Excerpt from Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Oxford University Press,1997. 38-9. "Churching of women" Another ecclesiastical ritual with a strong social significance was the churching, or purification, of women after childbirth, representing as it did society's recognition of the woman's new role as mother, and her resumption of sexual relations with her husband after a period of ritual seclusion and avoidance. Extreme Protestant reformers were later to regard it as one of the most obnoxious Popish survivals in the Anglican Church, but medieval churchmen had also devoted a good deal of energy to refuting such popular superstitions as the belief that it was improper for the mother to emerge from her house, or to look at the sky or the earth before she had been purified. The Church chose to treat the ceremony as one of thanksgiving for a safe deliverance, and was reluctant to countenance any prescribed interval after birth before it could take place. Nor did it accept that the woman should stay indoors until she had been churched. Like the Sarum Manual, Dives and Pauper stressed that unpurified women might enter church whenever they wished, and that 'they that call them heathen women for the time that they lie in be fools and sin. . . full grievously'. But for people at large churching was indubitably a ritual of purification closely linked to its Jewish predecessor. Radical Protestants were later to blame the ceremony itself, which 'breedeth and nourisheth many superstitious opinions in the simple people's hearts; as that the woman which hath born a child is unclean and unholy'. But a fairer view would have been to regard the ritual as the result of such opinions, rather than the cause. Virginity, or at least abstinence from sexual intercourse, was still a generally accepted condition of holiness; and there were many medieval precedents for the attitude of the Laudian Vicar of Great Totham, Essex, who refused communion to menstruating women and those who had had sexual intercourse on the previous night.' Such prejudices may have been reinforced by the all-male character of the Church and its insistence on celibacy, but they are too universal in primitive societies to be regarded as the mere creation of medieval religion. The ceremony of the churching of women took on a semi- magical significance in popular estimation; hence the belief, which the Church vainly attempted to scotch, that a woman who died in child-bed before being churched should be refused Christian burial. The idea of purification survived the Reformation; even at the end of the seventeenth century it was reported from parts of Wales that 'the ordinary women are hardly brought to look upon churching otherwise than as a charm to prevent witchcraft, and think that grass will hardly ever grow where they tread before they are churched'. It is hardly necessary to detail the allied superstitions which attached themselves to the ceremony of marriage. Most of them taught that the fate of the alliance could be adversely affected by the breach of a large number of ritual requirements relating to the time and place of the ceremony, the dress of the bride, and so forth. Typical was the notion that the wedding ring would constitute an effective recipe against unkindness and discord, so long as the bride continued to wear it. Such notions provide a further demonstration of how every sacrament of the Church tended to generate its attendant sub-superstitions which endowed the spiritual formulae of the theologians with a crudely material efficacy. Excerpt from Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Oxford University Press,1997. 59-61. "Churching and childbirth" Another semi-magical ceremony which the Anglican Church seemed reluctant to discard was the churching of women. In its prescription for this rite the Elizabethan Prayer Book followed medieval practice in laying its emphasis on the element of thanksgiving for a safe deliverance. But to Puritan observers it seemed that too many remnants of the old idea of ritual purification had been retained. They took offence at the stylised accompaniments of childbirth — lying-in 'with a white sheet upon her bed', coming forth 'covered with a veil, as ashamed of some folly'. The rubric of the Prayer Book did not require the woman to wear a white veil, but orthodox clergy insisted upon it and it was upheld in a legal judgment in the reign of James I.' Many churches had a special seat for the new mother, with her midwife at a discreet distance behind her. All this seemed to the Puritans to imply that a woman was unclean after childbirth until she had been magically purified; and it was true that some of the bishops regarded 'purifying' as the mot juste. The need for such purification, declared one preacher, speaking of sexual intercourse, was clear proof 'that some stain or other doth creep into this action which had need to be repented'. Puritan suspicions were not allayed by the recitation at the ceremony itself of Psalm 121, with its strange incantation: 'The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night' — as if, snorted John Milton, the woman 'had been travailing not in her bed, but in the deserts of Arabia'. The taboo elements in the whole ritual were sardonically analysed by Henry Barrow: 'After they have been safely delivered of childbirth, and have lain in, andFor Barrow the surest proof of the magical element in the ceremony was the ritual period of isolation which preceded it: 'If she be not defiled by childbirth, why do they separate her? Why do theyResistance to churching or to wearing the veil thus became one of the surest signs of Puritan feeling among clergy or laity in the century before the Civil War. But the Anglican Church hung on to the ceremony though dropping Psalm 121 after the Restoration, and quietly abandoning the emphasis upon the obligatory character of the rite. 1 The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1587-1590, pp.462-3. |