ABSTRACT
Three small towns in the vicinity of Piacenza under examination here provide almost seventy thousand baptisms deployed over almost two centuries. Status animarum censuses permit the comparison of baptisms with residence patterns in the towns and the adjacent rural districts. There were periodic leaps in the baptism of boys that were statistically significant in the aftermath of plague and harvest failure. Similarly, there were sharp drops in the proportion of baptised males during the worst years of hunger, which probably reflects a biological female mortality advantage. While not exactly synchronous across all three parishes annually, there remains enough correspondence to see how crises were grouped in particular years and decades. The analysis of twins among commoner and elite families reveals that both might have sacrificed these in considerable numbers. For the upper classes, this looks suspiciously like conscious family planning.
