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
- 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
Most of the stories people told about abortion in the Early Middle Ages are hidden. We have whispers of only a few like the unpleasant story with which Theutberga was slandered. In the eighth century, an author took it upon himself to retell the life of Germanus in an abridged form; the Vita Germani brevior runs to just a few pages. The author had abbreviated the life so that he could ‘now relate what the story teaches so truly’. The first lesson in this distilled life of Germanus nevertheless remained the saint's miraculous survival in the womb:
The land of Autun earned the increase of his birth; a native within its boundaries, his father Eleutherius and also his mother Eusebia were descended from a noble and distinguished line. So when the mother had felt him in the womb not much time after the birth of a previous son, she wanted to extinguish inside her he whom Christ was calling to himself as a soldier to heaven; and after she received a drink, she sipped poisons mixed with swallowed wine. In the mouth of death the mother drank what she knew to be abortive, aiming to inflict danger. Behold! The bundle did not know the suffering of being thrown out. The extraordinary boy felt the pain in his mother's flesh more than he had feared the risk to his life. The mother, whom the punishment for parricide had encircled, was snatched away from her crime. Let the wondrous and clear sign be obvious to all, that blessed Germanus was known as a miracle worker before he reached the light from his mother's womb!
We have heard it all before. By this third telling, I can no longer surprise my reader. But one lesson which the story ‘teaches so truly’ is to resist the numbness of repetition. Reams of repetitive texts addressing abortion recirculated across the Early Middle Ages. As this book has traced, they were reread with new eyes, reinvigorated with new meanings and revised in what Regino of Prüm had called ‘these, our perilous times’.
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- Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500–900 , pp. 296 - 299Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015