The 2026 Holberg Lecture by Lyndal Roper

‘Who Owns Fertility? The Reformation’s Sexual Politics’

What makes people suddenly attracted to a conservative vision of the family? When and why do governments want to control fertility and sexuality? – after all, for most people before there was reliable contraception, sex and fertility could not really be separated. And what happens when such a vision is allied with religious conviction? This question has particular relevance now that we have seen the rise, and perhaps the waning, of right-wing political movements that aim to promote ‘family’ life, restrict abortion, and limit women’s freedoms. But when and why does controlling fertility and sexuality become central to political agendas, and why do such ideas attract women as well as men?

Wanting to know the answer to this question made me interested in the Reformation in the first place, and this was why I left Australia determined to find out how the Reformation changed the role of women. Looking back, it was a crazy thing to do. I was 21, had never been outside Australia before, and I flew to Europe at the height of summer on January 26, ‘Australia Day’ as it was then known. I arrived in Stuttgart dressed in an Australian sheepskin jacket and saw proper snow for the first time.

I

But I didn’t know how to find out about women. There was no archival section headed ‘women’, not even one for ‘prostitutes’, nor did I know how to read the handwriting if there had been one. It took years for me to learn how to use an archive and to understand the process through which documents are made and then classified and stored. If it hadn’t been for the patience and support of Ingrid Batori, who was one of the pioneers of computerised methods in history I don’t think I would have had the confidence to keep going. As she told me later, she was the only one who did not laugh when my letter to the Tübingen Research Group SFB 8 ‘Town and Reformation’ was read out, explaining that I wanted to work on the effect of the Reformation on women. And I was lucky to have been taught by Charles Zika in Australia, who has now trained generations of early modernists, and to have met the late Bob Scribner in his camper van outside the archives in Ulm, who became my doctoral supervisor.

I’m ashamed to admit that it took me seven years to finish my doctorate. That simply would not be allowed today, and I’ve felt a hypocrite for bullying my own students to finish within three years.  I supported myself in part by small scholarships to work in the archives, and by working for the Tübingen SFB 8 project  while living in London the rest of the time, where I was a member of the London Feminist History Group. It was a deeply split life.

What did I discover? Looking back, I’m struck by how differently my question about religion and conservative moralism reads now. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminists believed that the family was an outdated institution and that marriage was bad for women – I was myself newly married, and I couldn’t square my conventional morality with my feminism. Some feminists were beginning to argue that housework and reproductive labour had economic value and should be paid for. Meanwhile German historiography was dominated by the legacy of the medievalist Otto Brunner, who seemed to offer a way of bringing anthropology into history, and using it, for instance, to rethink the feud, or ritual behaviour. For Brunner, though, medieval society was dominated by the model of ‘das ganze Haus’, the whole household, of which women were organic members, represented by their menfolk. Brunner, we now know, was a Nazi supporter, but his ideas were pervasive amongst medievalists and he dominated how social history was perceived. Meanwhile in London, feminists wanted to prise apart the apparently sealed unit of the household, because men and women, as we saw it, had different interests. The model of the ‘whole house’ completely ignored the issue of power within the household, of men’s domination of women.

So what was my thesis? I became convinced that the Reformation message in towns like Augsburg was a theology of gender, and this was why guildsmen were its most passionate supporters. That theology proposed a model of gender relations in which there was a clear hierarchy, the master running the craft workshop and housing journeymen and apprentices. This form of economic production functioned because the master housed his workers, so they did not have to earn enough to support a wife and family. Effectively, women’s invisible reproductive labour provided part of the ‘wage’. Economics worked through the male life cycle: you started as an apprentice, became a journeyman, and finally a master. This operated politically too, because when you became a master you could marry, set up a household, join the guild as a full member, and become a full citizen. Women, for their part, as Renate Dürr and others have shown, started out as servants and hoped to save enough for a dowry. Master’s daughters already had a dowry in kind because they, like masters’ widows, could pass on guild membership and citizenship to an outsider. It was a system that linked reproductive to economic status, and it gave many people a stake in it.

The problem was that by the middle decades of the sixteenth century it was also coming under pressure. Increasingly not everyone could hope to become a master and guilds were starting to attempt to restrict membership by, amongst other things, delaying mastership and with it, marriage. There was competition, too, from rural crafts, and guilds responded by becoming more protectionist. As more people moved to cities because of economic opportunities, town Councils made it harder to get citizenship. They began to restrict poor relief, distinguishing ‘their’ honourable poor from those they saw as wandering workshy beggars. They started to control population by one of the few methods available to them, restricting marriage. The Reformation, which took over control of marriage from the church, made it easier to do this, and allowed parents to forbid the marriage of their children.

At the same time, the Reformation attacked monasteries and convents – monks and nuns did not accord with its vision of what ideal masculinity and femininity should be. A pastor should be married, a house father like a guild master. He should take on the burdens of citizenship like everyone else, and should not exemplify a kind of ‘third gender’, not permitted to carry weapons, not a citizen, not a voter, and living in an institution with other men, and getting up to who knew what with young women, or even young men. Instead, society should be reformed, and town Councils should foster godly behaviour. In 1534, the Augsburg town Council formally introduced the Reformation and closed monastic institutions. Like many others it issued a few years later a Discipline Ordinance which abolished prostitution, and condemned fornication and adultery, along with gambling and drunkenness.

The Reformation theology of gender was therefore in many ways a backwards-looking movement. It was fundamentally, I see now, about the control of fertility. It lauded the days when gender divisions were clear, when every apprentice could hope to become a master, become independent, take a wife, and be a citizen. You knew when your town became reformed not only because you now received communion in both kinds, but also because you experienced a wave of moral reform. Immigration was controlled, brothels closed, women punished for immorality, and marriage tightened up. So far from the Reformation bringing freedom for women who could now read the Bible for themselves, I argued, the Reformation intensified patriarchal control and advocated wifely submission. I’m oversimplifying massively here of course, because the impulses of Reformation theology did not always seamlessly accord with the values of the craft household workshop.

But the pattern is clear: religion sanctified a system which reinforced gender by narrowing the gender roles open to both men and women, creating a kind of compulsory heterosexuality – an unmarried man couldn’t in theory run a workshop. Control of population through exerting control over marriage, condemnation of the ‘beggars’ who were thought to be pouring to town to access Augsburg’s poor relief system, a crackdown on sexual immorality, especially that of women – does it sound familiar? This is why it is so important to see how these issues can coalesce to limit the lives of women. When the Reformation began, and lay pamphleteers, enthused by Luther’s message, began to publish their ideas in the new medium of print, several women did so too, Argula von Grumbach, Katharina Zell and many more. By 1525, as the peasants were defeated in the Peasants’ War, of which more later, and the Reformation began to be institutionalised, women fell silent.

And by the middle of the sixteenth century, governments all over Europe, now Catholic as well as Protestant, were beginning to close brothels, previously not only tolerated but state run or even owned by the church. They began to police sexual behaviour -men’s as well as women’s – far more strictly. Marriage, by contrast, was lauded and in Protestant areas, this became women’s only ideal destiny – in Catholic regions they could still enter convents or become beguines. Yet at the same time, authorities were cracking down on immigration and trying to limit access to poor relief. They were restricting marriage – in Counter Reformation Bavaria, as Ulrike Strasser has shown, servants were simply not permitted to marry. Pregnant brides might be humiliated, forced to wear a wreath that was open at the back. And infanticide and abortion were becoming political issues. By mid-century, many western European law-codes – France, England, the Holy Roman Empire – criminalised infanticide and prescribed the death penalty for women who committed it.[1] The burden of proof was changed: if you had not publicly announced your pregnancy and your foetus or infant died, you were presumed to have killed it. Motherhood was lauded, but only for the right kind of woman; maybe twenty per cent of the population never married. This new gender order had different emphases in Catholic and Protestant cultures, and it was inseparable from religious values, indeed, it was powered by them. But the outcomes so far as controlling fertility was concerned were similar.

As I was writing about Augsburg in the late 1980s, I thought I was chronicling a world that had passed for ever. I expected that women would become clergy, as indeed they did over the next decades, that they would engage in politics, and that there would be no limit to women’s possibilities. When I published The Holy Household in 1989, there were so far as I knew only three full professors of History in Germany who were women, Gisela Bock, Karin Hausen and Heide Wunder; I thought we needed to fight to change this, and that we would. I hadn’t had children at that point, and I had not thought at all about how the Reformation affected motherhood. And my concerns were very much about middle class, urban women, as the feminist movement soon began to realise, as Black feminists forced it to think about race and class much more seriously.

Indeed, I wonder now whether we shouldn’t be looking at a global story of fertility and its uses by governments and the rich, for the sixteenth century also saw the rise of a mass trade in human beings as plantation slavery was established. Central to that system was property in fertility, in female slaves’ capacity to reproduce. Instead, as Brenda Stevenson and other scholars of slavery have shown, hypocritical ‘white’ morality created one world for whites on the plantation in the US, lauding family and female chastity. It rested on the exploitation of black slaves, seen by whites as immoral, whose households were often dominated by women because slavery’s brutality smashed the family, while slave owners wanted property in the slaves that women’s bodies could produce.

II

But the holy household was only ever a fiction, never reality; and so far we have been very abstract, so now it’s time to meet someone real, someone whose existence shows how fictional it was.

In 1565, in the last days of August, a small plump journeyman appeared in the guildrooms of the tailor’s guild at Nördlingen with a sorry tale. Last Saturday he had set off from Nuremberg with his manservant on his ‘wandering’ to Nördlingen. Reaching a small village and a wood, his manservant persuaded him to leave the path – you should never leave the path in the sixteenth century – and there he beat him soundly, and stole all his money and his clothes, leaving him stark naked. Passersby heard him, chased the villain away, and lent him some clothes. Now in Nördlingen, weakened by the attack, he was begging the guildsmen to help him with medicine and lodgings and lend him clothes – guilds had an obligation to assist fellow craftsmen, especially non locals. Shortly after, the young tailor went to the town market, where he managed to cajole yet more clothes from the stall holders. But then he left town, and the infuriated market stallholders got him arrested. Enquiries were now made about the young man’s character and origins, and young Adam – for this was his name – advised them to contact his father in Regensburg.

Matters now took an unexpected turn. The man who Adam had said was his father was not his father at all, but a town Councillor, who wondered whether this Adam was not in fact a person who had recently married in Regensburg but had turned out to be a woman. Immediately Adam was investigated by midwives and found to be a ‘well bound woman’. Adam now confessed that he was ‘Eva’, aged 17. Forced into marriage, she had left and become a man. She then worked as a manservant and had a love relationship with a maid.

Adam and Eva was tortured until she confessed to a series of small thefts, many of them of clothing. She begged to be permitted to wear male clothes to execution. Not only was this request granted, but the scribe included a full sketch of her execution, and it shows her dressed in male trousers but with an exposed female breast. The Lutheran preacher exhorts her to be ‘keck’, brave, an interesting word associated with liveliness, and more appropriate to a youth than a young woman.

I came across this case over thirty years ago when I was working on witchcraft in Nördlingen, and didn’t know what to do with it. At first it didn’t interest me, because it appeared to be a case of a woman cross-dressing so as to enjoy the freedom of travel open only to a male journeyman and not to a woman. And to be with a woman, she had to imagine herself male.

But then my students made me question whether gender was indeed a binary category as I had assumed, and so I’m going to use the pronoun ‘they’ from here on. The choice of name is interesting here: Adam and Eva, as if to say that, like the first Adam and Eve, they were created like this. Until reaching Nördlingen and committing thefts, Eva managed to live as a man without apparently being punished. According to their story, it was not they but their father who had first insisted they wear trousers underneath their dress, because they suffered from a falling sickness that led to them exhibiting themselves and thus they had been attired as both male and female, while the Nördlingen Council agreed to the request that they be allowed to continue to wear male dress and be executed as a man in male dress (the outside of the paper that would have been used to read out her crimes shows the alteration permitting this). Whether or not they worked as a tailor, their longing for male clothes runs through the case and was their undoing – it was male clothing they got from the passersby when they were attacked, male clothing the guild gave them, and male clothes they pilfered from the market stall holders. We know from the work of Ulinka Rublack on the costume book of the Fugger employee Matthäus Schwarz just how fabulous sixteenth century men’s clothes could be, more beautiful even than those of women. But a normal lower class sixteenth century person needed only one set of clothes: why this passion for so many? Interesting too is their explanation that the ‘sickness’ that compelled them to exhibit themselves came on every four weeks, suggesting that this was to do with a menstrual cycle, perhaps a deep-seated horror of femininity and thus of fertility.

Whatever one makes of this case – and there are so many different directions you could follow – it, and the work of so many others, has convinced me that it isn’t helpful to assume that early modern people saw their society in strictly sexually-ordered binary terms. True, the household as an economic as well as a social structure dictated the choices open to them, but not their identity at a deeper level.

Instead of taking Martin Luther’s famously binary statements about the difference between men and women as reflecting what his society thought – men have narrow hips and broad chests, women have big fundaments to sit upon and so they are designed to bear children and keep house –  it might be more helpful to see Luther as insisting aggressively on sexual difference, drawing lines where reality was so much less clear. Whenever Luther attacked the papacy, he instinctively drew on the imagery of sexual instability: the papal officials were ‘courtesans’, the Pope was a hermaphrodite, Pope Paula, and she was only half human, indeed, Luther pictured her as a dancing ass. In a final pair of images from the mid 1540s, which Luther dubbed his ‘testament’, monks are depicted as the result of anal births from a line of she-devils sitting atop a gallows, while Pope ‘Paula’ is depicted pregnant with a prominent vagina. This was, if you like, the seething imaginary beneath Lutheran moralism, a world of human-animal mixtures, anal couplings, perverted fertility and male and female mixtures – the ‘She-man’ and the ‘He-woman’ would become stock characters of Protestant satire. If household moralism sought to fix people in their sexual place and control fertility, it was not mirroring reality nor could it control how people experienced their own gender identity. But it did shape the social structures in which they lived that out.

III

Some early modern people apparently believed that if a woman made a huge leap, their genitals might fall out and thus they would turn into a man; indeed Michel de Montaigne himself recounted such a case. So, if you are not too giddy, I want to make another chronological jump, this time backwards with you to the world before the ‘holy household’, the world of the Peasants’ War of 1525, the biggest uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. It’s the subject of my most recent book—Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (2025)—and it has taken me back full circle to my days as a student in Melbourne, for it was in 1975, when I was just starting my studies, that the 450^th anniversary of the Peasants’ War was celebrated. And that was also the year that Natalie Zemon Davis’s Society and Culture in Early Modern France came out, a glittering set of essays that influenced me and my generation of gender historians probably more than any other – Natalie was honoured with the Holberg Prize.

So of course I wondered about the gender politics of the Peasants’ War. What role did women play in it? When I began I assumed that my male colleagues simply hadn’t been interested in women, and that naturally I would find them. Except that – I didn’t. Yes, like many before me, including Käthe Kollwitz, I found Margareta Rennerin, the woman who took part in the Weinsberg massacre and smeared the fat of the count on her shoes, but I also found her lord’s plea on her behalf that women ‘do nothing with deeds, but only with their mouths’. For the most part, it seemed, men were the actors in the Peasants’ war. They swore oaths of brotherhood, they went marching and formed ever bigger armed bands, they slept together under the stars, they stole the animals they killed and roasted in the open, and they sang together before battle. Brotherhood powered their movement.

Thinking about fertility for this lecture made me wonder about the issue in the Peasants’ War. Because it WAS one of the central issues that led to the Peasants’ War, and in areas in the German south-west where serfdom existed, it came up time after time. Lords there could insist that their subjects could only marry someone of the same lordship, and if they didn’t, they had to pay a fine.  Just one example – the master painter Jörg Ratgeb married a serf owned by the Duke of Württemberg, and the Duke refused to sell her freedom. This meant that Ratgeb could not become a citizen of Heilbronn, could not leave a workshop to his children or train them, and that his children would become serfs. He became a peasant leader, and after the war, he was executed by quartering. Given the antagonism that the insistence on marriage rights caused amongst their peasantry, why did the lords stick to such an outdated demand? And why did so many convents and monasteries insist on it – who were, after all, some of the major landowners? Especially seeing that the church itself insisted that marriage was a sacrament, and therefore consisted of the free exchange of marital consent between the couple followed by sex, so that no-one, not even parents, could forbid it.

The lords insisted on unfree marriage because they wanted to control the labour power of the next generation, binding it to them through ownership. Women’s reproductive power, the fertility of men and women, was thus something in which the lords had property rights, and they were not going to give those up. It was like the rights that the lords had over the fertility of the land, their claim to tithes, or to dues of hens, or their claims to vast numbers of eggs, which symbolised servile status, all of them about reproduction in the natural and human world. Property in human as well as natural fertility was thus a central pillar of serfdom.

But despite its recurrence in so many complaints, this demand did not make it into the Twelve Articles, the peasants’ programme drawn up on the basis of hundreds of local complaints by the Memmingen townsman Sebastian Lotzer. Article 3 rejects serfdom root and branch, stating that ‘Christ bought us all with his precious blood, the poorest shepherd as well as the highest, no-one excepted, and therefore we are free, and want to be free’. When I was writing about the issue in my book on the Peasants’ War I assumed that ending serfdom would simply have abolished unfree marriage, and so there would have been no need to mention it.

But now that I think about it again, in the light of the history of the control of fertility, the omission seems more puzzling. It seems even more so because the issue had been raised by the peasants who were ruled by the town of Memmingen, just days before the 12 Articles were composed, and the town Council was negotiating on it at this very time. The Council concluded that while it was willing to free all its serfs from ‘bodily serfdom’, its general rights and authorities could not be restricted, and while it would allow ‘free marriage’, it would permit this only to a free partner, that is, it would not insist on owning the offspring of such a marriage but it would not infringe the rights of other lords either. The issue was live in south west Germany and in Alsace as well, while towns like Basel nearly conceded it to their peasants – that is, they had first pressured their peasants to ‘buy’ their freedom so as to counter the claims of Solothurn,  a town which owned many peasants in the region, and then after the war, persuaded them to relinquish that freedom – but they did concede that serfs should be allowed to marry the serfs of other lords. So its exclusion was not an oversight but deliberate. Unfree marriage should have been specifically condemned in the Twelve Articles as a consequence of Article 3, just as the Twelve Articles spelt out exactly which tithes would not be paid any more. And I should have noticed.

We will never know why Lotzer did not specify it in the Twelve Articles. It might be that as a townsman, he simply didn’t realise how important it was, deeming it a petty concern; complaints in the local articles about midwives and the need for more and better care didn’t make it into the 12 Articles either, so it might have been that these seemed to him mere women’s concerns. Lotzer was very concerned to dignify the peasants’ cause and to insist that they were not opposed to authority: ‘Not that we would wish to be absolutely free and under no authority. God does not teach us that we should lead a disorderly life in the lusts of the flesh, but that we should love the Lord our God and our neighbour.’ And he also insisted that where the lords could prove that they had bought common land, or forests or even waters, then they should administer it in a brotherly manner – that is, the articles do not threaten confiscation without compensation, and throughout they are careful not to attack private property. Perhaps the shibboleth of private property discouraged him from mentioning unfree marriage directly. Or perhaps he knew that the Memmingen Council had allowed free marriage only if the other partner were free; that is, they had deliberately not abolished it if both parties were their own serfs, nor had they said they would not insist on fines if one of their own serfs married a serf of another lord. Whatever the reason, the 12 Articles did not attack the lords’ control of marriage and thus their ownership of the fertility of their serfs, which was what perpetuated the system down the generations.

When the peasants were defeated, and 70 to 100 thousand of them were slaughtered, serfdom was massively reinforced, and it would last for centuries longer. The concessions over marriage that had been made in Basel were reversed, because control of marriage was not a quaint oddity, a feudal hangover that could readily be relinquished, but fundamental to the system. The historiography of serfdom has often presented it as a minor inconvenience by this period, and in some ways an advantage because it secured your tenancy – it did not stop a peasant becoming rich. But it was far more than an indignity because it was part of a whole social system that gave some people property rights in human fertility.

And here is where we can see the connection to developments in the history of slavery. When Reformation authors refuted peasant claims that Christ had bought our freedom, and so serfdom must be abolished, they argued that slavery existed in Christ’s own society and He had not condemned it, and so, by extension, peasants must accept serfdom. Thus, when peasants rejected this line of argument, they implicitly rejected its corollary too. If they argued that Christ’s purchase of freedom for all was not just spiritual (as Luther argued) but bodily, it must include slaves. Even if they did not make the implication explicit, that thought was there. Slavery depended on the idea that you could have property in people and in women’s fertility, and when the legal position around slavery was developed, it was to Roman law that Europeans turned, that is, to the law of the society in which Christ had lived, a slave-owning society.

The idea that slavery was unknown in western European societies was a fiction. As we now know, slavery had existed through piracy and through importation of slaves; indeed, as Renate Duerr’s work is showing, it was not just nobles in the Holy Roman Empire who owned slaves as status symbols, but perhaps even more, townsfolk. I think that in coming years, we will need to explore the kinship between serfdom, labour services and other forms of slavery. Here we will need to ask how, and in what ways, such systems gave some people property in human fertility, along with their property rights in the fertility of the natural world; and we will need to ask when societies insisted on those rights, and when they allowed free marriage. I think this must form part of a much wider, longer history of the control of human sexuality and fertility, asking why it becomes an issue at particular historical moments.

A history of fertility and its control would need to think about how birth was organized, and why, by the eighteenth century in western Europe, the lying-in period of 6 weeks after birth was starting to decay, no longer honoured as it had been. Indeed, Holberg himself wrote a comedy which became one of his most popular, lampooning the Lying-In Room (Barselstuen) and the host of visits and female sociability that it entailed; indeed, it was immortalized in Wilhelm Marstrand painting of 1845. It would need to ask why the decline in lying-in seems to correlate with the decline in witchcraft accusations. And there might well be a connection, because so many witchcraft accusations began in the lying-in chamber and have so much to say about milk and fertility, as well as about sex with a Devil who could be both male and female at the same time. When lying-in was kept no longer, the special time after birth where women gathered and gossiped, told stories and partied was lost – and so also, the chance to identify the ‘witch’ to blame if mother or child failed to thrive.

So to go back to the question with which I began, why did rigid moralism and tight control of sexuality become so important in the sixteenth century? Here is one hypothesis. Perhaps it was the trauma of a revolutionary movement based on brotherhood, on horizontal bonds between men, and the complete overthrow of the existing order that the Bauernkrieg nearly achieved, that lay behind townsfolk’s insistence on the hierarchical order of the household. For middling townsfolk like those of Augsburg, Nuremberg, or Strasbourg, the peasant uprising was terrifying; for authorities everywhere, the War had revealed an abyss of disorder.  Perhaps the moralism of the mid sixteenth century and beyond that proved so destructive to women was a delayed conservative reaction to the Peasants’ War, and to the theology of liberation it envisaged. But that would be another story.

I guess what I have tried to do throughout my work as a whole is to link physical and psychic experience, that is, to think about human beings as embodied and as having complex subjectivities, and as living in social structures and landscapes that shape, but do not determine, how they make sense of their lives or what they desire. This is what the humanities are for, to bring what is human into how we think and what we think about. Holberg recognized that and did not divide literature from history or anthropology from science. That the territory of the historian now includes so much more than battles, politics and monarchs is because the profession now includes so many more women, and allows us to share perspectives, increasingly, across countries, ethnicities and cultures, though there is still more to do to make it more diverse than it currently  is, and to make the conversations we have more global.. Even so, the historical profession is unrecognizable from when I first entered it.  

Taking women’s history seriously truly must reshape the questions we ask and the subjects we address. It’s no longer enough to ask “did the Reformation make things better or worse for women?” or “was the French Revolution good or bad for women?”. These are questions I have encountered time and again on examination papers with a single token ‘gender’ question. What if we could rethink our categories so as to imagine a world where gender might be fluid, and where Adam and Eve insisted that they were both male and female, created this way by God, just as the peasants insisted that God gave the fertility of the earth to all humankind? It’s not just that historical transformations affect men and women differently: Gender relations, fertility, indeed the history of human bodies, the age of puberty, height, frequency of pregnancies, are also features that themselves cause historical change. Over my career I have become profoundly convinced that taking women and gender seriously must also enrich our understanding of causation in the humanities in general as well as transforming our historical narratives for good, and I look forward to seeing the coming generation do exactly that. And Jörg Ratgeb’s wife, the serf of the Duke of Wüttemberg, has not been forgotten either. The sculptor Michaela A. Fischer has created a sculpture of her (2013) which stands in a sculpture park in Herrenberg in Ratgeb’s honour: we see her body encased in a cage-like pillar, and glimpse her delicate face in profile.

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[1] Carolina, 87-9, Articles 131, 132, 133: in the case of infanticide, the statutory punishment of burial alive with a stake thrust through was to be commuted to drowning so as to avoid despair, that is, loss of hope of salvation, except in areas where infanticide was common, in which case either the statutory penalty was to be used or else the woman should be punished with glowing tongs before drowning. If a woman abandoned a newborn, and it survived, she should be punished according to the circumstances; but if it died, she should merit the death penalty or a physical punishment. A man who procured an abortion was to be executed as a murder; a woman who procured her own abortion should be drowned. If a foetus which was not yet alive should be aborted, advice should be taken from relevant experts. Articles 35 and 36 authorized interrogation under torture of an unmarried woman who seemed to have been pregnant and whose body then became smaller, or of an unmarried woman who had milk in her breasts, though it allowed that sometimes this happened without pregnancy. Interestingly the same law-code also prescribed death for the sin ‘against nature’, ‘human with an animal, man with man, woman with woman’ p. 81, Article 117.

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