Writing in the early tenth century, Regino of Prüm looked back on 855 as a watershed year. Lothar II, the new ruler of the Carolingian middle kingdom, married a noblewoman, Theutberga. ‘The greatest ruin resulted from this union,’ rued Regino, ‘not only for him, but also for his whole kingdom’. The marriage quickly unravelled. Within a few years, Lothar and his supporters had made their first moves to dissolve the union in a way which left the young king free to remarry. Theutberga was accused of the most sordid crimes, including incest and abortion. The attempt to engineer a divorce quickly escalated into a cause célèbre. It sucked in an expanding ensemble cast, a who'swho of church and state in the mid ninth century. Debate over the divorce dragged on for over a decade. It finally ended in 869, when Lothar died en route back from Rome, believing that he had finally obtained approval for his marriage to another woman from a pope whose predecessor had been his most implacable opponent. To examine the only abortion accusation surviving from the early medieval west requires delving deep into this Charles-and-Diana moment in Carolingian history.

Such lurid accusations against the wife of a Christian ruler were not utterly without a precedent, though we must shift back in time to early Byzantium to find it. In the sixth century, Procopius recounted squalid stories about the empress Theodora. An eager participant in drunken orgies, ‘though [Theodora] was pregnant many times, yet practically always she was able to contrive to bring about an abortion immediately’. Theodora's name, like Theutberga's, was dragged through the mud. But there are important differences too. Procopius's picaresque narrative was not just a character assassination of the empress. Theodora's abortions unveiled the true character of her husband Justinian, ‘who did not disdain … to lie with a woman who had not only encompassed herself round about with every other rank defilement but had also practised infanticide time and again by voluntary abortions.