Religion and life cycles in early modern England

By Manchester University Press

Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and art history to further our understanding of the intersection between religion and the life course in the period c. 1550–1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between life stages and rites of passage that were of religious significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Oct 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526149220

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Introduction: religion and life cycles in early modern England

Caroline Bowden, Emily Vine and Tessa Whitehouse

In 1704 Benjamin Levy, a prominent member of the London Ashkenazi Jewish community, recognised that he was increasingly ‘weak and infirme in body’ and set about making his will. He left detailed instructions for how his estate should be dispersed after his death, as well as his desire to be ‘decently buryed according to the Jewish Rites and Cermonyes’. Yet in addition to using the approaching end of his life to settle practical and financial affairs, Levy also made specific directions to guide his children’s religious observance in the years after his death. Among other stipulations, he desired that his children ‘may be educated in the fear of God’, that ‘they always marry in the race of the Dutch Jews in which they are borne’ and that they ‘religiously observe and keep the law of God according to the Jewish religion all the days of their lives’.¹ Levy, in his own preparation for the end of life, focuses his thoughts on his children’s journey through earlier stages of the life cycle – experiences of schooling and marriage – and urges them to be guided by the teachings of the faith they had been born into. Belief and religious practice are central to Levy’s preparations for his own death and equally central to how he believes his children should frame their daily experiences.

Seventy years earlier, the Cheshire landowner Sir Thomas Aston commissioned a memorial that also looked to the future but represented the significance of life-cycle processes across generations in a very different material form. John Souch’s almost life-sized family portrait Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of his Wife (1636; see plate 1) depicts the birthing chamber of Aston’s deceased wife and an empty cradle that evokes an infant dead soon after birth. Aston himself and a surviving son stand as witnesses to this deathbed scene, along with an ambiguous female figure. Heraldic and biblical motifs reinforce the portrait’s messages of remembering the dead while looking to the future. Despite the significant differences in the social status, professional concerns, family background and religious commitments of the two men, both Levy’s will and Aston’s portrait highlight the frailty of the human body and the need to place hope in the life cycle as an opportunity for individual and community renewal. Considerations of inheritance, concern about generations continuing, bearing public witness to acts of faith and the intersections of life and death are shared concerns across time, place and religion that are displayed in forms produced according to very different financial, material and social considerations.

In both Levy’s will and Aston’s portrait, the dead speak to the living and to future generations. The end of life is understood as a crucial period in preparing for the afterlife and for leaving guidance for those continuing their lives on earth, but other life-cycle processes – birth, education, maturation and marriage – are acknowledged too, and the individual’s life course is given meaning by its placement in an overarching spiritual and dynastic web of relationships formed over time and guided by religious teaching.

This volume takes actions such as those of Levy and Aston as its prompt to explore the intersections between religion and the passage of life in early modern England. The term ‘life cycle’ is interpreted broadly here to include rituals, sacraments and everyday observance; biological transition points such as birth and death, life stages such as childhood or adolescence, and indeed the passage of time and the process of ageing. The interdisciplinary scope of the volume brings together essays which examine how early modern people conceived of the relationship between faith and lived experience, and how religious practice both shaped and was influenced by the stages and passages of the life cycle in different textual and material forms. It includes chapters on Catholic, Protestant and, uniquely for a study of this kind, Jewish communities, to encourage cross-confessional comparison between life stages and rites of passage which were of religious significance to those belonging to all faiths. In sum, this volume brings together chapters on a wide range of topics which offer broader interpretations of the life cycle, religious practice and confessional identity than appear in existing studies in this area; by positioning chapters from historians, art historians and English literary scholars alongside each other, it consolidates a range of approaches and means of framing these events and practices.

In some respects, this book responds to David Cressy’s pioneering study of the influence of religion upon rites of passage during and after the English Reformation, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (1997).² Cressy’s focus, predominantly upon ceremonies in Protestant families, reflects the interests of historical studies of its time. Much has changed in the last two decades, particularly regarding awareness of other religious groups in post-Reformation England and the fluidity of the composition of those groups. In the period covered by this volume, multiple religious communities were present in England with a variety of rituals to mark key life events and a range of life experiences influenced by matters of faith. Life-cycle events, and the family and congregational ceremonies that marked them, were particularly important for the religious identities of displaced or marginalised faith groups. Indeed, debates surrounding certain life-cycle events often demarcated and were central to the identity of these different denominations: the decision about when (or indeed if) to baptise, where and how a burial should take place, whether it was acceptable to pray for the deceased. These rites of passage could generate conflict with the established church or even the apparatus of the State. Some of the complexity of identifying religious communities derives from the fact that some groups had formal membership rites and processes, whereas others had membership that was more informal and involved self-identification, making it challenging to quantify fellow believers.³ Some minority communities existed under difficult conditions at times, suffering penalties for membership and limited opportunities for worship. Such restrictions raised the stakes for the role of the family and community in supporting specific religious practices related to the life cycle, such as child-rearing practices or attitudes to death.

One of the key interventions that this volume proposes is the reimagining of the definition of ‘life cycle’. The term ‘cycle’ implies something fixed, sequential and repetitive – events that are experienced in the same way, in the same order, with each ‘revolution’ of the cycle being the same or very similar to the one that came before it, and with each generation and individual experiencing the stages and passages of life in similar ways. Equally, another term, ‘life course’, implies that the passage of life is mapped out and predetermined, and again experienced similarly, in a certain order, by different people. In the conference that initiated this volume, the idea of the ‘life spiral’ was posited as a useful means of understanding how early modern people may have framed their lived experiences. Thinking of the passage of life as a spiral, rather than a cycle, acknowledges that individual timelines are distinct and that individual perceptions of ageing and rites of passage can shift, that each passing year or life stage is not experienced in the same way and there is no set or predetermined pattern for generational changes. In this collection we contend that the life cycle was not something fixed, absolute, or universal in the early modern period. Multiple and overlapping ‘life cycles’ were experienced and interpreted by individuals in different ways. On one level we mean the ways in which individuals experienced and framed the physical or bodily processes of childbirth, puberty, menstruation, breastfeeding, sickness, menopause, ageing, death. Two of these, childbirth and death, were truly universal and of great significance to those belonging to all faiths. Coexisting with this bodily life cycle were the experiences which formed the social life cycle: schooling, coming of age, joining a profession, embarking on travel abroad, marriage, parenthood, widowhood. Interspersed throughout was an individual’s religious life cycle: the occasions when they were welcomed into a particular faith or perhaps turned their back on it, when they were tempted to convert, when they joined the ministry or a convent, events or years which they personally acknowledged to have transformed their life or instigated their spiritual awakening. This collection also contends with the very life cycle, development and growth of religious communities and confessions themselves: the fledgling London Jewish communities in their desire to establish burial grounds and lasting traditions for future generations; and the development of the Reformation from infancy to maturity and middle age.

By focusing on England in the period c.1550–1800, this volume traces how different religious confessions were impacted by and responded to the significant religious and political changes that occurred in the two centuries following the Reformation. The time period explored in this volume marks a break with studies which have been oriented around the impact of the break with Rome upon life-cycle ritual.⁴ Our intentionally long duration continues well beyond the religious turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century and over the eighteenth, in order to facilitate an analysis of change and continuity which is not grounded around any one religious upheaval. This extended time frame is necessary to understand how life cycles as experienced by Catholics, Jews and Protestants of various denominations were shaped by the aftermath of the Reformation, the civil wars, religious migration, waves of increased persecution, the introduction and repeal of penal laws and ongoing debates about religious toleration. The persecution faced by Catholics in the late sixteenth century was very different to the situation in 1800, when many Catholics were able to worship openly and exiled religious were permitted to enter the country in order to escape persecution on the other side of the channel. Although legislation remained in place restricting their rights, it was not regularly enforced. Protestant Nonconformist denominations variously emerged, faced oppression and restriction, and were eventually granted increasing toleration within the time period explored by this volume. Jewish people began to return to England in 1656, and by the close of the eighteenth century had established congregations across the country with several synagogues serving the populations of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in London, as well as others in communities as remote as Exeter and Falmouth. Nonetheless, we contend in this collection that the significant connection between religion and life cycles continued into and throughout the eighteenth century.⁵

In order to permit cross-confessional, as well as cross-temporal comparison, the volume presents studies thematically rather than chronologically. Thus, the end-of-life rituals of seventeenth-century Jewish communities can be set alongside contemporary Protestant practices, or Catholic and Protestant Nonconformist responses to childhood can be viewed together, or religious practices in London in the sixteenth century can be considered alongside those from the end of the eighteenth. Several chapters which focus on the eighteenth century clearly show the continuing influence and significance of the links between life cycles and religion, although at the same time it is clear that there have been substantial changes regarding acceptance of minority denominations and toleration of a range of expressions. The varying legal situation over the three centuries covered by this collection means that at different points, different communities were either in the ascendancy or forced to act out their practices in secret. The focus upon life-cycle ritual permits the study of the degree to which nonconforming rituals could be practised openly, providing an important litmus-test for studying religious plurality more generally.

Setting examples from different contexts and confessions alongside each other reinforces the existence of multiple and overlapping understandings of the life cycle in early modern England. Religious practice and degree of faith were not fixed, absolute, or universal entities at an individual level either. In this volume the writings produced by individuals such as Sally Wesley and the painting commissioned by Sir Thomas Aston stand as testament to their intense piety. Richard Stonley’s memoranda of life-cycle events, on the other hand, are as much about his social and working life as they are about his religious life. The education that the Catholic Lady Jerningham intended for her adolescent daughter was as much about deportment, grammar, music and drawing, and conversational writing skills as it was about instruction in the faith while it polished her to become a good Catholic wife and mother. This intersection between piety and pragmatism is encapsulated in Chapter 6, which highlights worldly reasons for religious conversion.

This collection is not constrained to the three ‘transition points’ of birth, marriage and death singled out by Cressy. It seeks to take a more holistic approach to the intersection between religion and all stages of the life course, considering not just the rites of passage that shaped an individual’s life, but their everyday lived experience of attending school and church, going to work, praying, writing letters and singing hymns. These quotidian practices could be just as important in influencing an individual’s life course and their continued engagement with their faith as attendance at formal religious ceremonies.

Accordingly, chapters 4 and 13 focus on the centrality of religion to the upbringing of children, especially the importance of religious instruction. In chapters 9 and 10, Zoë Hudson and Tessa Whitehouse analyse daily encounters with life-cycle events within genres of life writing to show the symbiotic relationship between everyday practice and life-cycle events. Everyday devotional practice was punctuated and shaped by news of birth and death, yet so too was much of everyday practice – Bible-reading, prayer, the writing of a spiritual diary – oriented towards a preparation for death. Religious education was targeted to guide children and adolescents through their current life stage and prepare them for the next: appropriate marriage, joining the ministry or a respected profession, and ultimately to set them up for a pious adult life. Those who were older, or nearing the end of life, crafted wills or life writings which reflected upon how significant events had shaped or marked turning points in their own religious lives.

This volume also considers alternate frameworks and timelines for thinking about the life cycle which run on different tracks to everyday lived experience and transformative rites of passage. Elaine Hobby analyses the life cycle as specifically experienced by women in Chapter 8. Bernard Capp explores ‘pragmatic’ religious conversions as a category of analysis and surveys how these conversions coincided with different stages of life in Chapter 6. Nancy Jiwon Cho shows in Chapter 13 how hymns which encouraged children to prepare for death were closely bound to other conceptions of temporality: daily routines, the arrival of ‘clock time’, the passing of the seasons and understandings of eternity. Meanwhile, in Chapter 1 Alexandra Walsham investigates the phenomenon of ‘second birth’, and the interrelationship between the biological and religious life cycles.

In acknowledging the existence of multiple, overlapping life cycles, experienced differently by different individuals, the contributors in this volume survey a variety of contexts for religious observance and life-cycle ritual. The book seeks to move beyond the focus upon the institutional religious settings of churches and synagogues, and to consider also the home (where most people in early modern England were born, and where they would likely die), the school, the burial ground, the workplace and the stage. In seeking lived experiences that encompass the everyday, as well as transitional rites of passage, so too must we consider everyday settings with informal actors, religious practice directed by laypeople as well as religious leaders. This collection also responds directly to Cressy’s call for scholars to look at ‘local variations and regional patterns of English cultural history’, with chapters turning to local case studies, encompassing both the rural and the urban (for example, Zoë Hudson’s focus on Essex and London in Chapter 9, and Rosemary Keep’s concentration on Cheshire in Chapter 11), which do much to highlight the complexity of English religious life.⁶

The interdisciplinary focus of the collection, comprising scholars working in the fields of history, English literature, and art history, brings together sources and approaches which provide a fuller understanding of how people in early modern England experienced and responded to the interaction between religion and multiple, overlapping ‘life cycles’. Rebecca Whiteley’s analysis of ‘birth figures’ (Chapter 2), anatomical drawings found predominantly in midwifery manuals, has important implications for how printed images shaped medical and religious understandings of pregnancy and childbirth. Rosemary Keep’s study of the Aston portrait demonstrates how birth, death, childhood, adulthood and intense piety interact in close proximity within a single painting (Chapter 11). David Fletcher’s examination of Restoration comedy focuses on the importance of drama in reflecting contemporary attitudes to the institution of marriage (Chapter 7), and Tessa Whitehouse’s use of personal writing seeks to bring together life cycle and life writing as categories of analysis which have often been too discretely framed (Chapter 10). Lauren Cantos’s examination of maternal breastfeeding in Chapter 3 highlights the religious scripture that underpinned sermons and prescriptive literature alike. In the absence of personal religious writing for the London Jewish communities, Emily Vine focuses on congregational records and wills in Chapter 12. This broad range of sources and approaches allows for a more complete overview of how religion and life cycles shaped many aspects of the lives of early modern people textually, visually, experientially: whether through images commissioned or encountered, hymns sung, religious or medical prescriptive texts read, drama seen or personal writing and legal documents composed.

The term ‘life cycle’ has been applied to processes from the past in a variety of ways. The life-cycle theory articulated by the French sociologist Arnold van Gennep in Les Rites de passage (1909; English translation 1960) sought to examine the role of religious belief in ceremonial activities connected with rites of passage, described by van Gennep as ‘life-crisis ceremonial’.⁷ First adopted by ethnographers, other scholars subsequently broadened and elaborated the original methodological tools to apply them to historical studies of industrial societies. As well as responses to ceremonies relating to life events, such as baptism and marriage, historians have included life stages such as childhood and adolescence in their investigations.

Edward Muir played an important role in bringing van Gennep’s ideas into dialogue with the study of late medieval and early modern Europe. By surveying the period 1400–1700, Muir analysed how the Reformation transformed the means through which ritual practices ‘marked and assisted the biological and social transitions of birth, elevation in social status, marriage, procreation and death’.⁸ He contended that the perception that ritual had a discernible and physical effect (for example, prayers for the dead) was transformed by the post-Reformation understanding that such acts were unnecessary, as evidenced by the Protestant rejection of prayers for the dead, and accordingly the ‘rejection of the ritual industry of death’.⁹ Cressy pointed the way for historians of early modern England by engaging with sociological studies in Birth, Marriage, and Death. He demonstrated the insights to be gained by applying van Gennep’s framework, particularly to post-Reformation baptism rituals in England, but at the same time highlighted the limitations of this kind of sociological approach: ‘Much more can be learnt by trying to be receptive to difference, by listening to individual stories, and by examining particular circumstances as they developed over time’, he observed.¹⁰ Religion and Life Cycles in Early Modern England does as he suggests in a deliberately inclusive way by attending to specific circumstances in which life-cycle practices were represented in material forms as diverse as oil paintings, printed engravings, wills, plays and correspondence. Across the collection here, a wide range of religious groups at particular times are brought into focus, including social networks of Protestants and Catholics in the decades following the Reformation (Chapter 9), first- and second-generation Jewish Londoners (Chapter 12), Quakers in the eighteenth century (Chapter 4), eighteenth-century families containing both Catholic and Protestant members (Chapter 5) and evangelical Protestants at the turn of the nineteenth century (Chapter 10). Chapters such as 1 and 6 take a comparative approach including several confessional groups. Across the volume we thereby develop the scope of Cressy’s work, which focused on the established church, charting the theological and ecclesiological changes that took place due to reformation and political change. Cressy’s excitement regarding the complexities revealed by his extensive reading of wide-ranging sources remains inspirational.

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing interest among early modern scholars in using the concept of the life cycle as a tool for analysis. Often engaging with (even if only to critique as reductionist) the categories established by van Gennep, they have generally focused on one ‘stage’ of the life cycle, and predominantly on the beginning and end of life. Adrian Wilson has considered how religious practice influenced childbirth and Will Coster has focused on baptism and the role of godparents. The roll call of those who have examined the dead – the impact of the Long Reformation on understandings of and the management of death and dying – includes Clare Gittings, Ralph Houlbrooke, Eamon Duffy, Peter Marshall and Danae Tankard.¹¹ These studies have shown, in great detail, the profound influence that the introduction of Protestant practices had for communities mourning their dead.¹² Susan Brigden and Lucy Underwood have explored the links between youth, religious conversion and related activism. Writing about the sixteenth century, they are dealing with adolescents on either side of the confessional divide: Brigden focuses her attention mainly on young men in London who embraced Protestantism from the 1530s. Underwood considers the religious commitment of young men joining the seminaries in Rome and Valladolid from the end of the sixteenth century. Both argue for the importance of considering age in understanding the behaviour and the impact of religious beliefs on their subjects. Brigden concludes: ‘To be a youthful Protestant in the 1520s, when the faith was new and outlawed, was to be a revolutionary: a generation later Protestantism was the orthodoxy … Once Catholicism became an evangelical faith young disciples were at the forefront of the mission.’¹³ This collection also considers the life cycles of religious movements, most prominently in Chapter 1 but also in chapters 6 and 11 which reflect, in different ways, on how particular individuals’ life cycles intersected with shifting religious paradigms in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

In 2011 Alexandra Walsham published her first intervention in the debates about the importance of age and how the life cycle was implicated in the movements for religious renewal that marked the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁴ Walsham’s findings were, like Cressy’s, based mainly on Protestant sources, and established one of the key observations that has influenced our collection: ‘Somewhat surprisingly, the consensus that has emerged from the historiographical controversies of the last thirty years that England experienced a long and incremental Reformation has not prompted much interest in how people at the various points in the lifecycle reacted to it and how far the religious developments of the period can be said to have had a generational complexion’.¹⁵ While Religion and Life Cycles in Early Modern England is not directly concerned with these questions of how metaphors of age and youth were used to characterise national religious progress or to emphasise confessional distinctions, it responds to Walsham’s call for attention to the particularities of religious experience in the lives of people at certain life stages (notably death, but also in childbirth) and considers the significance of intergenerational relationships and the experience of being young.

The tendency has been to focus upon life-cycle events or stages in and of themselves rather than to situate them within the life course of a given individual, family or congregation. Much of the scholarship which has considered preparation for death has focused upon sickness and the end of life, including preparations such as will-making, rather than upon how preparation for death shaped the daily religious practice of the healthy, or of expectant mothers, or of children.¹⁶ How did the death of an individual like Magdalene Aston affect the religious practice of her family in different ways depending on their own life stage – how did it affect her husband’s devotional practice, and how did it affect her young son’s? Studies of marriage have focused upon the ritual of the ceremony itself and less upon the appropriate preparation for or anticipation of marriage that began in adolescence, or how the institution was viewed by those who were not within a normal marriageable age range.¹⁷ Equally, recent work on the intersection of childhood and religion, such as Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain, has tended to focus upon methods of training (such as catechising) rather than environments of belief.¹⁸ While this collection considers the importance of religious education for children and adolescents, including Chapter 4, which offers a detailed synthesis of existing research in this area, chapters such as Chapter 13 also offer a deeper understanding of patterns of life, linking childhood and religious practice with broader understandings of the life course, temporality and the afterlife.

In keeping with our focus upon multiple and overlapping life cycles, each author has been at liberty to apply the language and concepts of ‘life cycles’ in their own way, facilitating fresh possibilities of applying the methodology to the study of different stages of the life course in the early modern period. The authors have applied a range of research techniques, based on written and visual sources, offering insights into the impact of religion on daily life across several social groups. Our contributors demonstrate a broad range of creative conceptions of life cycles – from the passing of hours within a single day to constructions of eternity; from understandings of generational difference and rites of passage to the lived experience of daily routines; from the focus upon the life course of a single child to that of an entire congregation (present and into the future).

The collection is structured around the following themed parts: ‘Birth, childhood and youth’, ‘Adulthood and everyday life’, ‘The dying and the dead’. In keeping with our authors’ broad-ranging conceptions of the life cycle, and indeed of multiple, overlapping ‘life cycles’, these parts do not impose rigid groupings based solely on biological or social life stage. Accordingly, the first part explores ideas of spiritual ‘second birth’ as well as biological childbirth, and the youth and coming of age of the Reformation, as well as the youth and coming of age of individual adolescents. In the second part, narratives of religious conversion and the changing fortunes of the institution of marriage feature as an important part of adulthood and everyday life alongside work and friendship. And in the third part, death is shown both as a discrete event which required congregational management and as a concept which shaped and directed the preceding expanse and practices of an individual’s religious life. Given such a range of possibilities, it is clear that a single volume cannot address all the issues, but it richly suggests avenues for further exploration and research.

Notes

1Will of Benjamin Levy, Broker of London 17 July 1704, The National Archives, PROB 11/477/227.

2David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

3See, for instance, the Introduction to Merridee L. Bailey, Socialising the Child in Late Medieval England, c.1400–1600 (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), pp. 1–10; and Alexandra Shepard and P. J. Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Places and Rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

4Eamon Duffy , The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven: Yale, 1992); Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death ; Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

5This follows the argument by W. M. Jacob in ‘Conscientious attention to publick and family worship of God: religious practice in eighteenth-century English households’, in J. Doran, C. Methuen and A. Walsham (eds), Studies in Church History: Religion and the Household , vol. 50 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 2014), pp. 307–317.

6Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death , p. 481.

7Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage , trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).

8Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 16.

9Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe , p. 52.

10 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death , p. 98.

11 Adrian Wilson, Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1984); Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Danae Tankard, ‘The reformation of the deathbed in mid-sixteenth-century England’, Mortality, 8 (2003), 251–267.

12 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family .

13 Susan Brigden, ‘Youth and the Reformation’, Past and Present , 95 (1982), 67; Lucy Underwood, ‘Youth, religious identity, and autobiography at the English colleges in Rome and Valladolid, 1592–1685’, Historical Journal , 55:2 (2012), 349–374; Lucy Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

14 A. Walsham, ‘The reformations of the generations: youth, age and religious change in England, c.1500–1700’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , XXI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 93–121.

15 Walsham, ‘The reformations of the generations’, 95.

16 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death , pp. 379–395; Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual ; Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family ; Tankard, ‘The reformation of the deathbed’.

17 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death , pp. 285–297; Anthony Fletcher, ‘The Protestant idea of marriage in early modern England’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 161–181; Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

18 Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (London: Routledge, 2009).

Part I

Birth, childhood and youth

1

Second birth and the spiritual life cycle in Protestant England

Alexandra Walsham

In early modern England, perceptions of the human life cycle were filtered through the prism of the influential classical and medieval scheme known as the Ages of Man. This didactic trope engendered a pervasive iconography, and was normally divided into seven periods – infancy, childhood, youth, man- (and woman)hood, age and ‘decrepit’ old age. In one popular single sheet print, however, there are eleven steps, five from birth up to responsible adulthood and five down towards to the terminus of death (see figure 1.1 and plate 2).¹

This familiar device was a metaphor for the progression of the world from Creation to Doomsday and for the growth of the human soul. A rich cultural resource, it was flexible and multivalent. It coexisted with a set of cultural conventions about childhood and old age marked by contradiction and ambivalence. If youth was associated both with purity and with idleness and ignorance, age likewise carried connotations of stubbornness and senility as well as maturity and wisdom. Age itself was understood less in rigid numerical terms than as a sliding scale of successive stages of mental, physical and moral development. Settled conventions about when childhood ended (typically 14) and when old age began (commonly 50 or 60) coexisted with the conviction that one could be advanced in years but young in faith or precocious in piety despite being a tender babe.² These scriptural commonplaces provided a powerful lens through which early modern people perceived demographic realities. As is well known, early modern England had a very different age profile to our own: 40–50 per cent of the population was under 21.³ Yet a reverence for age, as the arbiter and conduit of authority, lay at the core of its cultural values. The prevailing ideal was gerontocratic: the young were expected to defer to their elders.⁴

Figure 1.1 [The Ages of Man] (London: Thomas Jenner, c.1630)

This chapter explores how these rhetorics were employed to describe the process of personal religious growth within Protestant circles. It examines the complex relationship between biological and spiritual understandings of age in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and traces how this evolved as Protestantism ceased to be an illicit protest movement and became the official, institutionalised faith of the English nation. Complementing Alec Ryrie’s recent study of the Protestant life course, it illuminates the shifting significance and status of conversion in reformed piety against the backdrop of generational change, and highlights the ways in