Orphans and Foundlings

Churches and governments in Renaissance society made efforts to protect and care for needy and helpless people, such as children without parents or guardians. A variety of organizations existed to help such children. However, the treatment children received sometimes depended on whether they were orphans or foundlings. Orphans were children whose parents had died, while foundlings were those abandoned by their parents. Society generally had less respect for foundlings than for orphans and in some cases treated them as less worthy of aid.

Some religious leaders saw foundlings born to unmarried women as being at special risk of sin because they had been "doubly conceived in sin." Although not all foundlings were born outside of marriage, their uncertain origins disgraced them in the public eye. Abandonment by poor families unable or unwilling to keep all of their children became increasingly common over the course of the Renaissance.

In spite of the social distinctions between the foundlings and orphans, they often ended up in the same large institutions. For example, the Hospital of the Pietà in Venice, originally established to house abandoned children, admitted many orphans after outbreaks of plague* in the 1350s and 1440s. During the 1500s it became more common to place foundlings and orphans in separate establishments. Some orphanages belonged to hospitals, while others stood on their own.

One great danger was that mothers might kill unwanted children before baptism—murdering their souls along with their bodies. To prevent such crimes, hospitals and other charitable institutions in some parts of Europe offered an alternative to desperate women. They provided places for people to abandon their children anonymously and in relative safety by simply leaving them on a special shelf or a rotating wheel. Unfortunately, when hospitals were flooded with abandoned children, death rates rose so high that abandonment threatened to become little more than a legal form of child murder. England and other Protestant countries were generally reluctant to let people abandon their children openly. Many hospitals and orphanages accepted foundlings but did not call attention to the fact.

Institutions that cared for large numbers of infants and children employed wet nurses to feed them. A wet nurse was a woman, usually of the peasant class, paid to breast-feed another person's child. After a few weeks in the hospital, most orphans and abandoned children were sent to stay with foster parents, often in the surrounding countryside. Most of them died, but those who survived generally returned to the hospitals between the ages of four and seven. The institutions prepared these older children for places in society as laborers, servants, housewives, or crafts workers. Some orphans and foundlings ended up spending their lives in service to the hospitals that had taken them in. In other cases, an apprenticeship* or an attachment to a foster family could lead to official adoption. Either way, the goal was to turn abandoned children into useful and productive adults, preventing them from becoming beggars or criminals.