ABSTRACT
Finding periodic imbalances in the sex ratio of children baptised in the village of Montefollonico was an unexpected discovery. This Tuscan castello is small enough to study these discrepancies year by year in their close context by identifying each of the subjects by name. This allows us to see that sharecroppers chose boys during and after subsistence crises. Landless villagers living in the agglomeration generally preferred girls, however. In bad years, perhaps a quarter or a third of newborn children were killed by their parents before baptism. The baptismal records spanning most of the seventeenth century can be cross-checked against ecclesiastical census records to confirm that these imbalances were structural and perennial and an important feature of Italian reproductive behaviour.
