Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to "Its worked that way for millenia."

Re: the other option, or, "Whatever Happened to Baby Quasimodo?"
Mary Anne — (archived)

Good morning, Tony!

Children from families with too many mouths to feed, or from middle class families with more than the customary three children among whom to divide the estate, were sometimes sent as oblates to a monastery or convent. The child was "dedicated to God", in exchange for which service the religious community received a monetary gift, large enough to be worthwhile but still smaller than the inheritance or dowry owed the child upon attaining adulthood.

Physically deformed or mentally handicapped children were frequently disposed of in this way. John Boswell quotes the observations of a twelfth-century abbot who "'was horrified and shocked at the crowd of deformities. . . among whom were the lame, the malformed, the one-eyed, the squinting, the blind, the crippled. . . '." [Boswell, John. 1988. The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. New York: Pantheon. p. 299.]

Regards--
Mary Anne

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