Illegitimate parenthood in early modern Europe

ABSTRACT

This special section presents new research on the ways in which unmarried parents – particularly women – negotiated illegitimacy, how they interacted with urban institutions, and what legal resources they had. Throughout the early modern period, extramarital pregnancies were an important issue of concern to urban authorities and city dwellers. In line with recent historiographic strands, the two articles in this section approach the topic of unwed motherhood from below. The articles pay particular attention to the interactions between institutions and unwed mothers, the diversity of identities of unmarried parenthood, and the agency of unwed mothers in early modern Europe. Geographically, the contributions cover evidence from cities in Italy, Germany, Holland and Switzerland. In this introduction, we contextualize the most important issues addressed in the contributions. We explain why early modern societies regarded unwed motherhood as such a serious problem and expound the concept of ‘agency’ in relation to illegitimacy. We then elaborate on the institutions that dealt with unmarried parenthood in early modern Europe and their possible effect on the agency of unmarried mothers. This includes the impact of changes on the treatment of illegitimacy by institutions, and the North-South divide with regard to attitudes towards unwed parenthood.

KEYWORDS:

• Illegitimacy
• urban history
• socio-legal history
• gender
• early modern history
• urban institutions

1. Introduction

‘Why study illegitimacy?’ wondered Richard Adair in his study on Courtship, illegitimacy and marriage in early modern England (Adair, 1996, p. 2). It is remarkable how much time and research historians have devoted to so-called ‘bastardy’ in the past. In the 1970s in England, the history of illegitimacy was driven by the question of how and why illegitimacy rates dramatically rose in the latter half of the eighteenth century (Laslett, 1977; Shorter, 1971, 1973). Since the 1980s scholars rather focused on the moral issues attached to unwed parenthood and illegitimate children. Adair explains that historians might have given so much attention to illegitimacy, because bastardy was often characterized as deviant behaviour, leading to stigmatization by societies. Studying illegitimacy therefore informs historians about what societies across time and space considered improper, what kind of behaviour crossed moral boundaries, and how societies dealt with those who violated the standards and values. Illegitimacy has also attracted historians, because it touches the core of family values, as it involves sexual reproduction, kinship, marriage, inheritance and property (Kuehn, 2002).

Most studies on early modern illegitimacy have focused on family values, paternal households, and marriage law, which portrayed unwed mothers as vulnerable, liable and isolated women (Kuehn, 2002; Teichman, 1982). In the last decades, family historians have begun to revise the rather negative and passive portrayal of the lives of unmarried mothers, by shifting the attention to ‘pauper agency’. They began to look at the opportunities and options of women facing single motherhood, the space to make choices, and their attempts to improve their lives (Froide, 2005; Hitchcock 1997, Kamp & Schmidt, 2018; Schmidt & Van der Heijden, 2016; Sharpe, 1999; Vermeesch, 2016, 2019; Walker, 2003). This special section presents new research on the ways in which unmarried parents – particularly women – negotiated illegitimacy, how they interacted with urban institutions, and what legal resources they had. The contributions to this special section of the History of the Family are based on papers presented at the European Social Science History Conference in Belfast in 2018.

Let us start by briefly going into the definition of illegitimacy or bastardy. Generally, illegitimacy or bastardy refers to children whose parents were not married at the time of his or her conception or birth. In the literature on early modern illegitimacy, illegitimate parenthood is usually understood as fatherhood or motherhood out of wedlock (Adair, 1996; Gerber, 2012; Kuehn, 2002; Williams, 2018). Several historians have addressed the problem of the legal definition of illegitimacy, because it was related to various marriage laws and customs. Civil law, canon law, and criminal law had different concerns and definitions, and some laws even included hierarchies of illegitimacies (Adair, 1996, p. 8; Kuehn, 2002, pp. 33–69; Macfarlane, 1980). In their contribution to this section, Schmidt, Kamp and Muurling distinguish between bridal pregnancy and pregnancy or birth of children whose parents never married to each other. In this special section, the authors focus their examinations on the last form of unwed parenthood. Since in early modern Europe all forms of extramarital sex were punishable by law, unwed parents risked being sentenced for the crime of fornication. Compared to men and childless women accused of fornication, women with illegitimate children often received more serious punishments which emphasized their unacceptable behaviour. In early modern Holland approximately 25% of women of those being prosecuted by the urban courts for premarital sex or unmarried cohabiting, were pregnant at the moment of their arrest (Van der Heijden, 1998, p. 121, 2016, pp. 56–75). Clearly, throughout the early modern period, extramarital pregnancies were an important issue of concern to urban authorities and city dwellers.

The contributions to this special section are in line with the new strands in research on unwed parenthood in early modern societies, which focus on bottom-up perspectives and the agency of unmarried mothers. The articles pay particular attention to the interactions between institutions and unwed mothers, the diversity of identities of unmarried parenthood, and the agency of unwed mothers in early modern Europe. Geographically, the contributions cover evidence from cities in Italy, Germany, Holland and Switzerland. In this introduction, we will contextualize the most important issues addressed in the contributions. We will start explaining why early modern societies regarded unwed motherhood as such a serious problem. We will then give a short introduction on the concept of ‘agency’. The final section will elaborate on the institutions that dealt with unmarried parenthood in early modern Europe and their possible effect on the agency of unmarried mothers. This includes the impact of changes on the treatment of illegitimacy by institutions, and the North-South divide with regard to attitudes towards unwed parenthood.

2. The problem of unwed parenthood

There are several reasons why early modern societies regarded unwed motherhood as such a serious problem. First, the problem of unmarried parenthood was connected to deeply rooted notions of (female) honour and double standards regarding sexual behaviour of men and women. The shame associated with unmarried parenthood was – and in some parts across the world still is – strongly gendered (Kertzer, 1991; Williams, 2018, p. 5). Both unmarried parents of children born outside wedlock may have been shamed and felt shame, but in early modern societies, women were blamed and shamed the most. The burden of unmarried parenthood was mainly on women. Women wore the physical burden: they were faced with the physical consequences of a pregnancy and birth. They also had to deal with the emotional considerations regarding concealment and openness; should and could they conceal their pregnancy and the birth? Kuehn notes that in early modern Florence ‘As a life without honour was considered a living death, the dishonour of illegitimacy had to be denied or circumvented’ (Kuehn, 2002, p. ix). Florentine women, who did not succeed in removing shame by getting the father of the child to marry her or failed to hide the illicitness of the sexual act, had little choice but to abandon the child. Women faced the practical and daily consequences of an out-of-wedlock-child, the shame associated with unmarried motherhood, and the stigmatization of their children, who were labelled as ‘bastards’. Social norms and attitudes towards unwed motherhood were generally negative in the early modern period, but there were variations in the incidence and prosecution of illegitimacy. In his work on unmarried motherhood in London between 1700 and 1850, S. Williams shows that in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bastardy increased, while punishment for fornication and bastardy declined (Williams, 2018, p. 231). At the same time, notions of honour and shame could vary across European regions. The strong emphasis on honour and feelings of shame in Florence might not be apparent to the same extent in other European regions (Van der Heijden & Muurling, 2018).

Second, child abandonment and poverty related to unwed motherhood caused major financial problems for urban governments, poor relief institutions and churches. Urban charitable institutions took responsibility for the maintenances of illegitimate children and provided poor relief to support poor unwed mothers. As a response to the financial burden of unwed motherhood, local governments felt the need to set up laws against fornication, and to prosecute and punish particularly unmarried mothers. In seventeenth-century Holland, unwed mothers were punished more severely than women accused of fornication without illegitimate children (Van der Heijden, 2016). Urban authorities and churches also wished to regulate the financial contribution of fathers of illegitimate children and to instruct midwives to retrieve the father’s name during childbirth.

Finally, concerns about illegitimacy were related to conflicts about family interests, inheritance and property. Although both Catholics and Protestants prescribed parental consent for marriage formation, the principle of consensual marriage and the conjugal praxis deriving from it conflicted with family strategies (Seidel Menchi, 2016). From the sixteenth century, couples who exchanged marriage vows followed by sexual intercourse without their parents’ consent violated religious and civil laws and took the risk that their child was born out of wedlock. Parents from boys from wealthy families particularly would not allow their son to enter into such a marriage, as it would jeopardize the transfer of family property and goods (Crawford 2001; Hardwick, 2009; Schutte et al., 2001). Young seduced women from poorer families were often left empty-handed, without a marriage and financial arrangement, but with the practical responsibility for an illegitimate child.

3. ‘Agency’ and unwed parenthood

In the case of unwed parenthood, the main focus has been on the fates of unwed mothers and the nature of these fates has given rise to debate among historians as we saw above. On the one hand, a number of scholars have emphasised the poverty of these women, their marginal and isolated position that worsened because of single motherhood, and the way secular and church authorities penalized these women (Fuchs & Moch, 1990; Kuehn, 2002; Teichman, 1982). Recently, however, the alleged victimhood of single mothers has been reconsidered. Local governments or neighbours did not necessarily act against such women – they could also be supportive. Quite a few single mothers demonstrated legal agency and successfully took legal recourse against the alleged fathers of their illegitimate children (Kamp & Schmidt, 2018; Vermeesch, 2016, 2019). Historians have shown that single motherhood was not necessarily associated with relative social isolation and marginalization, but that some women rather sought early marriage by taking the risk of prenuptial pregnancy and that many illegitimate children were conceived in courtship (Muir, 2018). This dichotomy in the interpretation of illegitimacy, then, links up with current debates on so-called ‘pauper agency’ and ‘gender agency’. Instead of interpreting the experiences of unwed parents, and particularly of unwed mothers who were usually hit the hardest and carried the burden of the unwanted pregnancy, solely in terms of the fate of victims of oppressive structures, we believe that it is fruitful to also look at these women as actors and to explore their agency.

The concept of agency has recently been warmly welcomed by scholars working on the history of the poor, criminal history and gender history. In its most plane form, the term ‘agency’ can be defined as the ‘ability of capacity to act or exert power’ (Oxford English Dictionary); it has been applied as ‘the ability to define one’s goals and act upon them’ (Van Zanden, 2017, p. 1) but it may also refer to resistance against social norms and power relations (see Simonton & Montenach, 2013, p. 4). With elaborate definitions of the concept, historians often respond to the critique that the concept has also met. The risk of the use of ‘agency’ is the implicit, and unjust assumption that people acted intentionally and self-consciously, and that it attributes power to vulnerable people that they did not have. Martha Howell, who recently reviewed the ways in which the concept was used in the context of the history of women in the late medieval and early modern period takes a critical stance and pleads for ‘rigorous attention to just what powers we are claiming for women when we assign them agency’ (Howell, 2019, p. 22).

Montenach and Simonton make explicit their choice for a nuanced definition and see agency as ‘a process and mosaic of changing opportunities’, ‘not conceptualised strictly in terms of resistance to male authority’, but as arising from ‘the variety of everyday interactions in which women accommodated, negotiated or manipulated social rules and gender roles’ (Simonton & Montenach, 2013, pp. 4–5). They do not deny the existence of the many barriers and restrictions imposed on women, but are able to show how women also inventively exploited the system’s loopholes and took advantage of options to achieve economic independence not attributed to them by the social norms.

In their examination of seventeenth and eighteenth-century plebeian Londoners, Hitchcock and Shoemaker go one step further. They look at the shared tactics that ‘turns individual actions […] into a collective, at times even strategic, engagement with the social system’ but also explicitly links the agency of the poor and criminals to historical change (Hitchcock & Shoemaker, 2015, pp. 20, 23). They thereby provide a refreshing and valuable perspective on the old ‘structure versus agency’ debate. Hitchcock and Shoemaker emphasise that they ‘do not claim any real self-consciousness of the part of the poor and the criminal beyond a gnawing need to achieve a particular outcome in a narrowly confined negotiation with power’. Yet as such, by trying to achieve a particular outcome in the narrowly confined negotiation, the poor were able to ‘open narrow cracks in apparently working hegemonic systems and stimulated change’ (Hitchcock & Shoemaker, 2015, pp. 17–18).

These two studies show the gains of the concept. A focus on agency enables us to see that, notwithstanding the precarious situation, vulnerable people like unwed parents were not solely passive victims. Looking at the choices they made and the way in which they negotiated or manipulated the rules help to explain and understand the variety of their experiences. Moreover, a focus on agency also enables a shift in the focus from a top-down approach of unmarried motherhood in which the experiences of women are described as determined by the law, legal regulations and procedures of the church and local authorities, to a bottom-up approach that leaves room for considering the choices and the acts of women, the way in which they both used the institutions and created leeway and opportunities. Such an approach has proved to be fruitful in the understanding of the development of early modern legal institutions. Institutions were established by authorities, but not only got its shape in the hands of those authorities. The functioning of the institutions also depended upon the way in which people chose to make use of it (Dinges, 2004; Van der Heijden & Vermeesch, 2019). Also, for unmarried women confronted with an unwanted pregnancy, there was a ‘myriad of formal, semi-formal and informal options’ that gave them the ‘opportunity to strategically use the various possibilities and choose the form of settlement that would serve their interests best’ (Van der Heijden & Vermeesch, 2019, p. 4). It is, of course, important not to overestimate the power of subordinated groups or individuals. But an advantage of the concept is that it provides the ability to expose the interactions between the institutions and ordinary people and to show how both top-down and bottom-up forces affected the development of the institutions.

4. Institutions

The options and survival opportunities of unmarried mothers were very much related to early modern social control mechanisms and disciplinary actions of urban institutions. Studies of the uses of justice have shown the broad variety of institutional actions and different forms of secular and ecclesiastical institutions dealing with bastardy and unwed parenthood across early modern Europe (Adair, 1996; Gerber, 2012; Kamp & Schmidt, 2018; Vermeesch, 2016; Van der Heijden, 2016). The contributions to this special section reflect the various ways in which urban institutions across Europe handled and dealt with illegitimacy, but the articles also demonstrate the great similarities between European regions.

First, poor relief institutions played a central role in the social disciplining of unmarried parents. Most studies on illegitimacy have concentrated on regulations and proceedings initiated by urban governments, secular criminal courts, church courts and consistories. Scholars have found ample evidence of how and to what extent unmarried parents were prosecuted and disciplined by governmental and church bodies, but their examinations much less included poor relief bodies. The articles in this special section demonstrate that charity foundations and poor relief organizations played a vital role in various ways. Lorraine Chappuis describes how the hôpital général in early modern Geneva actively led inquiries into illicit pregnancies to ascertain the identities of future mothers and fathers. The institution thus hoped to prevent child abandonment and to force the parents, and especially the father, to assume financial responsibility. In the not unlikely event that fathers thus assumed liability, they were free to ‘give away’ the child to the hospital by paying an amount of money. Mothers who were left with the sole responsibility of their child more often than not received monthly allowances from the hospital, at least if they belonged to the local community.

Schmidt, Kamp and Muurling show how in the early modern Dutch Republic, Germany and Italy the intervention by poor relief institutions could vary widely. In the Dutch Republic, poor relief institutions were first and foremost concerned with the potential financial burden of illegitimate children and their mothers. Therefore, they often acted as de facto allies of the mother to claim support by the putative father, a phenomenon that has been described for eighteenth-century Antwerp as well (Vermeesch, 2019) and mirrors the functioning of the Old Poor Law in England and Wales (Nutt, 2010). In Italy, on the other hand, restoration of honour was the prime objective of poor relief institutions. Accepting illegitimate babies in foundling hospitals was widely adopted to try erase the sin of unwed motherhood. Even non-locals had access to these institutions. This stands in contrast with the situation in the Dutch Republic, Germany and Geneva and Great Britain, where unwed mothers who did not belong to the local community could much less rely on local poor relief systems, and were sometimes even sent away.

Second, unwed mothers were not necessarily poor and isolated women as was once thought. The papers in this section reconsider which social groups the parents of illegitimate children came from. Loraine Chappuis found people belonging to middling groups in the records she studied. In addition, the several papers in this section evidence how quite a few single mothers could rely on family and friends to negotiate their situation, to call in the help of urban institutions, and to pressure putative fathers. Third, the articles demonstrate that the agency of women in relation to institutions that were involved in illegitimacy has often been underestimated. Courts, consistories and charity bodies were disciplinary instruments against unwed motherhood, but the same institutions provided support and assistance to unmarried mothers in need. Disciplinary actions against unwed parents were taken, but the emphasis seemed to have been on the solution and much less on punishment. The fact that disciplining and mediation went hand in glove is very much apparent in early modern Germany, where one and the same court was responsible for both criminal persecution of extra-marital intercourse and civil mediation over paternity and broken marriage vows. Women who took legal recourse over paternity thus self-disclosed their crime, yet had much more to win than to lose. In Geneva, most women readily complied with the sixteenth-century edict that compelled them to reveal their illicit pregnancy, which made them liable for punishment over sexual offence. They were then called to appear in front of the magistrate together with the putative father of their child. Seventy-five percent of those putative fathers were ordered to take care of the child. The case of eighteenth-century Marguerite Rojoux that Chappuis elaborates in detail pointedly illustrates how the Genevan magistrates mixed criminal prosecution with leniency and help to the mother. Rojoux was imprisoned for sexual transgression and gave birth in prison. Later, she however also received help from the magistrate, she managed to marry, and her bastard son later became an apprentice and then a citizen of the city of Geneva. It appears, then, that some women were well aware of the options various urban institutions offered them, and the activities of these institutions were very much a response to the needs and difficulties arising from unwed parenthood. These findings show the fruitfulness of shifting the attention from top-down social control mechanisms to a bottom-perspective, that may provide a much more nuanced view on how early modern European societies perceived and dealt with illegitimate mothers.

The articles also show differences in the responses of urban institutions to illegitimacy. The article by Schmidt, Kamp and Muurling for instance shows a striking difference between the involvement of courts in paternity cases in Dutch Republic and Germany. Whereas Dutch local criminal courts were less strict in the prosecution when couples settled their conflicts over paternity out of court, German local courts made sure that any settlement was (also) approved by the consistory court. In most cases studied in this section, governments generally strived to avoid financial liability of illegitimate children, yet in Italy, the preservation of honour inclined local poor relief organisations to offer women ample opportunity to leave their children in foundling homes.

The case studies presented in this special section thus raise questions about regional differences in the agency of unmarried mothers in relation to the working of urban institutions. A central topic in European comparative work is the North-South divide and the impact of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation on attitudes towards illicit sexuality and bastardy. Some studies have suggested that illegitimacy was prosecuted more severely and punished more harshly in Protestant areas (Kertzer & Barbagli, 2001, p. 147). Others point to the great similarities in the moral campaigns against illicit sexuality in Catholic and Protestant areas. Also, Catholics may have become more aggressive in prosecuting premarital sexuality as a response to the active attitudes of Protestants (Kertzer & Barbagli, 2001, p. 148; Van der Heijden, 2016). As Schmidt, Kamp and Muurling emphasise in their article, these differences can however not be explained by simply juxtaposing Catholic versus Protestant regions. In the Catholic Habsburg Low Countries, poor relief institutions performed similar functions as in the Protestant Dutch Republic. Those institutions were similarly first and foremost concerned with the potential financial burden single mothers and their children presented. Hospitals in the Habsburg Low Countries even refused to accept pregnant women, in fear of the burden of child care in the not unlikely event of the mother dying during childbirth (Vermeesch, 2019). In Catholic eighteenth-century northern Burgundy, local governments similarly strove at shifting the financial burden of bastard children on putative fathers, even if their fatherhood was scarcely proved by the mother (Hayhoe, 2005).

Finally, it appears that the extent of the involvement of courts and the solutions they strove for, differed through time as well. As is suggested for several cases, the legal situation for unwed mothers seems to have deteriorated in the eighteenth century. For instance, the names of fathers were no longer registered in baptismal registers in Geneva from 1720 without their consent. This must have had consequences for the bargaining position of women with the putative fathers of their bastard children. In late eighteenth-century Antwerp and in the new poor law in England, it became similarly progressively more difficult to have putative fatherhood accepted by the church and lay institutions, and the burden of illicit parenthood was progressively shifted to the mothers (Nutt, 2010; Vermeesch, 2019). From the mid-seventeenth century, Italian lawcourts ceased condemning putative fathers to make alimony payments, and it appears that women’s overall legal options deteriorated. Ample and fairly inclusive indoor relief was provided, yet it meant that mothers had to give up the care for their own children. Another element that changed through time is the fact that while couples could be forced to marry in the first part of the early modern era, such solution was less sought from the seventeenth century, as it as realised that the stability of such forced unions was to be problematic. This has been evidenced both for early modern Geneva and Italy. In Geneva, the care for bastard babies was often bestowed on the father, yet this also often resulted in ‘giving away’ the baby to the hospital, which meant that the mother lost the child. As the example of Marguerite Rojoux exemplifies, some mothers, however, knew how to deal with such a situation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.