The 'history, man' answer - damn. Look, it's fundamentally true. Know your sources, go directly to them, and the writers who can put them into some sort of context, while being aware of those writer's biases. I've read most of Henry Mayhew's London Poor books as reference material, for instance. But the examples are a bit lacklustre, especially the last one.
No doubt infant mortality was a horrible thing that drove individuals to blame things on supernatural forces - that's always been my fundamental understanding of the supernatural, it's a way of people to externalise shit that they have very little control over (or are too dumb/uneducated to try to control). I read an interesting book that drew parallels between fairy stories and infant mortality, with the Victorian era rising standards of sanitation and mortality, for the middle classes at least, coinciding with the shift from dangerous tricksters to charming flower fairies. (There's also an interesting parallel between the putti in Renaisance art and infant mortality among the rich as a sentimental celebration of dead babies frolicking in heaven.)
But nobody gave a fuck, on a societal level. They cared about infanticide, at least in rich cities like Florence, but infant mortality was a tragic part of daily life - plenty more where they came from. So the analogy is flawed to its heart - either it's a comparable issue, in which case it's tragic but not something authority figures should feel capable of tackling due to a lack of political, judicial or economic development, or it's doomsday because both this and the normal shit of raising a child in the early-modern era, plus monsters, makes any family's survival odds pretty low, and the Dyrford should feel like Children of Men in that case, barely one step above the apocalypse of a population crash.
Valians on the other hand never feel like anything other than the 'Squabbling Cities of Merchant Princes' who are heirs to the 'Former Great Empire' shit you see in every fantasy book once the author decides to do some world building, so about David Eddings level of research and authenticity.
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