Chapter 2: Killing in Secret: State and Popular Perceptions of Infanticide in Early Modern Europe

When is a crime not a crime? And who gets to decide? Such questions remain at the centre of current research in criminology and histories of crime. The definition of any given crime is not only socially contingent but also historically and culturally contextualised. The perception of the threat that is posed by certain crimes is dependent on time and place; some actions that are seen as criminal in one period or region are not perceived as such in another, or the threat that those actions pose is seen as less of a concern. To add to these historical and cultural differences, the gulf between how the criminal justice system operates and the perception among the wider public about how the system prosecutes crime has always been a matter of concern: ordinary citizens are often frustrated with how they perceive victims and perpetrators to be treated by the justice system. To explore this division between popular perception and state justice and to show how ideas about crime could change radically over time, this chapter looks specifically at the crime of neonatal infanticide across Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. Infanticide was a perennial phenomenon, but from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, multiple states increasingly wrote draconian legislation targeting a very specific group: unmarried mothers who gave birth in secret and then killed the newborn. The evidence needed for conviction was highly questionable, but through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many young women were executed for a crime that was not previously a capital offence. The chapter thereby shows the fluidity in the concept of the criminal, which can change dramatically over time, and is constantly being negotiated and interpreted by ordinary people and their governments. Significantly, while the legislation does seem to have sparked an immediate rise in the rate of executions, there appears to have been little support for this harsh punishment among the wider populace. This lack of support can be witnessed in the lack of songs that were printed about these women. Although execution ballads – songs about condemned criminals and their crimes – were a popular genre across this period, and one in which women tended to be over-represented, there exist relatively few such songs about infanticide. By exploring the few ballads that sang about young women being executed for infanticide from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, this essay traces a shocking divide between the moralising intent of an increasingly patriarchal legal system and the sympathetic and merciful views of the people it was supposed to protect.¹