This book provides a creative and revisionist approach to the subject of abortion. Reacting to the impulse of earlier scholars to impose the Augustinian-inflected decretals of the high Middle Ages back on an earlier period, Mistry challenges previous assumptions that early Christianity emphatically opposed the classical world’s tolerance for abortion. The result is a much less categorical analysis—one not so much concerned with finding an “answer” to whether abortion was permissible than with drawing a nuanced picture.
Mistry’s approach is avowedly inspired by Peter Biller’s The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (New York, 2001) in its focus on what medieval people thought about population, as opposed to what scholars think about medieval demography. By the same token, Mistry aspires to tell “the history of how individuals and communities, ecclesiastical and secular authorities, construed abortion as a social, religious, and political problem … and the neglected variety of their...