Introduction

It is no accident that infanticide has emerged as a topic of intense debate in recent historical writing. Research on criminality generally has grown out of social historians' broad interest in the less-than-privileged, while cultural historians have looked beyond descriptions of offences and offenders into the social and cultural origins of ‘criminal’ activities. However, much of the current interest in infanticide doubtless responds to the feeling that the last great battle of feminism is being fought over the control of women's bodies. At one political extreme, abortion is seen as the modern version of infanticide; on the other, as the final step in woman's emancipation from biological and legal bondage.

Common as infanticides were in later medieval times, they were not prosecuted with any intensity in the German-speaking lands until after the Protestant Reformation. In the communes of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Germany, where the supernatural order penetrated the natural, infanticide was regarded as a sign of Übel, Satan's work made manifest. It was the duty of the magistracy to see that God's wrath be expiated by punishing the guilty person. The act itself set off a perturbing chain of events in community life: suspicion, accusation, investigation. The crime of infanticide was thus highly disruptive both socially and morally, calling into question the nature of the individual, the relative claims of individual and community, and the proper relationship between gender and social role.