early as the thirteenth century, provided for infants nobody was able or willing to care for. Most foundlings were assumed to be illegitimate offspring, but an indeterminate portion of them was left by married couples.^⁵^ Foundling homes for bastard infants gave the mothers a second chance at respectability, at the baby’s expense. Gradually the Church and local government insisted that unwed mothers relinquish the care of their offspring to these institutions.^⁶^ Not all illegitimate offspring were abandoned, however, for most abandoned infants were girls, who were a liability to their mothers for a longer period than boys. As the hospitals grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were subject to reforms aiming to increase their efficiency, they began to attract infants from the rural hinterland.^⁷^ While most of the infants delivered there were illegitimate, baptized infants confided to these institutions gradually represented over 10 percent of the total by the early seventeenth century, although their numbers gradually declined after mid-century. Wherever married parents left children to these institutions, girls outnumbered boys by 3 to 2, or 10 to 9. Claudio Povolo notes that Venetian social elites in the early modern period castigated the abandonment of legitimate children, whether male or female. They claimed the practice was typical of the depravity of peasants with numerous mouths to feed already.^⁸^ Whenever older infants of either sex were left with institutions, their parents intended to reclaim them at the first opportunity.

We should emphasize the term ‘survivor’, for abandoning infants usually meant deferring their deaths by mere weeks or months. The mortality in the institution, or that visited upon unlucky infants farmed out to wetnurses, was dismal for both males and females. The death of infants was the most banal kind, and even children kept at home by married parents died in large numbers. For eighteenth-century Tuscany, the average infant mortality (confined to the first year of life) ranged between a quarter and a fifth of all births, and an equal contingent of children died before reaching adulthood.^⁹^ But death rates in the hospitals were often double those outside.^¹⁰^ Richard Trexler pointed to such high mortality of babies cared for by wetnurses that he suspected that many were killed intentionally.^¹¹^ We might think that parents who abandoned or neglected their children in this way would be acting at variance with human nature, but there is no reason for thinking that their attitudes to children were different from our own. In very poor areas of Brazil, for example, maternal detachment and abandonment are still common enough today.^¹²^ Their context is different from ours. Poor parents who abandoned their children to institutions such as these were evaluating their chances of survival at home, or else the survival of vulnerable siblings competing for their care. Contemporaries felt that the existence of foundling hospitals at least served as a check on deliberate infanticide and gave a portion of these “supernumerary” children a chance of having a longer and more fulfilling life than the one their parents could provide.

Neglect, abandonment and the deliberate killing of newborn babies by their mothers is something encountered in all human societies, and in many animal species as well. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, in their landmark cross-cultural study of homicide, noted that when women kill, the victims are most likely to be their own children. Infanticidal mothers are more likely to be younger and more frequently unwed than other new mothers.^¹³^ Frequently enough, what drives them to kill is the desire to attract another man and to reproduce again in better conditions with more support. Their research in police archives finds an echo in the anthropological work of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who observes that infanticide is common where there is no other form of birth control.^¹⁴^ Returning to early modern Europe, the cases of infanticide judicially prosecuted that surge from collections of criminal procedures, have a certain sameness about them. The perpetrators were unwed mothers who hid their pregnancies and then killed their babies immediately after birth, before the infants could utter their first cries. In England and British America crimes such as this made up about a quarter of total homicides prosecuted in the eighteenth century.^¹⁵^ The mothers were usually girls of good family who had been seduced and abandoned, and who resolved to hide their pregnancy and their shame. Men almost never figured in infanticide or abandonment, and when they did, they usually acted as an accomplice.^¹⁶^

The trend in Europe towards sterner criminal prosecution of infanticide began in the sixteenth century, maybe as part of a heightened Reformation repugnance towards sin. Dismay at what appeared to be a crime wave moved French magistrates to demand the death penalty whenever they felt the proofs justified a conviction.^\ ¹⁷^ King Henri II commanded French judges to pass harsh capital sentences on infanticidal mothers, and royal letters of pardon granted to other people convicted of homicide do not seem to have been granted to them.^¹⁸^ In the Venetian Republic too, the statutes for infanticide called for harsh punishment, but already in the sixteenth century, lenient sentences were common. By the end of the eighteenth century, such infanticide was hardly punished at all. In England, in France and in Italy, magistrates and juries were usually happy not to be able to prove premeditated murder, and sentenced the ex-mothers to minor penalties instead. European judges found it uncomfortable to execute the kinds of women who committed the deed.^¹⁹^ The profiles of murdering mothers hardly differed a century later when Paul Brouardel, coroner for a French tribunal, published his forensic lectures, complete with grisly photographs. He emphasized how quickly public sentiments shifted from revulsion against the mother the moment an infant corpse was discovered, to one of universal sympathy for her during the trial. There was no advocate for a long-dead baby.

Infants could also die in mysterious circumstances that was most often explained as “overlaying”, the accidental smothering by the mother during sleep. Brouardel made a point of studying the physical signs of such suffocation on infant cadavers, and concluded that such claims were polite fictions.^²⁰^ In Renaissance Florence, where Philip Gavitt has examined the cursory investigations of similar cases by diocesan authorities, there is little evidence to confirm that these infanticides were accidental.^²¹^ Church authorities acted on their suspicions after 1500 by prohibiting mothers from sleeping with their infants. The penalties decreed by church courts for the accidental suffocation of babies consisted merely of various forms of penance.^²²^ Only occasionally investigated by religious authorities, and sanctioned by light penalties, infanticide looked much like a delayed form of abortion, less dangerous for the mother than imbibing some potent concoction designed to make her sick.

Several modern writers invoke the probability that married parents sometimes killed their newborn infants too, only to lament that there seemed no way to study the extent of the practice, for such cases were almost never prosecuted as infanticides by magistrates. Even if the action were public knowledge, it would have gone unreported if it were not considered criminal by the neighbours’ understanding.^²³^ David Kertzer notes that hospice authorities were loathe to place obstacles in the way of married parents who wished to leave their newborns with the institution, fearing that this would spur them to commit infanticide instead. Richard Trexler’s article of a quarter-century ago makes the strongest case for it, noting that there were no specific laws against infanticide in sixteenth-century Florence. There was never any medical investigation into a child’s death, and no appropriate forensic procedure to follow. Since it would have been impossible to prove premeditation, the secular courts would never have tried to prosecute such a crime. Hard times seem to be the obvious motive for the dire measure of suffocating one’s own child: “If fifteenth-century parents could not support the new infant without starving themselves or their older children, they had to act.” He evokes the reasons for the silence of the courts as well; “Who would want to prove infanticide in this context?” The bishop’s absolutions of couples for the “accidental” death of their child must have been but a particle of the actual incidences, although the author does not suggest that this kind of infanticide was rampant. Trexler concluded that the only way to approach the incidence of infanticide by married couples, and to understand the motivations behind it, would be to study census documents and family reconstitution.^²⁴^

That is my purpose here. By looking closely at a specific community through a nominative study (that is, identifying each of the inhabitants by name and by family), and inserting the material into a district context treated statistically, it should be possible to know more about unreported infanticide by married couples. The village in question is the Tuscan hilltop castello of Montefollonico, erected as a fief by Grand Duke Cosimo II in 1618 on the southeastern ege of the Sienese Stato Nuovo. By virtue of its new status, most of its administrative papers and the judicial proceedings were locally conserved and are now accessible. Moreover, the parish records kept in the diocesan archives of Pienza are virtually complete, as are those of most of the adjacent communities to which we will refer. Together these documents allow us to reconstitute many of the families living in the perched agglomeration and on the poderi farms around it, estimate their relative standing and follow the destinies of their surviving children. This wealth of documents can help us explain, as much as possible, how often and why parents might have killed their children in the period from the late sixteenth century to the Enlightenment age of the 1770s. One aspect I will not deal with here pertains to the survival of children from a woman’s first marriage, after remarriage and resumption of childbearing. The material we have in Montefollonico is too meagre and defective to undertake such a study here; but this problem too would certainly repay study.

We have but one case of prosecuted infanticide in Montefollonico that conforms to the classic pattern reported by Daly and Wilson. Margarita di Pierantonio Sestigiani was a poor girl about 18 years old, orphaned of her father, living with her mother and adolescent brother in the village. A neighbour woman complained publically that she deserved to be hanged for giving birth in secret and killing her child. She was denounced anonymously to the court (which was not customary) and the magistrate came calling for an explanation. Margarita claimed to have been raped by Lorenzo Barbieri, son of one of the richest men in the village, but then admitted that she had had further relations with him, along with his well-to-do friend Evandro Selvi. Pretending at first that the baby boy was stillborn, she soon changed her story and in a long, teary lament covering several pages, Margarita confessed everything. She had done her utmost to hide her pregnancy. After giving birth secretly in the stables at night, she bestowed on the infant boy her blessing, and then strangled him with her hair ribbon.+++(4)+++ Hiding the little corpse at the edge of a field, she then resumed her chores.^²⁵^ We do not see her fate, since the magistrate consigned her to the city prison at Montepulciano and she disappears from view.

Margarita Sestigiani’s misadventure finds an echo in almost all the historical writing on infanticide in Europe and America. My first suspicions that Italian married women might have been killing their infants emerged from studying behaviour in Montefollonico during the famine of 1648-49. The empirical problem in our investigation is that such deaths were never recorded in the parish registers. Unlike unwed mothers, married women who would not keep their child did not hide their pregnancies. They did not need to choose a course of action prior to the moment they decided to keep the child, and could weigh their own and their family’s circumstances when the time came. Some infants would have been stillborn, for a proportion between 5 and 10 percent of all births, though none of these was recorded in the baptismal register.^²⁶^ It would not have been difficult to pretend that the child was stillborn or died immediately after, because the thing was common enough. How does one demonstrate a widespread practice that left no record? The answer lies in subjecting the various records to closer scrutiny.

Demographic historians have often encountered suspicious disparities between males and females, especially at young ages, that imply that parents might have sacrificed their daughters, though few jump to those conclusions. David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, looking at the massive census undertaken in the Florentine state in 1427, reveal a sex ratio of 119 males for every 100 females under the age of five.^²⁷^ Gerard Delille, using parish-censuses for a number of communities in the kingdom of Naples, also reveals significant disparities in the number of men and women, boys and girls, not always to the disadvantage of females.^²⁸^ Usually the tentative explanation for these disparities is to invoke the greater social profile of males and to assume that females were under-reported in the census material. These documents exist for Montefollonico. The status animarum, the states of souls census, was compiled periodically by the parish priest as a list of the inhabitants of every household, identifying their respective ages and usually specifying the kinship relation of everyone sharing a hearth. Most of these documents indicate whether or not the adults had taken Easter communion and whether the adolescents had received confirmation. Priests were not equally conscientious in its compilation, but most made a fair effort to report people’s precise ages, in more than one census by calculating them to the day from the baptismal register. The youngest ages are least likely to be distorted by rounding. For the largest parish, San Leonardo, we have states of souls for 1648 and 1702.^²⁹^ For San Bartolomeo, we have a census summary separating married men and women from unmarried boys and girls, in the village and on the outlying farms, respectively, for 1638, and full states of souls for 1677 and 1702.^³⁰^ For the small pieve of San Valentino, there are meticulous states of souls for 1643, 1655 and 1677.^³¹^ Most of these documents allow us to derive age pyramids from the data, and compare the number of boys to girls in the village and on the poderi. Comparing age pyramids for the three parishes just for the poderi (where the ages were recorded consistently), there were only 5 percent more males than females in the parish of San Bartolomeo in 1677, a generation after the great famine of 1648-49. On poderi farms in the parish of San Leonardo in 1648, on the cusp of the famine, there were 14 percent more males than females. For San Valentino in 1655, however, the deficit of females was fully 34 percent! The greatest imbalance was in the youngest ages, with 11 girls below the age of 10 as opposed to 20 boys, and the greatest disparity (6f/12m) among those between the ages of 5 and 9. Since we are dealing with the smallest children, one cannot suggest that the girls in question were working elsewhere, as town servants, or placed with other families to help with chores. If the San Valentino population represented roughly one-seventh of the total population, a quick extrapolation would suggest that some 40 female infants would have disappeared from all of Montefollonico. As an initial hypothesis, it is not unreasonable to suspect that parents snuffed out the lives of at least a score of their children, primarily female, during the famine of 1648-49. Some of these children, again probably female in the majority, might have been left with the San Cristofano hospital in nearby Montepulciano, whose records indicate eight girls were wards of the institution in October 1648.^³²^ A complete count of newborns and young orphans admitted to the institution in one normal year (1614) only gives us eight names, however. Other infants might have been carried to Siena, to the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, which received a couple of hundred children every year from the city and the entire state. The scale of the tragedy in 1648-49 would have swamped such institutions, however. These great imbalances then disappeared in better times. If the numbers of girls to boys are lopsided to the advantage of the latter in San Valentino parish in 1643, reflecting difficult years in the mid-1630s, the 1677 figures for the same parish show a female surplus in early childhood.

(figure 1 & 1bis: Age pyramids of poderi households, Montefollonico)

The status animarum is a snapshot image of the makeup of populations at infrequent intervals during the seventeenth century. One could argue that priests would have been more attentive to record boys over girls, although this claim does not explain why even the obviously painstaking censuses would have shared this defect. Fortunately, we can triangulate the conclusions from this single source by comparing it to a much more accurate record, the baptismal register. Baptismal data complements the states of souls nicely by allowing us to chart the number and frequency of children presented by local couples for the sacrament. Historians sometimes notice high masculinity ratios in baptismal records too, and invoke the greater attention paid to boys than to girls to explain it, without ever subjecting those frequencies to close scrutiny.^³³^ If priests and ecclesiastics were to “neglect” to have their children baptized and the act recorded, there should be sudden shifts in frequency or infrequency of the acts with every change of priest, something I have never encountered. Baptism was a sacrament dispensed to everyone: it constituted the basic act of civil identity and served as the reference which priests could consult in order to calculate degrees of kinship for marriage. It is difficult to imagine that parents would have neglected this fundamental sacrament, which was widely held to have thaumaturgical benefits. Theologians ruled that unbaptized infants could not be admitted to paradise, and that parents had a duty to present the infant as quickly as possible after birth. Baptism was also one of the most important patronage or clientage opportunities available to Italian parents, who designated the godmother or godfather well in advance of the event. Moreover, given the frequency that Italian women attended church for devotion and sociability, and the influence wielded by mothers in their families, it strikes me as odd that they would not have insisted upon it themselves. Parish priests also registered the marriages and burials in their territories. In a perfect world, we would be able to reconstitute the history of each family by documenting all the births and deaths and thus be able to tally the number and respective ages of the children at any particular moment. The weak link is the inconsistent recording of deaths, which, even when the registers are chronologically continuous, clearly under-report the burials of small children.^³⁴^ The baptismal data alone, however, tell us a great deal.

The disparity of male to female baptisms confirms startlingly high ratios of masculinity in years corresponding to high prices of grain. Looking at a half-century between July 1612 and June 1666, for which we have continuous baptismal registers for the two pievi, the overall ratio of males to females was 118, compared to nature’s universal ratio of circa 104. These disparities were most striking in periods of hunger or penury. Dearth or famine defined the harvest year starting July 1617 to June 1619; from July 1621 to June 1623; July 1628 to June 1630; from July 1635 to June 1637; from July 1642 to June 1644; from July 1646 to June 1649 (the longest period); and from July 1658 to June 1659. In a number of these years, 1617, 1629, 1635, 1647 and 1658, the ratio of males to females at baptism was over double, and it was almost double in several more years. There were two years when girls’ baptisms outnumbered boys, by 50 percent or more, as in 1623 and 1634, but occasional swings both ways was normal in villages like Montefollonico whose population oscillated between 700 and 850 people. (figure 2: Baptisms: males & females: Montefollonico)

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Selective infanticide was surely not new, and its origins are lost to us, but we can fix a point of departure for our study in the late sixteenth century, before the first great famine of 1590-93. We have most of the baptismal registers for the period after 1580. We can best reveal the dominant tendancy by noting decade-long mean indices of masculinity, based on harvest years (1 July – 30 June). In the rosy 1580s, the level was 107, before rising to 110.5 for the 1590s, which do not include the worst years of the famine, 1591-92, or 1596-97. In the two decades after 1611, the indices remained abnormally high, at 114.7 and 113.7 respectively, before dropping to normal levels of 105 in the respite of the 1630s. The disastrous 1640s resulted in a sharp increase to the highest level ever, at 129. During the five worst consecutive hardship years from 1646 to 1650, the index of masculinity of baptized children reached 156.5, before dropping to normal levels of 105 in the 1650s. The rate rose in the first half of the 1660s to 110.2, well above the norm. In the decades after our survey, indices of masculinity remained high, at 115 in the 1680s (to which I will return), only to fall to 106.5 for the two decades on either side of 1700. The rate was 107.4 for six years in the 1720s, and still 107.5 for eleven years in the 1760s, which include the famine years of 1764-66.

(figure 3: Baptisms: index of masculinity: Montefollonico)

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These crude ratios invite closer scrutiny. Next we can examine a large portion of the childbearing couples in Montefollonico, record the number of baptized children born to them and note the frequency of their births (called intergenesic intervals), once the continuous presence of the parents is attested in any of the records pertaining to the fief. This tedious procedure affords us a much closer look at the parents whose lengthy intergenesic intervals look suspicious. Of those parents for whom we have the date of marriage and the successive reporting of baptisms, we have 116 couples that have gaps of 30 and 48 months between births. Why choose such a limited frame? In a world of malnourished peasants and near-universal maternal breastfeeding, it seems best not to assume some kind of birth control being used within two and a half years of the previous baptism, even if there were cases of it. Only two references to a wetnurse have emerged from thousands of pages of documents of many different kinds, and only two of our 116 mothers, a noblewoman, and the daughter of the feudal tax-collector, have such short birth-intervals as to make their resort to one likely. Beyond 48 months, the absence of the couple from the village for part of that time may be more frequent. We should not presume the occurrence of infanticide in all these cases where we have long intervals between baptisms, for many women would have found it difficult to bring their pregnancies to term. The long birth intervals may also reflect sterility from malnutrition. It is vain to seek exactitude in data of this sort, but the procedure selected does offer a window on unreported reproductive behaviour.

If parents were not killing newborns, then the gender balance of the last-baptized and the next-baptized should be near parity. Out of this data, we have 134 binary relations or couples of births on each end of the gap, between the harvest years 1616 and 1663. The index of masculinity of the previous-born child was 135, well above the natural rate of 104; the index of the next-born was less pronounced, at 123, but still significantly abnormal. The frequency of the gaps was not constant (let us designate the mid-point between the two births to “date” the gap). Of the 134 binary relations we have established from the 116 couples, there were never more than three annually until the harvest year of 1635. Starting that year they become numerous; six such gaps in 1635, 8 in 1638, 19 in the three years between 1644 and 1646, 10 in 1649 and 1650, 7 more in 1653 and 6 in 1659. Citing selected absolute numbers like these implies that the total baptisms remained relatively constant: but it did not. The long intergenesic intervals we see in the 1620s and early 1630s did not comprise more than ten percent of the number of live baptisms from the 116 couples I selected. The gaps in the late 1630s correspond to an annual average of 17 baptisms from these couples, or roughly equal to a third of them. The proportion of gaps to baptisms in the 1640s was similarly high. The ten gaps in 1649 and 1650 correspond to only 19 live baptisms in the same period, or more than half. (figure 4: Montefollonico: frequency of intergenesic intervals 30-48 months)

Looking at a smaller sample during the worst famine on record, (1648-50), I found eleven couples with gaps of three years or more between births; among them the previous infant was male in fully 10 of 11 cases, while the next-born was male in 8. In the aftermath of bad harvests, people’s reserves of food and cash disappeared so they sold their land at paltry prices to richer neighbours.^³⁵^ The years where the gaps were most frequent were not necessarily those of the highest prices; low prices could be a curse to peasants if they had debts to pay, or if landowners reacted to the low prices by cutting back their planting. The high index of masculinity in the 1680s occurred in years where no harvest shortage troubled people’s lives. On the other hand, it marked the lowest level of grain prices ever, and there is some evidence that less grain was being grown than ever before as a consequence, which deprived local peasants of both food and paid employment.^³⁶^ High rates of masculinity at baptism reflect not only short-term crises, they correspond to long-term hardship of peasant families caught in a long depression.

In brief, then, parents wished to enhance the chances of survival of their previous-born son at the expense of children born not long after; and then tended to prefer a son for the next child they decided to keep. And who were these parents? Among the eleven families with long intergenesic intervals during the famine period, there was just one local businessman, Jacomo di Pietro Crocchi, whose wife Lisabetta Vettori was the sister of a parish priest. Crocchi leased village assets, like the butcher-stall, and took up leases on agricultural land. The famine conjuncture hit him very hard; we see him suing villagers for small purchases of meat made long previous.^³⁷^ He still owed money to the community he was unable to collect from villagers during his term as communal treasurer (camerlengo), fifteen years previous. Whether his nemesis was bad luck or poor management abilities, the result was the same. Another couple a little above the peasantry was a literate stonemason maestro Niccolo Biagi, and his peasant wife Faustina Barbieri. Biagi’s affairs had been deteriorating since his father died in 1632, and Niccolo’s elder brother Bernardino bought some of his property years earlier in 1637, in what looks more like a loan with the land as collateral.^³⁸^ He sold more of his assets in the village to neighbours in 1638 and 1639, and his brother bought what was probably his remaining land in 1647. The other parents were all peasants of diverse assets and resources. Niccolo di Lattanzio Pilacci lived with his wife and three children (two sons and a daughter) in the castello early in 1648. Both his parents died during the famine, after selling their house in the village in January 1649 and their land in April to the more prosperous Francesco Crocchi. Village smallholders Pietro Barbieri and Giovanbattista di Virgilio Rossi both had a single child at the onset of the famine. Barbieri sold his vineyard at the height of the famine in 1649. Giovanbattista Rossi sold his garden and the cellar of his house soon after. Luca Barbieri’s situation was somewhat different: this smallholder and sharecropper’s progeny was already secure. Margarita di Giuseppe bore twelve baptized children to him, several of whom later married. Francesco Mazzoni was the married son of an old sharecropper with several siblings all working a single podere. His own son Giuseppe would have been a toddler at the beginning of the famine. At its close, his wife Agata bore him another son and a daughter in quick succession.

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has noted that wealthy Florentine parents in the fifteenth century seemed to keep trying to have children if they could increase the number of boys.^³⁹^ Mothers who had girls close to the end of her reproductive span often tried again to get a son. This appears to have been at work in Montefollonico too. Rather than try to retain only those couples still surviving at the end of the mother’s fertile period (age 45), in Montefollonico we can make a crude calculation of the number of couples with more than one baptized child where the last-born is male. Males appear as the last-born in 76 of these families married before January 1, 1651, as opposed to only 56 females. Like Klapisch-Zuber we can compare this to the gender balance of the second-last born, which works out to 67 girls for 63 boys. Boys might also have been the object of more care and feeding from their parents, at least in the families of sharecroppers. If one were to take the hundreds of baptisms of the 173 families for whom we have the date of marriage and a succession of baptisms, we could make crude calculations as to the duration of a mean interval before the next baptism, within the space of five years. Until the mid-1650s, the mean interval after the birth of a boy was 27.3 months; the interval after the birth of a girl was only marginally shorter, at 26.2 months. First-born children often came within the first year of marriage, and second-born children arrived not long after. Birth intervals were short too, when an infant expired soon after birth and was followed by another given the same name. The mean interval for boys tended to lengthen for those people married in the late 1620s to the late 1630s, who would have had at least one or two children alive by the time of the great famine. There the mean interval after boys was 31.3 months, compared to 26.9 months for girls, a more significant spread.

Parents also seemed willing to sacrifice a child when twins were born. The baptismal registers supply us with 22 sets of twins; that is, twins presented together at the baptismal font, for over 1,200 baptisms. Among those, there is no disparity of males to females, with 23 to 21 respectively. The twins are not evenly distributed over the territory. For the rural pieve of San Valentino, in over 250 baptisms, not a single set of twins appears after 1625. They were much more likely to be brought to the priest by dwellers of the castello. For the entire territory, there was but one set of twins baptized in the 1620s, and there were only two sets baptized after 1650. As twins were often born premature, they were more likely to be hurriedly baptized at home, in a proportion of about one-fifth. Parents may often have chosen to keep just one. Five sets of states of souls for all three parishes in the seventeenth century reveals only two sets of twins living with their parents. For the two largest parishes of San Leonardo and San Bartolomeo enumerated in 1702, totalling 550 inhabitants, not a single set of twins could be found living with their parents.^⁴⁰^

In themselves, the statistics seem conclusive that Tuscan parents practised infanticide on some considerable scale, equivalent to a quarter or a third of live births in bad years. To explain why they did so, we should step back from our village for a moment and consider the practice elsewhere. Infanticide is universally encountered in human societies, as ethologists and anthropologists know. Practices common across our species must be rooted in universal motivations, however much its specific features are linked to local situations. The sociobiological explanation seems to be the most compelling one; infanticide probably gives the mother greater chances to reproduce in future in better circumstances, or else it protects children whose survival would be compromised by the arrival of a needy sibling. The deliberate and overt infanticide we find everywhere takes place at the moment of birth or very shortly after, before the infant can be considered a social being. Its occurrence is not proof of an absence of parental love for children, for there is no anthropological evidence that parental or maternal sentiment varies over time and place.^⁴¹^

Explanations for behaviour are most satisfying when they fit both the ultimate causes (biological evolution) to proximate ones (the context of each birth). Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s study of the conditions in which mothers bear children and raise them provides the best fit to the evidence in Montefollonico. Raising children was just one of the tasks that married women had to perform. They accomplished much of the labour on the poderi farms, and in the village (where everyone worked) they kept occupied with menial tasks such as spinning or wicker-weaving in order to survive. A child was a long-term investment requiring food, attention and time from mothers, who had to make tradeoffs between their own subsistence and reproduction. Moreover, mothers had to evaluate their children’s chances for survival after birth, in a world where at least half of all offspring would die before they could marry and reproduce in turn. Mothers had to make this choice before the establishment of lactation, which transformed them physiologically and emotionally. Once the mothers became attached to their baby, and the babies reciprocated, their subsequent abandonment became more difficult.^⁴²^ This dilemma is quite universal in human societies and so has less to do with gender ideologies than with the physiology of lactation. We should seek rather to explain the good reasons a mother had for making the choice to kill her infant. Such a rationale would have been widely accepted among her peers, the neighbours and the midwives who helped mothers through labour, who could evaluate the social status of the parents and the physical condition of the newborn child for themselves.

Historians sometimes evoke a “mentality” that made it possible for parents to think that abandoning or killing girls was normal, but the notion of mentality is purely tautological. Why the parental preference for boys? In Italy there were several advantages to having mostly boys. Sharecropping establishments tried to do better than simply balance arms to mouths, as they put it. Two or more adult brothers often worked these estates in common, in indiviso. Families on the poderi were on average twice the size of those in the village, and showed greater complexity. The men performed the most strenuous labour to produce grain for sale. Women participated in a range of useful functions, but their contribution to the production of essential foodstuffs was considered secondary. One disadvantage of having girls, apart from their marginal position to paid labour, was that they required dowries that were far higher than what their earnings could provide. Given that most girls married around age 20 before the famine at mid-century, and that wage-labour opportunities were negligible for rural girls, their parents had to build a dowry for each of them long in advance, coin by coin. Average dowries for peasant girls ran between 300 and 400 lire, when peasant men normally earned but half a lira for a day’s labour, when work was available. Sharecroppers could sell part of the share of the crop they retained, but this was not often abundant and agricultural prices were on the wane after 1630. Peasant sons brought dowries to their parents, if these were still alive. Parental success could be crudely tabulated in the cumulative dowries of several sons, offset by only one dowry to pay out. Having boys entailed other advantages for parents too. Italian children did not live separately from their mothers when these were aged and widowed, but sharecroppers clung to sons more than daughters. Looking at poderi families in San Bartolomeo and San Valentino parishes outside of famine times (1677 and 1643 respectively), mothers living with married sons numbered 15; only one, who had no sons, lived with her daughters. Sons were material and emotional security in old age, and Italian mothers enjoyed high status in the household as is betrayed by any number of offhand references in judicial documents and marriage contracts. We should not see mothers as being disinterested beings. As much as their husbands, they had good reasons for wanting boys.

There is an interesting wrinkle, however. Most stratified human societies practice hypergamy wherein women frequently marry men of higher social status than themselves, just as husbands are almost everywhere older than their wives. Early modern Italians did as much. Not being able to afford proper dowries that their social peers would expect, aristocratic families destined half or more of their daughters to convents in the seventeenth century. Their sons, on the other hand, monopolized positions of power and influence from the army to the church; the more sons a family had, the better its chance at social consolidation or advancement.^⁴³^ It was not often considered an option to marry their daughters with meagre dowries to poorer men. Hypergamy allowed rich commoners to insinuate their entry into the aristocracy via the marriage of their daughters to well-born men.^⁴⁴^ Sociobiologists see this practice as an ecologically adaptive mechanism easing the tensions between social superiors and their underlings. While it was in the interest of powerful people to procreate sons who would in turn beget heirs (unlike their daughters), it was on the contrary in the interest of poor people who desired heirs to have multiple daughters. A good number of women went to the altar without substantial dowries, often “repairing” her husband’s family left without a mother. Others reproduced outside the bounds of holy matrimony, usually impregnated by men of higher status. Whatever the merit of the theory in terms of its first causes, a preference for girls over boys among poor people is something we can test through the states of souls and the baptismal registers. While sharecropping families seemed to resort to infanticide most often, and clearly preferred boys, they were not the poorest people in the community, as a rule, for they enjoyed continuous access to land and animals, sometimes for generations. Landless inhabitants paid by the task (called pigionali, or renters), smallholders who primarily worked the land of others, widows and isolated individuals residing in the castello agglomeration alongside nobles, landowners and rural entrepreneurs, were the true poor. Households headed by widows in the castello portion of San Bartolomeo in 1677 constituted a full quarter (8/32), all but one of them burdened with offspring too young to marry.^⁴⁵^ Once the boys were beyond the age of 10, their parents could send them to an outlying podere to serve as garzone, but they were rarely younger than that, and never younger than nine. In 1702, we have for the combined parishes of San Leonardo and San Bartolomeo only 9 well-off families in the castello with only 4 boys and 5 girls under the age of 10. Their poorer neighbours, on the other hand, had only 12 boys for 28 girls in the same age group! Eight more boys and three girls served as servants on the outlying poderi. A proper study of this specific problem must embrace a larger territory and bigger communities, but at first sight the numbers suggest that poor families might have neglected their male children at the expense of the females.^⁴⁶^ We can look at the better-off inhabitants living in the castello to determine whether or not there was a gender imbalance in the number of children they had baptized. The infant boys outnumber girls there by a significant number, 103 to 85, which suggests that the village notables may have practiced opportunistic infanticide themselves. (figure 5: Age pyramids Montefollonico 1702)

This pattern of abnormally high masculine ratios for the community overall can be confirmed a few years after birth. Children who survived early childhood were eventually confirmed by the bishop or his emissary. We have confirmation lists for the entire village at irregular intervals. Confirmation, or cresima, was not a sacrament conferred at a specific age, so it cannot be used as a proxy for juvenile survival rates. The mean age for the candidates would have been around eight or nine, but depending upon the last time the sacrament had been administered, some of the cresimati would have been as old as eighteen or even twenty. Between 1587 and 1730 we have eighteen lists for Montefollonico, with rates of masculinity below 100 in only three. The normal ratio of boys to girls past age five would probably be at or below 100. In 1638 the index of masculinity was only 67. In a few cases, it was close to normal, at 102.5 in 1677, 106 in 1625 and 1642, and 109 in 1599. But the more difficult years revealed stunning disproportions of male and female juveniles. The index of masculinity was 142.5 in 1613 (when over 200 children were confirmed), 125 and 123 in 1632 and 1636 respectively, reflecting the more difficult years of the mid to late-1620s; 185 in 1646, 170 in 1654 and 136.5 in the kinder 1660s. It is not clear that parents were letting girls die after they had decided to keep them at birth, but such consistently high rates of masculinity show that parents were making hard choices about which children to raise to adulthood.

(figure 6: Confirmation: Indices of masculinity: Montefollonico)

Montefollonico is just one village, you will say, with good reason. But the profile we find there is reproduced with subtle variations in the communities nearby. We can start again with age pyramids constructed from the status animarum lists, in a number of neighboring parishes. Ciliano was comprised entirely of a handful of poderi, fewer even than San Valentino. We have three lists for it, in 1643, in 1655 and again in 1716. In all three, males consistently outnumbered females, but the age and gender structures were not consistent. In 1643, the village basked in a short interlude of good times. There were 24 males between the ages of 10 and 19 to only 10 females, but this reflected the practice of hiring male garzoni to mind animals. At the younger ages numbers were more balanced, and females outnumbered males 18 to 14. The list just after the famine stands in starker contrast, after the total parish population dropped from 114 to 82. The children vanished; instead of the 32 children below the age of ten, just over a decade previous, in 1655 there were but 8! Six of those were boys. Finally, the list compiled just before the famine of 1716 shows no clear sign of infanticide; 19 male children counterbalanced 18 females below the age of ten. (figure 7: Age pyramids Ciliano)

In Petroio, the population list drawn up for a granducal census in 1638 does not give specific ages, but rather specifies marital status for males and females. There the unmarried boys (fanciulli) outnumbered girls (fanciulle) 60 to 39; adult women (da confessione) outnumbered men 95 to 76. The second document, a status animarum carries no date, but it indicates the name and age of a sometime Montefollonico resident, and enables us to fix the year somewhere around 1677. As we find in Montefollonico that year, there was no apparent discrepancy in the proportions of children; 26 boys under 10 to 24 girls. The small numbers involved in Petroio make it difficult to generalize, but that defect is avoided in the three censuses we have for Torrita di Siena. The first is the long list without ages for 1638, in an era of abundant harvests. It shows no clear discrepancy in the index of masculinity, where boys were outnumbered just a little by girls, 277 to 282. The slight preponderance of boys on the poderi was annulled by the heavy preponderance of girls in the village, which we also saw for Montefollonico. A proper status animarum compiled in 1693 shows a more familiar distribution; 70 boys under ten to 69 girls in the village, and 172 boys to 135 girls on the poderi farms. A second status animarum was compiled just at the end of the great famine of the 1760s, in 1768; it give us 46 boys in the village to 36 girls; and 137 boys to only 95 girls on the sharecropping poderi. In this rich territory, infanticide was clearly preponderant among sharecropping peasants.

While the combined territory is too large to reconstitute families from parish registers, it is feasible to calculate indices of masculinity from baptismal registers over the same period, and compare them with the age pyramids just mentioned. The smaller the community, the wider the statistical variation in the annual number and gender ratio of baptisms. The smallest was Petroio, with only two to three hundred people. It lacks baptismal registers for the crucial central years of the seventeenth century, but has a fairly complete set of registers before and after. Unlike Montefollonico, there were decades when there were more baptized females than males. The index of masculinity was only 96 in the cruel 1590s, but 118.4 in the first years of the next century. The rate fell to 100.5, below the natural rate for the next decade before rocketing up to 132.5 for the more difficult 1620s, and it then coasted down to 108 in the 1630s. In the more settled 1660s, the rate was again less than normal, at 91, before rising to 121 in the harsh 1670s and still 114.6 in the 1680s, falling to 99, 98, and 90 in the three decades to 1720. The mean index for the period covering 1590-1730 is 106.4 (still remembering that the most difficult decade was not included). The highest rate of masculinity we encounter in Petroio, at 133, occurs during the 1760s. In Trequanda with its five or six hundred inhabitants, just to the northeast, the pattern is similar. In the first years of the 1600s, the index of 106 is close to the natural one. The decade following was more difficult, with an index of 121. Trequanda is original in that its overall index of masculinity falls below normal levels for most of the 1600s, to a rate of only 101.6 for the entire period between 1600 and 1720. There too, the cruellest years were the 1760s when the index rose to 125. (figures 8, 9, 10: Baptisms: Petroio, Trequanda, Torrita)

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We should examine the levels in Torrita di Siena closely because it was the breadbasket for the region, in the lush Val di Chiana below Montefollonico’s hilltop. With between 1,500 and 2,000 inhabitants in the agglomeration and on the farms around it, we can be more comfortable with our statistics, even if years of scarcity and plenty were less contrasted than on the higher ground. The baptismal registers for Torrita are almost continuous beginning in 1580. The decade indices of masculinity for baptisms do not oscillate as considerably there as they do elsewhere, but they are not negligible either. In Torrita they alternate high levels with those very close to natural ones, never lower than 102.5. The last decades of the sixteenth century witnessed fairly high levels of 109 and 111 respectively. The beginning of the seventeenth century was just a respite (102.9) before worse years after 1610 (112.9). The decades after 1620 that were more tragic in hill villages behind the town, were calm ones for Torrita, with indices of 102.5, 103 and 102.5. Times were harder after 1650; after an index of 110 for the 1650s, there was a slow harshening of conditions in the thirty years after 1660, with rates of 106, 109 and 114 in those three decades. The culprit was the declining price of grain, that deprived landlords and their sharecroppers of their income. As we see elsewhere, the 1680s figure among the worst years despite the absence of a harvest failure. Observers pointed out the paradoxical connection between widespread misery and the low cost of food.^⁴⁷^ The index of masculinity fell again in the 1690s to 105, only to jump brusquely to 112.8 after 1700, and to decline to natural levels of 103.6 after 1710. As we see elsewhere in the region, high rates of masculinity prevailed in the bad years of the 1760s, with an index of 108.4. If one looks at individual years, we never find the overwhelming imbalance we see operating in Montefollonico; in only one harvest year (1605) did male baptisms come close to double those of females, with 63 opposed to 33. The years of great hunger at mid-century left some trace in the registers, with 74 male baptisms to 53 females in the two harvest years after June 1649 (an index of 139.6). The five years of shortage after June 1763 resulted in 190 male baptisms to only 155 female (122.6). The age pyramids derived from the castello and the poderi in 1768, at the end of the crisis, reveal the telltale deficit of females on the farms. So, in even the most prosperous districts of central Italy during the Enlightenment era, infanticide appears to be an almost routine form of birth control applied by peasants in hard times. (figure 11: Age pyramids Torrita di Siena, 1768)

The confirmation or cresima statistics for five rural communities (Montefollonico, Torrita di Siena, Pienza, Trequanda and Petroio) reinforce the image we have been developing. For 15 lists in Montefollonico between the dates of 1587 and 1738, the overall ratio of males to females was high above the natural one for juveniles, at 130.7. In Torrita the overall mean from the sixteen lists between 1587 and 1739 is 108.9. In Pienza, with fifteen lists between 1587 and 1738, the index of masculinity is identical, at 108.9. In Trequanda and Petroio, with small populations, the rates fluctuated greatly from list to list. In Trequanda they were close to natural rates for juveniles for the fifteen lists in the same years, at 97.3; and in Petroio, they stood at 105.2, contrasting very high rates for the late sixteenth century with very low ones after 1720. Almost everywhere the rates of masculinity were high in the middle years of the 1650s, in the aftermath of the great famine. Trequanda and Petroio would appear to have more girls than boys. The higher proportion of people living in the castello as opposed to sharecropping poderi may be a sufficient explanation for the disparity, just as it would explain persistently high rates of females at baptism. In Petroio, the castello component of the population in 1677 represented over 57 percent, compared to circa 35 percent in Montefollonico and less than 30 percent in Torrita.^⁴⁸^ That of Trequanda constituted about 45 percent in 1640, if we may extrapolate from a manuscript source.^⁴⁹^ We could make a prediction here, that wherever the bulk of the population lived in an agglomerated castello, the proportion of girls to boys should be higher than in those communities where most people lived on sharecropping farms. A systematic study of the states of souls would confirm or invalidate this hypothesis.

(figures 12, 13, 14, 15: Confirmation indices, Torrita, Petroio, Trequanda, Pienza)

Was infanticide just a peasant practice? We have two sets of urban baptismal figures, one for Siena and another for Florence, over the full span of the early modern era.^⁵⁰^ At first sight, the urban ratio appears closer to the natural one, with some oscillations upwards. For the entire span between the calendar years 1581 to 1720, the overall index of masculinity in Siena was 105.5; never falling lower than 101, but reaching levels above 108 in the thirty years after 1601, and again in the decade after 1700. Similarly in Florence, levels hovered around 104 for the entire period, with the lowest level of 102.96 in the twenty (calendar) years after 1750 and the highest level of 106.7 in the twenty years after 1511. But there is a hidden artifact in both these cases. In Siena and Florence, baptism at the city’s baptismal font conferred on girls eligibility to receive charitable dowry supplements when they married. Both authors note that it was common practice for parents to bring girls from their rural or suburban pieve of origin to have them baptized in town. This means that to an unknown extent, there is an over-representation of girls in the urban figures. What is more, peasants brought more girls into the cities in bad years to place in the hospital or to render them more marriageable, having decided to keep them. In both Siena and Florence, the lowest indices of masculinity correspond to the hardest years, contrary to rural patterns. In Siena, the rates of masculinity were only 92.4 in 1590, 88 in 1598, 97 for three consecutive calendar years, 1647-49, and 96.3 in 1655. These rates fell below the natural ones again in the 1760s, at 94.2 and 95.6 in 1764 and 1765, only 82.2 in 1769 in the aftermath of the famine. Rates then bounced upwards, high above natural rates at the end of a series of bad years. One might argue that here were our village newborn girls, carried far from their birthplaces to be baptized in Siena hospitals. But the absolute numbers involved quickly invalidate this hypothesis. In the calendar year of 1649, the total excedent of girls over boys baptized was 15 (including illegitimate births), out of a total of 991 baptisms. There were few years when the number of girls over boys rose above 50, in a city of about 17,000 inhabitants with about a thousand baptisms annually. Offsetting the occasional peak of female baptisms in difficult years, there were years with hugely disproportionate rates of masculinity, beginning with 1555, the year of the siege, with 144.4 males to every 100 females. In the 1620s rates climbed again after bad harvests, to 126 in 1622, 118 in 1628 and 120 in 1630. In 1683 they climbed to 128, and peaked at 129.1 in 1767, a year of high mortality. Foundling hospital statistics for Siena also preclude the idea that parents would have brought large numbers of infants in from the countryside. In the 1760s, when recourse to such hospitals was at its peak, the institutions rarely received more than 200 infants annually, from the city and the entire state.^⁵¹^

Similarly in Florence, the statistical mean close to the natural ratio of 104 is largely fictive; there were female majorities in the worst (calendar) years, 1590, 1593, 1599, 1606-07, 1619-20, 1636 and 1649, 1652, 1671 and 1716. In a city where over 3,000 infants were baptized annually, the surplus of females in bad years rarely above 20 individuals, however. So the Florentine statistics also imply that parents sacrificed their girls in bad years throughout the early modern period, and perhaps beyond. It would be especially interesting to work from states of souls and baptismal records to compare rich families with poor ones in an urban environment, to determine whether or not the evidence supports the Trivers and Willard hypothesis that some social groups might have sacrificed boys over girls.

These results raise as many questions as they answer. Why was infanticide by married couples not denounced by theologians and prosecuted by bishops in their courts? Historians may have to comb the diocesan or Roman archives to search for evidence. Although I have never encountered a text from the church or the state that denounced infanticide by married couples, priests and magistrates must have suspected something. The church’s campaign to shorten the interval between birth and baptism, which it promoted throughout the seventeenth century, might have had this as an aim.^⁵²^ New rules threatening excommunication of parents who neglected to baptize their children quickly appeared late in the sixteenth century.^⁵³^ Infanticide concerns may underpin the increasing imposition of church jurisdiction over midwives. For the midwives and the neighbour women who helped them (donne da parto) could not have been ignorant of the practice. Normally their task was to administer baptism to infants whose lives were in danger of slipping away before a church baptism could be arranged, and they did so, at some periods with much enthusiasm. Judging from the baptismal records, it makes no sense to fix a steady proportion of baptisms administered by midwives. Baptisms conferred at home in Montefollonico averaged four to five annually until Cesare Mazzoni became rector and pievano of San Leonardo in 1625, after which they were very infrequent. As soon as Fausto Moreschini replaced him in 1638, they returned to the old level until 1643, when he too adopted a stricter policy on it. The baptismal registers tell us that the midwives came from different social strata, sometimes very close to the priests, and sometimes not. Of the ten midwives identified in the registers, we have some information about several of them. Aldabella di Pasquino christened infants ten times in Montefollonico, for eight boys and two girls. Like her, Lisabetta di Bernardino Gabbiai was a peasant woman, who administered baptism at least twice, but appears 20 times in the registers as a godmother. Maddalena Bertini-Selvi, married to an aggressive village landowner, baptized babies five times from 1625 to 1641. Besides serving as a midwife, she was the undisputed leader of devout village women that was concretized in her godparenting role, enacted fully 48 times between 1613 and 1659! She eventually had the temerity to criticize her parish priest in public in 1659 for moving her bench in church, and paid for it soon after by appearing in front of the Inquisition charged with performing superstitious healing remedies.^⁵⁴^ Olimpia Pilacci figured as the person to baptize a child in danger a half-dozen times: she was the mother of three feared delinquent sons. Calidonia di Pietro Gabbiai was midwife in the most wretched years of the late 1640s and 1650s. After widowhood she lived with her daughter Francesca, a village harlot who gave birth to four bastards, by village accounts. Both mother and daughter were briefly exiled by the marchese for scandalous behaviour. It may be too bold to assume that these midwives would have snuffed out an infant life on the mother’s bidding, but they could certainly attest to the gender of the infant and to its vigour. Midwives were expected to keep the secrets of their clients. Infanticide would certainly have been one of them.^⁵⁵^

What can we conclude? It looks like the infanticide of legitimate infants at birth before their baptism was a routine response to hard times in early modern Tuscany, and no doubt elsewhere. Even where the overall ratio of males to females seems close to the natural one, there may have existed counterbalancing forms of infanticide eliminating both girls and boys, but in different places and among different social groups. In bad years it might have corresponded to a quarter or a third of live births. It seemed to persist longest among sharecroppers, but the practice was no doubt widespread, and may explain the gradual decline of population across much of Central Italy during the long 17^th^ century, from 1590 to 1730.^⁵⁶^ We should be wary of rates of fertility offered for Italian cities and towns for the entire early modern period, until more detailed attention is directed to this problem. Further work confirming widespread infanticide would nullify our present calculations on rates of natality and mortality – especially infant mortality! We should also be wary of proclaiming the “prosperity” of 17^th^ century Italy, even a waning one, before we have looked closely at the standard of living of most of the population.^⁵⁷^

Infanticide is murder, of course, but people did not consider this murder to be a crime, unlike the one committed by Margarita Sestigiani. Like abortion, which has replaced it today, most people could live with it as an unpleasant fact of life. Girls appear to have been the chief victims of the practice. Perhaps mothers killed boys too when they had enough of them already, and the structure of poor castello households suggests this view. Whether with boys or girls, we do not find in Tuscany the quick replacement of dead children after a harvest failure. The Malthusian model does not apply here. Rather, the cautious and tentative replacement of generations implied that survivors of hard times had little hope that their situation would eventually improve. Having a baby for both sharecroppers and village notables was a long-term investment that might disappoint them. It looks as if parents were making fatal choices to construct a workable family out of the material that nature bestowed on them.