Mortality and Memory: Foundlings in Early Modern Catholic Europe

Across early modern Catholic Europe, foundling hospitals took in thousands of abandoned infants. But the mortality rates at foundling hospitals was extraordinarily high: not only at the institutions themselves, but also in the countryside, where infants placed in the care of impoverished wet-nurses died at alarming rates. How does a society organize to sustain – or not – its youngest and most vulnerable members? What would it mean to take the phenomenon of mass infant death in this period not as an inevitable "fact of life," but as the consequence of structural violence perpetrated against poor women and children – and perpetrated, too, by poor women against children? I will explore how we might write a feminist history of the deep past that can account for continuities of reproductive unfreedom and violence; and suggest some ways that we might draw the practice of gender history a little closer to the political aims of contemporary feminism.
 
Erin Maglaque is a historian at the University of Sheffield, whose research focuses on histories of gender, the family, and the body in early modern Europe. She received her D.Phil from Oxford. She is the author of Venice's Intimate Empire (Cornell, 2018), and has more recently published on the history of foundling hospitals and care work in Italy. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. Erin is currently writing a trade history of the female body, called Pure Presence, due out with Astra House (US) and Jonathan Cape (UK) in 2026.