Conclusion

Early modern European understandings of family and sexual violence were very different from today's, but this is not to say that violence occurring within households or sexual assaults on women went largely unpunished.

Penalties for rape and infanticide in early modern Europe were often severe, but both crimes were singularly difficult to prove. In the case of rape, distrust of women in patriarchal societies led to laws that placed serious obstacles in the way of female victims attempting to substantiate their allegations. With infanticide, in an effort to prevent it, some jurisdictions went as far as criminalising single women who concealed a pregnancy. Again, the fundamental object was to ensure godly households in which sexual relations occurred exclusively between husbands and wives, and thus all children born were legitimate. The household was central to most early modern European societies, and these societies were prepared to go to considerable lengths to ensure that they operated in an orderly fashion, under a male head licensed to employ appropriate violence in regulating the economic, religious and also sexual lives of his subordinates.