Reflections on Dervin’s Essay

As Dan Dervin is well aware, my designating parenting in the early Christian period as “Abandoning Mode” goes beyond the forty percent that are exposed according to Boswell (actually much higher). Beyond killing the babies through exposure, I discuss in all my work over the past three decades abandonment by sending newborns to wet nurses, who usually managed to kill them; by the nearly universal practice of sending children out to other families as servants and apprentices, where they were routinely beaten and used sexually; by oblation to monasteries and nunneries, where again sexual and physical abuse was common, and so on. That this was not because of poverty I gave a lot of good statistical evidence for, since the rich actually had higher infanticide and apprentice rates than the poor. Good records were kept in later centuries of actual abandonment to wet nurses; in Paris, for instance, by the 19th century the police still counted over ninety percent of newborn babies who were wrapped up and sent out of town to peasant wet nurses, never to be visited by the parents and — if they lived — considered strangers by their parents when they returned at the age of four or five.

As Dan is also aware, my designation of parenting as “abandoning” also referred to the emotional abandonment in the early years when attachment is so important. All infants were tightly wrapped up in yards of bandages so they wouldn’t “crawl around like an animal,” left in their feces and urine for days, and, since they were considered “evil” and “filthy” and “preyed upon by ghosts,” they were dumped in a crib in a dark room “to ward off incubi” or “tossed in a corner” or “hung from a nail on the wall.” Twentieth-century visitors to Germany spoke of “the wretched newborn” still as “loathsome, foetid things, offensive to the last degree with their excreta…never washed,” “strapped into a crib in a room with curtains drawn to keep out lurking evils,” “covered with lice.” All this abandonment of course was true of the period Dan characterizes by Chrysostom’s advice to “show our affection and mold” the children. That the “affection” that was shown was often enough sexual I gave extensive evidence of, since parents routinely slept with their children and used them sexually (see the movie “Incest” soon at your local theater, featuring myself giving wide evidence of this fact.)

In addition, in my book The Emotional Life of Nations I give good evidence that the “pedagogues” that Greeks and others attached to their children were less “third parents” than pederasts whose task it was to be sure the children were only sexually used by “good” men, like those shown in all those Greek drawings of men pleasantly stroking boys’ genitals. Every boy was expected to have a lover, and the pedagogue was to guard boys against rape by unapproved men (or the pedagogue might assault the boy himself).

The reason why academics like Boswell, Harris and others prefer to ignore my decades of evidence (plus evidence from other psychohistorians publishing in my journal) and instead cite this or that Christian who advises people to “show affection” toward children does not lie in their citation of evidence. It lies in the fact that they get their paychecks from university departments where you damned well can lose your job if you call Christians

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violent pedophiles and especially if you call Christian mothers incestuous killers. Christian mothers are handled by reprinting thousands of drawings and paintings over the centuries of Mother Mary, lovingly depicted as smiling into the eyes of Christ. They do not print in textbooks the pictures I printed in my book of the grandmother of Christ stroking his penis (advocated even by doctors “to make it grow longer”). With my over two thousand primary source references to the brutality of childrearing over the centuries and its slow and uneven evolution, I can only conclude by saying, as I did decades ago, that there did not exist a single “good enough” mother anywhere on earth prior to the eighteenth century, definition of same being a mother who would not today be thrown into jail for child abuse. My offer of a prize for anyone who can find one remains. No one as yet has claimed to have found one.

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