The Sardinian Condaghi: Neglected Evidence for Mediaeval Sex Ratios

In recent years, various scholars, working with different techniques and in different disciplines, have grappled with the elusive problem of "missing" females in mediaeval documents of various sorts, particularly documents which purport to be inventories of peasant households. Understandably, western scholars have a certain measure of difficulty in accepting the suggestion that western Christian societies practised female infanticide; even though we know that some mediaeval parents suffocated, exposed, drowned, or otherwise disposed of unwanted children, it seems to be much more comforting to ignore attested incidents of infanticide and to explain abnormal sex ratios in extant documents as being the product of erroneous gathering or recording of data.1 It is certainly likely that texts, the compilers of which were more concerned with recording land holdings than with demographic data, contain errors; but it does not follow that those errors can be used as an argument against the hypothesis that female infanticide was being practised by the peasants living on those estates. At best, we have been up to now forced to conclude non liquet.