ABSTRACT
Towards the end of the first book of his De miseria humane conditionis (1195), Lothario dei Conti di Segni, cardinal of SS. Sergius and Bacchus, later to become Innocent HI, included an account from Flavius Josephus' history concerning the plight of a mother.1 According to this historian,2 during the Roman siege of Jerusalem a certain wealthy noblewoman, driven to madness and desperation by extreme starvation and the loss of all her possessions, slew her nursing infant, roasted and ate half of him. She excused her action as a means of delivering her son from war, famine and the yoke of Roman slavery. When plundering thieves broke into her home, attracted by the smell of roasted flesh, and threatened her on pain of death to surrender the food that she had prepared, the woman offered the remains of the child and the men fled in repulsion and terror.
