have in the older children. It also distinguishes between fathers’ and mothers’
responses to the death of their children.^78
The Dark Side of Child Care:
Abandonment and InfanticideThe issues discussed above—parental love and responses to children’s deaths—
were, as described in the introduction, the impetus for rich scholarly discus-
sions on the darker side of medieval life, spurring investigation into a variety of
topics, such as infanticide and abandonment. The proponents of this research
were of two opposing viewpoints: While some wished to prove that medieval
parents neglected and abandoned their children, others sought to prove the op-
posite.^79 Some Jewish scholars have argued that, whereas Christian parents did
not love their children, Jewish parents did.^80 In the earlier parts of this chap-
ter, I have argued that, in medieval Ashkenaz, Jews and Christians had similar
values and understandings of human nature and of parent-child relationships.
These similarities stem from a shared culture and from shared material and
physical surroundings.
In this section, I will discuss several other aspects of medieval Christian so-
ciety that were examined as part of the debate over Ariès’s thesis. We have al-
ready seen that the medieval world recognized two different types of parental
love: “natural” love, characteristic of mothers, and paternal love, which was
supposed to be of a higher quality and of greater importance. This distinction
highlights the competing values within medieval society, without which we
cannot make sense of medieval life. This distinction can also help explain
many of the issues that were often summoned as proofs that medieval parents
did not value their children’s lives. One such issue is the employment of wet
nurses, which, some scholars argued, was, in and of itself, an indication of a
lack of concern on the part of parents, and especially, mothers, since children
fed by wet nurses died far more frequently. We have already seen that on this
issue Jews were not much different from their neighbors, and that urban Jews,
like urban Christians, employed wet nurses. Although Jewish sources voiced
some concern over wet-nursing practices, these concerns were restricted to the
employment of non-Jewish women, and, as we saw, even those concerns were
not major ones.
Another issue that arose in Jewish sources is remarriage. The authorities
were concerned that the new spouse might compete with the parents’, and
especially the mothers’, affection and nurture. This is another issue in which
cross-cultural comparison should help further our understandings of me-
dieval family life, especially in light of different approaches to marriage and
divorce. To this topic, we must add infanticide and abandonment of children,