Responsibility and Emotions: Parental, Governmental and Almighty Responses to Infant Deaths in Denmark in the Mid-Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century

TY - CHAP

T1 - Responsibility and Emotions: Parental, Governmental and Almighty Responses to Infant Deaths in Denmark in the Mid-Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century

AU - Løkke, Anne

PY - 2016

Y1 - 2016

N2 - This chapter examines emotional responses to the death of unbaptized infants in Evangelical Lutheran Denmark. What kind of afterlife could be expected for such infants according to the church, and did the teachings of the church influence the emotional responses of parents? The memoirs of an eighteenth-century father, who lost nine of his eleven children, reveal a close connection between the writings of the early Lutheran church and the way he (two hundred years later) consoled himself while grieving for his children. He felt assured that God took responsibility for stillborn as well as unbaptized infants, so he did not fear for their salvation. However, a tension between this old Lutheran teaching and a simpler, magical understanding of the necessity of baptism for salvation is also present across the centuries, not only among peasants in the countryside, but also in nineteenth-century administrative practices, which saw stillborn and unbaptized infants as outcasts from Christian society.

AB - This chapter examines emotional responses to the death of unbaptized infants in Evangelical Lutheran Denmark. What kind of afterlife could be expected for such infants according to the church, and did the teachings of the church influence the emotional responses of parents? The memoirs of an eighteenth-century father, who lost nine of his eleven children, reveal a close connection between the writings of the early Lutheran church and the way he (two hundred years later) consoled himself while grieving for his children. He felt assured that God took responsibility for stillborn as well as unbaptized infants, so he did not fear for their salvation. However, a tension between this old Lutheran teaching and a simpler, magical understanding of the necessity of baptism for salvation is also present across the centuries, not only among peasants in the countryside, but also in nineteenth-century administrative practices, which saw stillborn and unbaptized infants as outcasts from Christian society.

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-1-137-57198-4

T3 - Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood

SP - 191

EP - 208

BT - Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe

A2 - Barclay, Katie

A2 - Reynolds, Kimberley

A2 - Rawnsley , Ciara

PB - Palgrave Macmillan

CY - London

ER -