Children and childhood in western society since 1500 pdf

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The Child and the Sacred When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany in , he set into motion the Reformation, a movement aimed at purifying the Roman Catholic church, which ultimately resulted in the establishment of Protestantism. The Reformation had a powerful impact on English culture, and so it is not surprising that children were involved in many of the religious reforms and counter-reforms that were instituted during this period.

We cannot be sure whether the groundswell of religious publications in sixteenth-century England represented an organic, popular embrace of Protestantism, or simply the zealousness of theologians and clergymen. But many of the surviving texts suggest that children were considered a prime target for writers wishing to promote reformed ideas and religious practices.

A large number of catechisms, for example, were produced by reformers to try to include the youngest members of the population in the new faith. These catechisms were often meant to prepare children for eventual admission to communion, although there was significant anxiety about their taking the sacrament before they were fully cognizant of its meaning.

We have examples, in fact, of catechisms designed for children as young as three years old, and in some instances doctrinal points were simply read out by adults to be answered with a yes or no by the child. The proliferation of question-answer exercises designed specifically to teach children the rudiments of reformed doctrine attests to both the ambitions of reformers—who wanted to include the youngest generation in their reforms—and to their sense that children along with illiterate or semi-literate adults needed to receive instruction in a form that was specifically tailored to their educational level.

The ritual of baptism—where children were sprinkled with holy water in the presence of elder spiritual caretakers—was also affected by changing views on the power of church-sponsored sacraments. We know that baptism was widely practiced by English parents, whether or not they belonged to the new Protestant faith.

Such debates call our attention to the importance of deliberate choice and willed as opposed to unthinking faith in the new religious consciousness gradually taking hold in England. And yet, even if children could not entirely choose salvation, they had long been credited with a spiritual purity that made them seem close to God.

The English poet Thomas Traherne, for example, offered a powerful vision of innocence in his collection of religious poems, Centuries , while Quakers embraced an ethos of spontaneous, unmediated spiritual authenticity. Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.

Third Century, sec. The qualities of simplicity and purity could mean different things to different religious groups. In some cases, this precocity and innocence could symbolize the future of the church, or the simplicity of adult spirituality when it was attuned to the basic truths of the gospel.

When, for example, Puritans began writing their own spiritual autobiographies in the seventeenth century, the writer would often show signs of spiritual awakening and conscience in childhood. Children were thus depicted as being able to grasp the essential warrants for redemption—experiencing, in effect, the type of conversion experience that was usually associated with adult spirituality.