“Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath, praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat, trading, traveling, reading and writing—yet so rarely with children as to raise the question: Why not? Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place.” MortalityInnateChild RearingMaternal LoveMedieval Life Book:A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century Source: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
“Besides, life was not precious, for what was the body after all, but carrion, and the sojourn on earth but a halt on the way to eternal life?” FatalismMedieval LifeMedieval PhilosophyMedieval Religion Book:A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century Source: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century