Readers of a canon law collection originally compiled in early eighth-century Ireland would have encountered a striking idea. Any woman who took potions to avoid conceiving would be ‘guilty of as many murders as [children] she ought to have conceived or born’. Did this mean that contraception was child-murder? That every sperm was sacred? There was no specialized intellectual discourse on abortion in the Early Middle Ages against which to make immediate sense of the idea. Condemnation of abortion was integrated into broader attempts to educate the clergy and define the boundaries of Christian communities.

‘It cannot be successfully argued,’ wrote John Noonan, ‘that the monastic code on marital morality was worked out by persons with no pastoral responsibilities or sympathies’. Even this pioneering historian of birth control understated the significance of ‘pastoral responsibilities’. A tradition of condemnation was the effect of a wider pastoral momentum – tradition or even traditions. In comparison with classical Greek philosophers, Talmudic thinkers or later medieval casuists, mitigating voices will be harder to hear and dissenting voices altogether silent. A corpus of early medieval ecclesiastical texts consistently condemned abortion. But abortion did not consistently throw up a single moral problem. Abortion threw up a range of practical and intellectual problems – moral, social, sexual, ecclesiological, eschatological – which early medieval churchmen construed and responded to differently. The task of the rest of this book will be to identify, connect and, sometimes, keep separate distinct threads across this corpus. There was no single perspective on abortion within the church, but a spectrum of focal points and blind-spots. One reason for this is plain. Insofar as there was a western ecclesiastical tradition on abortion, it was developed and adapted to needs in the present. On closer inspection this tradition was the aggregate of localized attempts to educate and discipline the clergy, and to shape the beliefs and practices of communities.

Textual tools produced to these ends, including canonical collections, penitentials and sermons, form our principal evidence for how churchmen thought about abortion. These texts resist historical investigation, and not only because some are difficult to date and contextualize precisely. Most are derivative, generic and lacking in individuality. Excerpts from one text were recycled in countless others. Recycling constitutes a visible and very real continuity; but continuity can also obscure particularity.