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Anyone who wants to understand how abortion has been treated historically in the western legal tradition must first come to terms with two quite different but interrelated historical trajectories. On one hand, there is the ancient Judeo-Christian condemnation of prenatal homicide as a wrong warranting retribution; on the other, there is the juristic definition of "crime" in the modern sense of the word, which distinguished the term sharply from "sin" and "tort" and was tied to the rise of Western jurisprudence. To find the act of abortion first identified as a crime in the West, one has to go back to the twelfth century, to the schools of ecclesiastical and Roman law in medieval Europe.
In this book, Wolfgang P. Müller tells the story of how abortion came to be criminalized in the West. As he shows, criminalization as a distinct phenomenon and abortion as a self-standing criminal category developed in tandem with each other, first being formulated coherently in the twelfth century at schools of law and theology in Bologna and Paris. Over the ensuing centuries, medieval prosecutors struggled to widen the range of criminal cases involving women accused of ending their unwanted pregnancies. In the process, punishment for abortion went from the realm of carefully crafted rhetoric by ecclesiastical authorities to eventual implementation in practice by clerical and lay judges across Latin Christendom. Informed by legal history, moral theology, literature, and the history of medicine, Müller's book is written with the concerns of modern readers in mind, thus bridging the gap that might otherwise divide modern and medieval sensibilities.
Wolfgang P. Müller is Professor of History at Fordham University. He is the author of Huguccio: The Life, Works, and Thought of a Twelfth-Century Jurist and coeditor of Medieval Church Law and the Origins of the Western Legal Tradition.
"The Criminalization of Abortion in the West examines the processes which led to the voluntary killing of a human fetus becoming a crime, as opposed to a sin or a wrong compensable by a money payment....This book should be regarded as essential reading for those studying the interface between law and medicine in medieval Europe, to legal historians and social historians."
Edward Peters, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania, author of Inquisition:
"In The Criminalization of Abortion in the West, Wolfgang P. Müller addresses a question of broad modern interest and dispute. This is the definitive book on the subject of the history of the criminalization of abortion in the Western world and also a brilliant account of the history of the invention of criminalization itself—that is, early criminal law—in the Western legal tradition."
"Muller traces the tortuous path of the treatment of abortion as a public crime (felony) between the late 12th and early 16th centuries.... He succeeds in demonstrating the shift in the settlement of disputes from the pre-12th-century local control of justice depending on local power and the strength of family status to a more public hearing under the control of centralizing authorities.... Added to these public tribunals to investigate abortion as a crime was the widespread public attitude that regarded it as no more than a sin, if that, subject to confession to a priest and the performance of penance."
James A. Brundage, Ahmanson-Murphy Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Law, University of Kansas, author of The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts:
"Wolfgang P. Müller presents a well-informed, comprehensive account of the process that led to the classification of abortion of a human fetus as a species of homicide punishable by severe penalties up to and including execution of convicted perpetrators. The Criminalization of Abortion in the West is a substantial contribution to our knowledge about a critical facet of the history of abortion."
Zubin Mistry:
"[T]he argumentation is intricate. To put it differently, this reader found that the importance of Criminalization rose to the surface upon a second reading. For, this is an important book, which will interest historians across the sub-disciplinary spectrum and not only late medievalists. It provides a stimulating account of the theoretical and practical development of medieval criminal justice and will become a sine qua non in the history of abortion."
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