Childhood and Emotion

Across Cultures 1450-1800

Claudia Jarzebowski, Thomas Max Safley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317913993
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

How did children feel in the Middle Ages and early modern times? How did adults feel about the children around them? This collection addresses these fundamental but rarely asked questions about social and family relations by bringing together two emerging fields within cultural history – childhood and emotion – and provides avenues through which to approach their shared histories.

Bringing together a wide range of material and sources such as court records, self-narratives and educational manuals, this collection sheds a new light on the subject. The coverage ranges from medieval to eighteenth-century Europe and North America, and examines Catholic, Protestant, Puritan and Jewish communities. Childhood emerges as a function not of gender or age, but rather of social relations. Emotions, too, appear differently in source-driven studies in that they derive not from modern assumptions but from real, lived experience.

Featuring contributions from across the globe, Childhood and Emotion comes a step closer to portraying emotions as they were thought to be experienced by the historical subjects. This book will establish new benchmarks not only for the history of these linked subjects but also for the whole history of social relations.

PART I

Communities

1

MODEL CHILDREN AND PIOUS DESIRE IN EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT PHILANTHROPY

Kelly J. Whitmer

Introduction

Accounts of child prophets and other spiritually gifted children played important roles in communities of Protestants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Among the most popular were accounts describing the “inspired discourses” of the “child prophets of Dauphine”; these were circulated in pamphlets among members of Huguenot communities in the French countryside after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.¹ The pamphlets contained depositions and extracts of letters of individuals claiming to have witnessed hundreds of children prophesying in villages scattered along the River Drôme from 1686 to 1689.² Huguenots of the Camisard region of France, who took up arms to defend themselves immediately following the Nantes revocation, were also associated with child prophecy as a kind of phenomenon.³

English Puritans and other non-conformist religious groups circulated stories of child prophets and other spiritually gifted young people that duly served to document their activities and inspire young people to behave in similar ways. The most popular of these stories included James Janeway’s very popular Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1670) and an octavo tract called The Wise Virgin that contained “A wonderfull Narration of the various dispensations of God towards a Childe of eleven years of age.”⁴ The young prophet was a girl named Martha Hatfield who, during severe bouts of illness for several months in 1652, went into trance-like states and foretold future events.⁵ Accounts of Hatfield’s activities appeared only a few years after a very popular account of the ministry of Sarah Wight, whose visions were recorded by the Baptist minister Henry Jessey in 1647.⁶

Groups of evangelical Lutherans, often referred to as Pietists, also worked to raise public awareness of the young prophets and other spiritually gifted children in their midst.⁷ This chapter focuses on an account of a spiritually gifted child published by Halle’s controversial community of Pietists in 1708. Told from the perspective of his tutor, the account offered a hagiographical account of the life of a ten-year-old boy named Christlieb Leberecht von Exter.⁸ That same year (1708), Christlieb’s story was translated into English and published in London along with a related account of some “extraordinary pious motions and devout exercises observ’d of late in many children in Silesia” called Praise out of the Mouth of Babes.⁹ The story of the Silesian children was based on actual reports of a youth movement that erupted during the campaigns of the Great Northern War and was recounted by radical Pietist Johann Wilhelm Petersen (1649–1727) in his 1709 book, The Power of Children.¹⁰

Part of what made the story of Christlieb particularly important was that immediately following its publication, an individual who was critical of Halle Pietism – a man named Johann Heinrich Feustking (1672–1713) – used it as an opportunity to attack the public face of the movement, a prominent professor of theology at the university named August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). Under the pseudonym Hieronymous Bahr, Feustking published a text called The Highly Perverse Raising up of Children by Pietists (Höchstverderbliche Auferziehung der Kinder bey den Pietisten) in which he lamented Francke’s efforts to “canonize” ten-year-old Christlieb, in particular.¹¹ Christlieb’s father, Johann Eberhard Exter, responded immediately with a defence of Francke and his efforts to promote awareness of his son’s exemplary behaviour and piety.¹²

The debates surrounding the activities of Halle Pietists that Christlieb’s story became associated with resulted largely from a public controversy that Francke had been involved in while teaching at the university in Leipzig.¹³ Francke had insulted several prominent theologians there by encouraging theology students not to attend their lectures, to burn their theology textbooks and to meet together in private circles called conventicles to discuss the Bible on their own terms. In 1689, these offended “orthodox Lutheran” professors formally investigated Francke and several others, banned the conventicles and forced him to leave the city. Francke became famous and with the help of his mentor, the Lutheran theologian (and “father of German Pietism”) Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), was given a prominent position at Brandenburg-Prussia’s new university, the University of Halle, when it was founded in 1695. Francke, who was committed to the reform of the university, and of education more generally, founded what he described as a “universal seminar”: a new “city of schools” or suburban educational community that was organized around an orphanage building and staffed almost entirely by theology students. Through Spener and many others, he maintained a close and, for the most part, mutually supportive relationship with courtly circles in Berlin.¹⁴

Told from the perspective of his tutor, the story of young Christlieb was useful both to Halle Pietists and their critics in ways I will explain. However, my purpose here is not to focus on the significance of Christlieb’s story for the history of German Pietism, but rather for the histories of childhood and emotion more generally – in keeping with the aspirations of this volume. The story of Christlieb offers one way of better understanding what were on-going efforts in this period to explain the emotional effects of certain practices of piety (praxis pietatis) on the mind – specifically the minds of young men. Pietist theologians, many of whom became involved in some official capacity in Halle’s new university, found themselves in an enviable position among other Protestant groups in that they had their very own institutions within which they could explore and elaborate upon these effects. They had created their own unique “emotional community”, which I define (following Barbara Rosenwein) as a group “in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions.”¹⁵ The group of Pietists who had created their own community in Halle by 1700 used Christlieb’s story to draw attention to the power of gifted male children – the main targets of their educational programming – and to demonstrate that certain kinds of emotions could affect young boys’ abilities to perceive, to remember and to teach. Christlieb’s story contained an argument about the meaning and potential of certain kinds of emotions to spark both rational and socially responsible (i.e. philanthropic) behaviour.

In sum, Christlieb’s example offered proof that, first, young men could achieve forms of spiritual and emotional perfection; and, second, this perfection involved real forms of emotional intelligence, not spontaneous and potentially dangerous outpourings of emotion that were difficult to direct or appropriate. Christlieb’s emotional intelligence – not his enthusiasm – was what made him worthy of emulation, even canonization (to borrow Feustking’s term). Readers who encountered the story were presented with several recognizable characteristics of Christlieb’s advanced affective state. They could then use this description to measure the quality of their own piety, to recognize forms of emotional intelligence they also possessed, and to apply this intelligence to the improvement of their communities in some tangible way. Francke said he hoped the story would make older readers “blush by what is to be seen in children” and also serve as a kind of manual for children so that “their Heart and Affections to God may thereby be raised and mounted up”.¹⁶

Enthusiasm and emotional intelligence

Francke wrote a long introduction to the story of Christlieb’s life in which he acknowledged the negative associations or assumptions people often had about young people. There would be many, he wrote, who might not bother to read the account since it related things that “concern only a Child, and are only the product of a Child.” He acknowledged that the rest of the world might interpret the things related in the text:

… as childish Things and consequently deserving all Contempt and Disregard, as not worthy, that any one should spend his Time and Pains upon Reading them.¹⁷

In response, he reminded his readers of the Biblical dictum to “become as little Children” (Matt. 18:1–4) and what he described as God’s tendency to choose “the weak Things of the world to confound the Things which are Mighty”. He also insisted that he had seen Christlieb with his own eyes, establishing himself as a credible witness who stood by the account of his actions as retold by his tutor.¹⁸

Francke also emphasized Christlieb’s age and lack of experience with the world – an empiricist position – as the key attributes that defined him as a child.¹⁹ In his estimation, the combination of these attributes usually meant an undeveloped or simple mind, which made the evidence of Christlieb’s emotional and intellectual maturity all the more striking. He explained that most of Christlieb’s biography contained “edifying meditations which the Pious Child wrote and left according to the Measure of that Knowledge he had obtained from the Word of God, in such Hours as others of his Age trifle way with Childish Plays”.²⁰ These meditations were especially noteworthy, Francke continued, because they are:

… not of a Man, who has attained at length to an eminent Knowledge by many Years Labour, Industry and Experience, but of a Child, who thought that the Love of Christ surpass’d and transcended all Knowledge; who wrote in his Simplicity concerning true Christianity, no otherwise than he found it lively in his own Heart.²¹

The contrast between Christlieb’s lack of experience in the world and what he actually knew is manifest throughout the story and serves as a way of drawing attention to the relationship between Christlieb’s piety and his intelligence. Here was a child who possessed and retained as much knowledge as an experienced and well-travelled man of industry.

It was not just what young Christlieb knew, it was also how he knew it that mattered most to Francke and his circle. Critics, such as Feusting, associated Halle’s community of Pietists with religious enthusiasm (Schwärmerei), which was roundly linked to spontaneous and highly emotive expressions of piety through ecstasies, prophetic visions or intensified outpourings of affection, and also anti-social or even irrational behaviour. “One really ought to think about what kind of people Francke and his accomplices in ‘the Pietist enthusiasm’ are”, he wrote.²² His entire treatise was devoted to providing evidence of their misuse, even abuse, of children in their midst. Among his concerns was how much attention Halle Pietists had paid to Christlieb as a model or example at the expense of directing readers’ attention to the Scripture – and the example of Jesus, in particular. Feusting believed Halle Pietists were really ecstatic Calvinists, who were endangering young people through their institutionalization of false and fanatical teachings. He was also concerned about their interests in linking the study of theology to the study of medicine.²³

Francke and other members of his circle were aware of Feusting’s criticisms, particularly the links he and many others were making between Pietism and enthusiasm. More generally, they were aware of a general tendency to associate enthusiasm with the impulsive or disconcerting behaviour often reported in accounts of individual child prophets associated with non-conformist groups. What they also knew was that the best-known child prophets tended to be young girls, not boys, and were readily associated with a long tradition of female mysticism and piety.²⁴ In his analysis of the Martha Hatfield case, for example, Nigel Smith notes that her story is best understood in conjunction with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Communities
• PART II Narrations
• PART III Practices
• Selected Readings
• Index