Εκκρεμείς λογαριασμοί της Ιθάκης με την μεσαιωνική & ενετική Ιστορία (της) [Unsettled accounts between Ithaca and (its) mediaeval & Venetian history]

Abstract

position, and threatened to excommunicate those involved in abortions. While Christopoulos hints that this stark approach altered the way abortions were seen in modern Italian society, his book leaves us wondering what we are to find on rummaging through archives of courts and hospitals; what remained privately tolerated though publicly condemned? A final note. Abortion in Early Modern Italy regards the state of affairs outside Italy only in passing. We may suppose that at least some of these patterns would be replicated in other parts of southern Europe which shared medical and Catholic ideas and practices, but were bound by different legal traditions and geographically distant from papal scrutiny. Although surely beyond the scope of this engrossing and wonderfully researched book, this comparison could perhaps answer a question that is left open: to what degree is the ambivalence and leniency towards abortion a product of the Italian social structure and its own particular preoccupation with avoiding public shame and striving for absolution? Christopoulos effectively shows how the inherent ambiguities of pre-modern medical understanding of women’s bodies coincided with the developments of Catholicism in its reformatory era, as well as the characteristics of the Italian legal processes of the period. Yet his argument also points to the profound need in such matters to bridge necessity and morality, ideology and incidence. In this, Abortion in Early Modern Italy encourages us to consider more broadly the gaps and ambivalences in handling abortions in other cultures, by which, perhaps, we might open new avenues with which to rethink and recalibrate the meanings and rhetoric of heated contemporary debates.