The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany (review)

If we follow Joel F. Harrington's beautifully conceived and analytically rich study of "unwanted children" in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nuremberg, conventional historical wisdom is misguided in placing the state with its institutions center stage in the early modern history of childhood and youth among the urban poor. The author makes an illuminating case for a different historical narrative: one in which individuals within their social networks are the most prominent actors in caring for children in need of a home. Such a mentality was shared, supported, and encouraged by the city's authorities, who stepped in to help only when other solutions such as placing a child with relatives or other potential caretakers had failed. The available options, the relevant mindsets, and the actual choices among those involved in caring for children are what this study demonstrates vividly.

Even in the best of circumstances, children placed a strain on the livelihoods of the poor with their makeshift household economies. If unwanted at birth or later in life, children certainly brought to the fore the patterns, structures, and scarce resources that governed the everyday lives of the poor. Harrington approaches "child circulation," as he terms the practice of placing "unwanted children" with others, through an exploration of instances when parents were unable, unwilling, or no longer capable of raising their offspring. "The Unmarried Mother," "The Absconding Father," "The Beleaguered Magistrate," The Street Orphan," and "The State Wards" are the titles of chapters focused on a typical moment of crisis.

In 1578, an unwed servant in the countryside gave birth to a child out of wedlock and, bereft of a social network, saw no choice but to kill her baby. She was sentenced to death. In fact, the authorities in early modern Nuremberg were greatly concerned about infanticide—a crime that, though rare, was more frequently punished after 1550 than before. "Infanticide," concludes Harrington, "represented an extreme and relatively uncommon failure of informal child circulation, a rupture in the usual way that relatives, neighbors, and friends dealt with an illicit pregnancy or unwanted newborn child" (p. 70). This murder therefore elucidates a spectrum of other possible responses to an illegitimate birth. The fact that the defendant's mother does not appear in the records suggests that Apollonia Vöglin, serving in a relative's household, was removed from female networks of support with their knowledge and experience.

The city council's regular reliance on, or preference for, informal networks of support instead of governmental care is also illustrated by the story of a mercenary and recent immigrant to Nuremberg who departed after having been widowed, leaving three daughters behind. The councilors determined that another son was able to raise his siblings in loco parentis, even though he had petitioned that they be provided for by the city for economic reasons. Due to a combination of interrelated developments—falling wages, a series of epidemics, and war-induced displacement among them—indigents placed increasing pressures on Nuremberg's institutions of poor relief and the city's coffers. During the Thirty Years War, the administrator who oversaw the foundling hospital introduced a number of shrewd measures to increase the revenues of the Findel, as Nuremberg's foundling hospital was known, in order to give shelter to a greater number of foundlings.

Occasionally, however, children took survival into their own hands and eked out a living through a combination of begging, occasional work, and stealing. Roaming child beggars and adolescent vagabonds were seen as a sign of social and economic upheaval, especially when they formed loose criminal associations. Jörg Mayr was a young thief whose criminal career resulted in his execution, once he had been apprehended and confessed to a string of criminal acts. The nine-year-old twins from Nuremberg who, as orphans, were placed in the Findel met a happier fate. Unlike many other foundlings, they lived...