Locating Childbirth Devotion in the English Parish Church, 1450–1580

Abstract

Abstract Childbirth in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England was not simply a medical affair but a social and religious event, with an associated array of complex devotional practices. This article challenges the widely held view that such practices were generally confined to the home and shows how the English parish church accommodated public devotional childbirth customs and objects. Using the perspectives of space, materiality, mobility, and recycling, I investigate a set of mobile material culture associated with childbirth (namely prayer beads, linen, and girdles) which moved between the parish church and domestic spaces. The article explores the shifting devotional significance of these objects, not only as they moved through space but also through time, by examining their fate during the English Reformation. Highlighting the previously under-examined public presence of the childbearing woman in the English parish, the article demonstrates that attention to devotional spaces and objects can shed new light on the emotional experiences of childbirth and women's wider religious and social practices during a period which was simultaneously one of incremental change and intense upheaval.