One man’s wife died and he had children from her, and he married another
woman and had children with her. And his second wife was good to the children
of the first wife. And she [the second wife] died, and they wanted to give him an-
other wife and money and he refused. They said to him: “Why don’t you take a
wife?” He said: “She is cruel and will be wicked to the children of my second wife,
who was kind to the first wife’s children, and I will not be ungrateful.”^88The treatment of this subject displays clear-cut gender distinctions. Although,
as we saw in the first part of the chapter, fathers also were understood as “nat-
urally” feeling compassion for their children, there was no expectation what-
soever that stepfathers would be considerate of already existing stepchildren,
and there are hardly any discussions of stepfathers’ attitudes toward their wives’
children.
AbandonmentThe abandonment of infants in medieval Europe, a topic mentioned fairly
often in the sources of the period, has been the subject of many modern stud-
ies as well. Expositiowas a crime for which parents, and especially mothers,
were blamed—the commonly portrayed situation being that of a woman who
left her child on the church steps or at the entrance to the local monastery.
Some modern scholars have argued that such acts were an almost certain death
verdict for the abandoned children, since their chances of finding someone to
care for them were minimal. Others, first and foremost, John Boswell, have ar-
gued that the “kindness of strangers” often saved these children’s lives.^89 The
phenomenon of abandonment is more heavily documented from the thir-
teenth century on, although there is evidence of the practice from ancient
times. According to one legend, after frequently witnessing infants cast into the
Tiber River by their mothers, Innocent III (1160–1216) established a home
for foundlings. During the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
many foundling homes were established.^90 It is impossible to determine
whether the practice of abandoning infants became more widespread or if the
relative wealth of sources creates the impression of a new social concern.
While some have claimed that the practice stemmed from the cruelty of par-
ents, others have argued that children were abandoned only by those whose
economic and social circumstances—extreme poverty, mothers of children
born out of wedlock—did not permit them to keep them. Furthermore, the
children were left in places where they believed that their child’s chance of
survival was greatest.^91
Turning to Jewish society, we find few cases of abandonment in medieval
Jewish society. The Talmud does include two categories of foundlings—asufi
and shetuki. Both terms refer to children found in the marketplace. The dis-
tinction between them is that an asufi is found in the marketplace and taken