The Unwanted Child. The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany. By Joel F. Harrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 456 pp.)

Abstract

In his fascinating study, Joel F. Harrington acquaints the reader with the realities of child abandonment and infanticide and the challenges that early modern social distortions, triggered by wars, economic crisis, and climate change, to name but a few, held for poor families. Focusing on five poor families in the city of Nuremberg, the author pursues a microhistorical approach. The density of archival sources makes his investigation conspicuous among the ones on the market already; Harrington's overriding achievement is to provide a view of early modern history that contributes to its so-called specifics, rather than to its potential for yet another unifying and therefore simplifying theory. This pivotal characteristic makes the book essential for students as well as for researchers. Harrington's five case studies lead us into distinct, though interwoven, social fields. In his first chapter, he offers the example of an unmarried mother who kills her child shortly after giving birth. As soon as rumors began to circulate, she was arrested, confessed to the birth and the death of the child, and was condemned to death in 1578. Working outward from this incident, Harrington undertakes a broad discussion of how unwed mothers managed to survive with or without children in 16th- and 17th-century Nuremberg. He focuses on a structural cause of illegitimate pregnancies, that is, subjugation to masters and fellow male servants. In his second chapter Harrington concentrates on the “absconding” father as one of the main reasons for early modern infanticide and social distortion. Military service in general and mercenary service in particular allowed men to ignore or evade their social responsibilities to mother and child. In chapter 3 the author widens the study's horizon by turning to what he calls the “beleaguered magistrate.” In so doing, Harrington attempts to overcome the usually claimed gap between norms and practices that often accompany a “top-down” approach. From this perspective, the magistrate comes into sight as one of many actors. Indeed, Harrington highlights norms and practices and their variously induced interconnections for every social group or field in question. The interplay between state actors, common people, and social institutions, such as orphanages and prisons, becomes visible in the book's fourth chapter on street orphans and youth gangs in the 16th and early-17th century. Of particular interest here are parents and their respective social equivalents, such as blood relatives, foster parents, and various neighbors. This discussion makes particularly convincing Harrington's contention that the history of unwanted children is the history of multifaceted and socially embedded child circulation. The fifth chapter deals with state wards and the social life in so called Findelhäuser, the public houses where foundlings were sheltered. Much of what Harrington tells us here about mortality rates, social integration, and the overall importance of Findelhäuser for their former inhabitants has been demonstrated by other path-breaking studies on Waisenhäuser and Findelhäuser as forms of poor relief (i.e. Thomas Max Safley, 1997; Markus Meumann, 1995). In reading the information the way he does, Harrington frames a narrative of the history of childhood in which the ways children were treated are indicative of break points in early modern social interaction.