parents to lay their children down to sleep in cradles and not in their beds.^117
It is clear from the penances mentioned above, that the authors realize that at
certain times, the children must be in their mother’s bed. They encourage the
mothers, however, to place the child back in his/her own bed after nursing.^118
While none of these penances voice the assumption that the child was over-
laid on purpose, they all seem to assume that it is the mother, rather than her
husband, who might be with the child in the same bed and who is responsible
for the overlying.
Based on these penances from the thirteenth century, Urbach argued that
the problem of overlaying arose in Ashkenaz at the end of the thirteenth cen-
tury. He suggested that the reason was a deterioration in Jewish living quarters
at this time. There is little evidence, however, that such a change took place
at the end of the thirteenth century. Moreover, as Urbach himself noted, Chris-
tian penitential manuals discuss this problem from the sixth century onward.
The Christian penance was to fast for a year, during which the penitent should
eat only bread and drink only water and refrain from eating meat and drinking
wine for two more years.^119 It is unlikely that Jews and Christians whose ma-
terial surroundings were similar would have different overlying rates.
The Jewish sources that discuss overlying do not mention any details related
to the physical surroundings of the home. In contrast, Christian sources are
willing to condone overlying in poor homes much more readily than in afflu-
ent ones, although the punishment is still sometimes very harsh.^120 As Peter
Abelard remarked:
For look, some poverty-stricken woman has a little baby at the breast and doesn’t
have enough clothes to be able to meet the needs both of the little one in the crib
and of herself. So, moved by pity for the little baby, she puts him by her side to
warm him with her own rags. In the end, overwhelmed in her own feebleness by
the force of nature, she is driven to smother the one she embraces with the great-
est love. Augustine says: “Have charity and do whatever you want.” Yet when she
comes to the bishop for atonement, a heavy penalty is exacted from her, not for a
fault she committed, but to make her or other women more careful about antici-
pating such dangers.^121Jewish sources do not distinguish between incidents of overlying in poor and
in more affluent homes. It thus seems problematic to assume that a change in
physical conditions in the thirteenth century gave rise to these penances. It
seems more likely that as penances became more and more integral to main-
stream Judaism, these penances became accepted for cases of overlying.
These different instances of children’s deaths reveal the problems in gener-
alizing about child care in the past. Within Jewish society, as within Christian
society, there were instances of neglect and abuse due to individual nature or,
more often, extenuating circumstances such as poverty and single mother-
hood. An examination of these cases of neglect, however, along with the norms