"The Kindness of Strangers"

Paper Summary:

A review of Boswell's book in which he uses the history of Antiquity to make a persuasive case that the idea of parental love for children is a constructed, rather than a biological, norm.

From the Paper:

"To make this powerful argument Boswell presents a historical narrative of the practice of child abandonment. He alleges it was a common practice during antiquity, up to the time of the Renaissance. Boswell's book, despite its morbid subject matter, is very entertaining and readable because he uses such a wide variety of sources from this vast historical stretch of time. He uses drama and popular myths as well as demographics. After all, even the abandoned founders of Rome itself, Romulus and Remus, were, traditionally suckled by a she-wolf. However, Boswell is not simply a storyteller. The implications of child abandonment are not simply literary or historical. He suggests amounted, in essence, to a form of cultural "pruning," genealogically speaking in Rome, and a kind of moral policing in Christian Europe."

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