What did abortion mean in late Renaissance Italy? In what ways did the reforming Church conceive of it and try to regulate its practice? This study explores attitudes toward abortion in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century through the lens of confessional discourses and practices. In the last three decades of the century, bishops and popes attempted to eradicate the practice of abortion by imposing shaming and increasingly severe punishments for its procurers. However, such initiatives were hindered by the social and practical consequences of bringing procurers of abortion to light. The ecclesiastical establishment had to rely on the secret space of the confessional to reform this aspect of morality. Exploring the negotiations between theological pronouncements and the sociopolitical realities of ecclesiastical administration, this article draws attention to the ambiguities inherent in early modern conceptions of abortion and contends that these led to inconsistent responses among Counter-Reformation ecclesiastical authorities.
In this carefully researched and engaging study, Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw offers a focused and multifaceted history of Venice's two iconic lazaretti, or plague hospitals: formidable castle-like structures occupying their own islands in the Venetian lagoon. Contributing to a growing revisionist scholarship on medical institutions, Crawshaw balances traditional medical aspects of diagnosis and cure with civic, religious, and economic concerns in order to understand Venetian lazaretti in their specific local contexts. While the study is focused on Venice and its peninsular lands (with only a few comments on plague and its management in Venice's Adriatic and Ionian colonies), Crawshaw enhances her discussion with comparisons with other plague hospitals in Italy and Western Europe.Plague hospitals emerged throughout Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as specialized institutions designed to separate the suspected "plague sick" from the uninfected in order to prevent the spread of the disease, to attempt to heal the sick, or else to serve as places where the sick could die and be buried at arm's length from the healthy. They were also depots that quarantined goods, merchants, and travellers coming from suspected plague-ridden places. Crawshaw's work differs from that of a previous generation of historians who, approaching these institutions through a Foucauldian lens, portrayed hospitals and lazaretti as jails, institutions of social repression where the state forcibly locked away the sick-usually the urban poor-and kept them out of sight until they died. Crawshaw problematizes these assumptions by carefully examining the day-to-day functioning of Venice's plague hospitals and situating them within the web of La Serenissima's institutional responses to social problems through charity, poor relief, and healthcare. Far from seeing Venetian lazaretti as "antechambers" or "charnel houses" of death, Crawshaw reveals the diverse ways the Venetian state and the administrators and staff of plagues hospitals attempted to intervene positively in the lives of the sick in order to cure them and alleviate their suffering, or else to isolate them and prevent plague from spreading. The aim, Crawshaw contends, was always to promote the physical and economic health of the city and its inhabitants. Approaching the subject
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