Rosa Rubicondior: Christian Misogyny - How Christians Abused Poor Women in Mediaeval Europe

The Christian nationalists’ 'Golden Age'.

How reproductive injustice in early modern Europe could mirror that of today | EurekAlert!

A paper just published in The Journal of Modern History by Erin Maglaque of Durham University, UK, should serve as a warning to anyone tempted to believe the Christian Church ought to have its former privileged position in society restored. It is especially relevant to women — particularly women in the USA — where liberal values are under sustained attack and far-right Christian white supremacists are gaining increasing influence within the Republican Party, with the arch-misogynist Donald Trump back in the White House, posturing (unconvincingly) as a devout fundamentalist Christian.

The paper details a history of institutionalised abuse of poor women and the denial of their reproductive freedom. The resulting “foundling hospitals” — ostensibly established as places where poor, unmarried mothers could abandon their babies in the belief they would be safe and cared for — in practice often functioned as instruments of population control. They encouraged desperate mothers to surrender their children, only for those infants to die in appalling numbers, with mortality rates as high as 91.5%.

The Middle Ages in Europe were a time when the Christian Church dominated public life; when governments ruled the people not for the people, but for the Church. It was a period of strict social hierarchy, with the poor at the bottom, and poor women especially occupying the lowest tier of society, with little or no freedom — a level of enforced female subservience that would be the envy of any Taliban purist.

It is also the era seen by many fundamentalist Christians — especially those of the American far right — as a “golden age” to which they aspire to return the United States, and ultimately the rest of the world: a time when self-appointed clerics legislated for everyone else, and women were expected to “know their place.”

It is, of course, in service of this ambition that right-wing organisations such as the Discovery Institute were established by fundamentalist Christians, with the express aim of promoting an unelected Christian theocracy in the USA (see the Wedge Strategy). Their vision entails imposing Levitical-style laws on the population — laws that would mandate the death penalty for countless American women for not being virgins on their wedding night (Deuteronomy 22:13–21), and laws that would require a rapist to purchase his victim from her father and bind her to a lifetime of sexual slavery and domestic servitude (Deuteronomy 22:28–29).

It is against this backdrop that the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the various state-level attempts to deny family planning services should be understood. Women are losing the right to bodily autonomy and sexual freedom, just as they did under the Church-dominated order of medieval Europe.

Background^ Women in Catholic-Dominated Medieval Europe. Medieval Europe is often romanticised by modern Christian fundamentalists as an age of faith, order, and “traditional values”. In reality, for most women — especially poor women — it was a world of legal inequality, coercion, and pervasive institutional control by the Church.

Some key features of women’s lives under Catholic dominance included:

Legal subordination to men
Women were generally treated as dependants of fathers or husbands, with limited independent legal standing. Marriage transferred authority over a woman from her family to her spouse, reinforcing male control as the social norm.
Marriage as a social contract, not a choice
Marriages were often arranged for economic or political reasons. Consent in the modern sense was frequently irrelevant, especially among the poor, where survival depended on compliance with local power structures.
Reproductive control as religious discipline
The Church regarded women’s sexuality as inherently dangerous and in need of regulation. Pregnancy outside marriage was treated not as a social hardship but as a moral crime, with punishment directed overwhelmingly at women.
Severe stigma and punishment for “sexual transgression”
Female chastity was obsessively policed. Women accused of adultery, fornication, or even suspicion of impropriety could face public humiliation, violence, exile, or death — while male behaviour was often excused or ignored.
Childbirth as a constant danger
With no modern medicine, childbirth carried high mortality risks. Women might endure repeated pregnancies, miscarriages, and infant deaths, with little autonomy over their own bodies.
Limited access to education and public life
Literacy and formal learning were largely closed to women outside convents or elite households. Most were excluded from political power, professional roles, and intellectual life.
Religious institutions as instruments of control
Convents sometimes offered women refuge or education, but the Church also functioned as the main authority defining women’s roles: obedient wives, silent daughters, or penitents responsible for male sin.
Poverty and abandonment criminalised
Desperate mothers — widowed, unmarried, or destitute — were often blamed rather than helped. Institutions such as foundling hospitals emerged in part because society offered poor women few alternatives except disgrace, abandonment, or starvation.
Theological misogyny embedded in doctrine
Influential Church thinkers portrayed women as morally weaker, more carnal, and closer to temptation — echoes of Eve’s “guilt” that shaped centuries of discrimination.

Medieval Europe was not a “golden age” of Christian virtue. It was a rigid hierarchy in which the Church’s moral authority was enforced through law, stigma, and punishment — and women, especially poor women, bore the harshest burden.

The background to the Erin Maglanque's paper is explain in a press release by University of Chicago Press Journals made available via EurekAlert!.

How reproductive injustice in early modern Europe could mirror that of today
“There was no such thing as reproductive freedom for poor women in early modern Catholic Europe.” A new article in the Journal of Modern History examines several facets of “reproductive unfreedom” in the early modern period: namely, single motherhood, foundling hospitals, and wet nursing.
In particular, “Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe” investigates how these formations of “delegated mothering” were disproportionately experienced by poor women and resulted in drastically higher infant mortality rates. Ultimately, author Erin Maglaque argues, the history of delegated mothering is one of structural violence against poor women and their children.

In early modern Europe, especially following the Council of Trent and its solidification of Catholic doctrine, single motherhood was intensely stigmatized. And although single or poor mothers were thus incentivized to ensure that an illegitimate child was “unlikely to live to its first birthday,” author Erin Maglaque writes, institutions emerged to present an alternative to infanticide.

One of these was the foundling hospital. Established so that single mothers could anonymously abandon their infants on its doorstep, the foundling hospital nevertheless offered little sanctuary for the children it took on. At one hospital in Florence, mortality rates for foundling children reached as high in some years as 915 per thousand. Some historians have debated if the existence of the foundling hospital in fact encouraged infant abandonment and subsequent death, as a way of culling an unwanted population; regardless of good or ill intent, writes Maglaque, the result of this negligence was one of structural violence and death.

Other impoverished mothers turned over their children to wet nurses to look after while they worked, or they became wet nurses themselves in order to earn income. Wealthy families could afford a private wet nurse, but many wet nurses working in less protected circumstances were responsible for multiple children while also engaged in other labor.

Due to these “circumstances of scarcity,” Maglaque writes, infant death was common in wet nursing arrangements. In addition to being overworked, some wet nurses didn’t have enough milk for multiple infants, even while they were forced to take on their care in order to make ends meet. Additionally, some of them committed fraud, allowing the babies charged to them to perish while still collecting wages for their work, demonstrating, writes Maglaque, “how reproductive unfreedom was perpetuated not only by institutions but also by the women who were themselves both victims and agents of violence."

Contrasting these systems of punition, Maglaque highlights programs of family support in some areas of Catholic Europe that led to reductions in infant mortality rates. When religious or municipal organizations established funds to support new mothers, writes Maglaque, infant deaths saw steep drop-offs—and yet, almost all of these programs supported legitimate children or children with two parents, not the illegitimate children of single mothers. As such, these initiatives created a hierarchy of care, further cementing single mothers and their offspring as “the collateral damage acceptable to a society that systematically deprived women of the ability to raise their children in safe and sustainable ways.”

Such a framing, Maglaque concludes, still resonates today. Despite living in a contemporary society characterized by many instances of reproductive injustice, Maglaque writes, feminism within the academy has become co-opted and diluted, rendering it less capable of responding adequately to the crises we face. “It is worth trying to understand how the structural violence of reproductive unfreedom worked in early modern Catholic society,” Maglaque concludes—“if only as a dark and imperfect mirror held up to our own freedom.”

Publication:
Erin Maglaque
Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe
The Journal of Modern History 2025 97(4), 781-809. DOI: 10.1086/738055

Abstract
This article argues that reproductive unfreedom was a form of structural violence that significantly constrained poor women’s and children’s lives across early modern Catholic Europe. Reproductive freedom entails parents’ ability to raise their own children safely and sustainably. This was impossible for the thousands of poor women who were forced to delegate their mothering by abandoning children to foundling hospitals, where mortality rates were extraordinarily high through much of the period. How did these hundreds of thousands of infant lives become “ungrievable”? This article takes apart the social logic of reproductive unfreedom, and it investigates how structural violence implicated not only institutions but also the intimate dynamics between women and the children in their care. It pays particular attention to the multiple ways that care work was coerced, and how women refused to undertake this care, which often meant that infants became collateral damage of labor disputes. The article thus contributes to scholarship on early modern social and gender history by reframing the history of delegated mothering as a history of structural violence perpetrated on poor women and children, and perpetrated in turn by poor women themselves.

Erin Maglaque
Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe
The Journal of Modern History 2025 97(4), 781-809. DOI: 10.1086/738055

© 2025 The University of Chicago.

Maglaque’s paper is therefore not merely an historical curiosity, but a reminder of what “Christian values” have so often meant in practice when Christianity has held institutional power: not charity, not compassion, not dignity for the vulnerable, but control — especially control over women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproductive freedom. The foundling hospitals were not aberrations in an otherwise benign system, but products of a social order in which poverty was moralised, female autonomy was feared, and suffering was reframed as divine necessity.

It is no coincidence that the legal and social regimes idealised by today’s Christian nationalists resemble, in their harshness and misogyny, those imposed by other religious fundamentalists. The Old Testament laws so often invoked by Christian theocrats — laws prescribing death for sexual “impurity”, compulsory marriage to rapists, and the reduction of women to male property — differ in detail but not in spirit from the codes enforced by the Taliban or other forms of Islamic extremism. The resemblance is not accidental: both draw from the same ancient Near Eastern patriarchal world, where honour, lineage, and female subservience were the organising principles of society.

This is the uncomfortable truth that modern apologists prefer not to confront. Theocratic rule, whether draped in the language of Christendom or of the Caliphate, leads to the same destination: a society governed not by universal rights, but by clerical authority; not by freedom of conscience, but by compulsory obedience; not by equality, but by hierarchy sanctified as holy.

Those who romanticise medieval Europe as a golden age are not calling for a return to faith, but for a return to power — power exercised over the poor, the vulnerable, and above all over women. Maglaque’s history shows what that world looked like. And the lesson is stark: when religion becomes law, it is rarely the powerful who suffer under it.

This is the world modern Christian nationalists invoke when they speak wistfully of ‘restoring Christian values’.

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