Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Author’s notes
- 1 Losses, Lacunae and Liminality
- 2 European and Medieval Contexts of Infanticide
- 3 The Liminal child and mother
- 4 Love, Law and Liminality
- 5 Constructing Outsiders, Constructing Killers
- 6 Not the Usual Suspects: Communities and Accomplices
- 7 Not the Usual Suspects: Married Women
- 8 Not the Usual Suspects: Men
- 9 Interlude: Infanticide 1700–1950
- 10 Epilogue: Echoes of the Past
- Appendix 1 The 1624 Infanticide Act
- Appendix 2 Note on Sussex Coroners’ inquests
- Appendix 3 Sussex Cases of Violent, Unnatural, Unexplained Infant Death 1547–1686
- Appendix 4 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Water
- Appendix 5 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Throwing
- Appendix 6 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Bloodshed or Extreme Violence
- Appendix 7 Sussex Infant Deaths Showing Direct Involvement of Men
- Index
4 - Love, Law and Liminality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Author’s notes
- 1 Losses, Lacunae and Liminality
- 2 European and Medieval Contexts of Infanticide
- 3 The Liminal child and mother
- 4 Love, Law and Liminality
- 5 Constructing Outsiders, Constructing Killers
- 6 Not the Usual Suspects: Communities and Accomplices
- 7 Not the Usual Suspects: Married Women
- 8 Not the Usual Suspects: Men
- 9 Interlude: Infanticide 1700–1950
- 10 Epilogue: Echoes of the Past
- Appendix 1 The 1624 Infanticide Act
- Appendix 2 Note on Sussex Coroners’ inquests
- Appendix 3 Sussex Cases of Violent, Unnatural, Unexplained Infant Death 1547–1686
- Appendix 4 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Water
- Appendix 5 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Throwing
- Appendix 6 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Bloodshed or Extreme Violence
- Appendix 7 Sussex Infant Deaths Showing Direct Involvement of Men
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Changes to marriage laws, and confusion about matrimonial customs, could place couples in a ‘betwixt and between’ situation with accompanying uncertainty about whether intercourse was permissible. This made unmarried women vulnerable to desertion if they became pregnant. The punishments for ‘fornication’ or bastardy, which included public penance and whipping, both having strong parallels with the rites of passage, were a public demonstration of the woman's liminal status in her society. As the punishments were designed to shame, they contributed to a situation which could easily lead to infanticide. Women would have sought every possible means to avoid pregnancy during courtship. Therefore, the chapter examines the extent to which women could avoid pregnancy by using contraception and / or abortion, and the availability and effectiveness of the practices available.
Keywords: Betrothal and informal marriage; Premarital pregnancy; Birth control; Punishments for bastard bearing; Self-punishment
Jaques: And will you, being a man of your breeding, be married under a bush like a beggar? Get you to church, and have a good priest that can tell you what marriage is. This fellow will but join you together as wainscot.
Touchstone[aside]: I am not in the mind but I were better to be married of him than of another, for he is not like to marry me well; and not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife.
Looking at early modern marriage and attitudes to premarital sex across a gap of four hundred years and more, it is hard to imagine what religious, legal and social groups were thinking, or indeed what they expected to happen, as a result of their strictures. As apprenticeships had to be completed before couples married, so that they were financially self-sufficient, most women wed around the age of twenty-six. But, getting married was risibly easy – a few words in the present tense, with no other ceremony or even witnesses, constituted a binding union. It is unsurprising that some couples, unwilling to wait, married informally and that, after a change of heart (usually by the man), a woman could find herself in a union she could not prove, pregnant and abandoned.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Infanticide in Tudor and Stuart England , pp. 113 - 150Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019