Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood

Naomi J. Miller, Naomi Yavneh, Naomi J. Miller, Naomi Yavneh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351934848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on art history, literary studies and social history, the essays in this volume explore a range of intersections between gender and constructions of childhood in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, England, France and Spain. The essays are grouped around the themes of celebration and loss, education and social training, growing up and growing old. Contributors grapple with ways in which constructions of childhood were inflected by considerations of gender throughout the early modern world. In so doing, they examine representations of children and childhood in a range of sources from the period, from paintings and poetry to legal records and personal correspondence. The volume sheds light on some of the ways in which, in the relations between Renaissance children and their parents and peers, gender mattered. Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood enriches our understanding of individual children and the nature of familial relations in the early modern period, as well as of the relevance of gender to constructions of self and society.

PART 1

Conceptualizing Childhood: Loss and Celebration

Chapter 1

A Comfortable Farewell: Child-loss and Funeral Monuments in Early Modern England

Patricia Phillippy

On a brass plaque in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, the grieving parents of ten-year-old Susanna Gray memorialized their daughter, enumerating their motives for doing so. These motives were widely held in common by creators of monuments for children in post-Reformation England:

Hallelujah

Here under waiting for a glorious Resurrection rests

ye body of Susanna Gray, Daughter of Henry Gray of

Enfeild in ye Countie of Stafford Esq. She dyed ye 29

of October: 1654 Being Neare 10. Years of Age.

First that such virtues as She practiced may

encourage others to imitate her

2: That they may not fall into oblivion.

3: That other may see, tis not in vaine to be

such. Ye most impartiall of them yt knew her thought

it Justice, to her Memory to leave this testimony

that she was the most modest, pious, & learned

that hath beene knowne of her yeares.¹

The didactic character of Susanna’s example, suggested in her parents’ first motive, is echoed on tombs for children as well as for adults, and reflects a reformed understanding of the function of funeral monuments.² No longer sites for intercessory prayers for the dead, as they were in Catholic England, postReformation tombs were reconsidered as tributes to exemplary lives and virtues, and as genealogical records preserving family history and identity.³ The Gray’s second goal, the creation of the monument as a defense against oblivion, is also a common feature of early modern tombs, and although the résumés inscribed on monuments for adult men are usually more replete than that of ten-year-old Susanna, her portrayal as modest, pious, and (more unusually) learned echoes the monumental portraits of many adult women in the period.⁴ By preventing Susanna’s memory from disappearing, as her small body did, into oblivion, the monument serves as a memorial to the permanent relationships established between family members in life, but perfected in death. The tomb anticipates the reunion of parents and daughter after the Resurrection, and imagines the bonds of love between them as reinforced, rather than severed, by death.

The Grays’ third avowed motive calls attention to a characteristic which this chapter argues is a chief feature of childhood tombs in early modern England. In making the difficult rhetorical and existential case that Susanna’s virtuous life was not vain despite her death at a brutally young age, the memorial introduces itself into evidence: her virtues were not futile, it reasons, because the monument renders “Justice to her Memory” by offering testimony to the life which would otherwise be lost to the bereaved and to history. The brass marker substitutes for the lost child, replacing the fragility of her flesh with the brilliant permanence of the material artifact. Although adults as well as children were commemorated in opulent tombs and with precious materials in early modern England—and, admittedly, Susanna Gray’s simple brass plaque would have featured among the least expensive, least opulent of memorial objects⁵—children’s tombs call special attention, in both their visual and textual elements, to the connection between the body mourned and the medium through which this sorrow is conveyed. The Gray monument’s explicit engagement with the question of vanity—both of its subject’s short life and its own memorial gesture—is typical of other monuments for children in the period. In these monuments, childhood death underscores the ephemeral and fragile qualities of all human life, and the preciousness and innocence of the deceased are literalized in the precious materials of the tomb and the imagery of its inscriptions. As these memorials substitute for and displace the bodies of children lost to death, they speak to the place and value of children in the domestic and social spaces of early modern English culture. Their efforts to stave off the vanity of childhood death and to render these losses meaningful comprise and convey a subtle history of the emotions, and an ever-changing image of the concerns attending dynastic continuity and domestic identity in the period.⁶

What is Pretty, What is Pompous

Children’s effigies evolved gradually throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from playing subordinate, symbolic roles on parents’ tombs to becoming free-standing portraits on monuments for individual children.⁷ The inclusion of children, living and dead, on the tombs of their parents responds to the acknowledged function of monuments as sources of genealogical, historical, and biographical information valuable to noble and upper class families in establishing dynastic identity. These effigies and the inscriptions accompanying them, however, are rarely free of feeling, and often present children’s deaths as emotional as well as dynastic losses. On the tomb of Sir Thomas Caryll in Shipley (Fig. 1.1), erected by his widow, Margaret, after his death in 1616, the recumbent effigies of husband and wife lie on an altar tomb on the face of which are portraits of three daughters and a son, the latter swaddled in his cradle. The inscription tells us, “Here underneath lyeth interred the bodye of Sr/ Thos. Caryll … who took to wife/ Margaret ye daughter of Sr John Tufton … by whom he had issue Edw./ deceased, Marie, married to Sr. Richard Molineux … Philip: married to Sr. Henry Parker … and Elizabeth deceased.”⁸ The figure of the child in a cradle, which ordinarily signifies death in infancy,⁹ underscores the death of the only son, Edward, as a dynastic failure, but at the same time, the tomb registers the social capital earned by the Carylls by arranging marriage alliances for their daughters with prominent families.¹⁰ Unable to guarantee the family’s social continuity through a surviving male heir, the monument offers a verse inscription, possibly written by Margaret Caryll, which stresses instead the survival of Thomas Caryll’s virtues in the historical afterlife:

Fig. 1.1 Monument for Sir Thomas and Margaret Caryll. St. Mary’s Shipley (Sussex), after 1616. Author photo.

Aske not who lyes intomb’d that crime

Argues you lived not in his time:

His virtues answer, and to fate

Out liveinge him, express their hate,

For stealing ’way the life of one

Who (but for fashion) needs no stone

To speake his praise: his woorst did dye

But best parte out lives memorie.

Then view, reade, trace his tombe, praise, deeds,

Which teares, joy, love, strains, causeth breeds.¹¹

The monument also recalls the death of a daughter, Elizabeth, and offers a sculptural record of her death, and those of the family’s patriarch and male heir, as affective losses, realized in the domestic sphere. Joining living family members with the dead, the Caryll monument insists upon the continuity of family ties after death and looks forward to corporeal resurrection in the afterlife. Gesturing toward the Resurrection, the tomb scripts an emotional, as well as dynastic, history of the family; a history as affective as it is pragmatic, focused on the painful separations of family members by death and on their eventual reunion in paradise.

Edward Caryll’s small effigy occupies an intermediate position in the spectrum of seventeenth-century monumental forms, between the stylized, symbolic depictions of children on parents’ (particularly mothers’) tombs and the realistic portraiture common on monuments for children themselves. If the Caryll tomb stresses dynastic identity on the one hand, and the affective ties between family members on the other, early-seventeenth-century monuments tend to replace representations of dynastic relations with those of domestic bonds. The connections between family members thus become more accessible in visual and emotional terms through images, inscriptions, and expressions that recast the public, social aspects of family identity as private, domestic affairs. This turn toward domestic intimacy is evident in the subgenre of tombs for women who died in childbirth, which gained popularity in the second decade of the seventeenth century. Nicholas Stone’s monument to Arthur and Elizabeth Coke, erected in St. Mary’s, Bramford, following Arthur’s death in 1629 (Fig. 1.2), employs this strategy of supplanting public matters and relationships with private. Elizabeth’s reclining effigy appears on an alabaster slab decorated to represent a bed, holding in her arms the profoundly swaddled form of a newborn. The impersonal, generic quality of the child’s effigy stands in stark contrast to the highly refined portrait of its mother. As Judith Hurtig has shown, infant effigies on the tombs of women who died in childbirth take a deliberately stylized form which allows them to serve the conventional function of naming the cause of the subject’s death.¹² By incorporating the appearance of the childbed/deathbed into the form of the altar tomb, the Coke tomb and similar monuments recreate the intimacy of the domestic setting in the public space of commemoration. In doing so, they shift attention away from the horizon of social relations, with its concern for the record-keeping function of monuments in documenting ruptures in the dynastic continuum, toward affective bonds within families, where the deaths of mothers and children exact an emotional toll on survivors. The visual remnant of the domestic sphere in these tombs reflects the notional equivalency of the bed and the grave. This equation is voiced, for instance, in the first-person epitaph of Maria Lusher in St. Mary’s, Putney, as she asks her second husband to be buried beside her (her first husband already having been interred on the other side): “You once were second to my bed;/ Why may you not like title have,/ To this my second bed, the Grave?”¹³

Fig. 1.2 Nicholas Stone, Monument for Arthur and Elizabeth Coke. St. Mary’s, Bramfield (Suffolk), after 1629. Author photo.

Confronting the stylized infant effigies on tombs such as Elizabeth Coke’s, it is not difficult to assume (as critics such as Lawrence Stone and Philippe Ariès have famously maintained) that early modern parents may have limited their emotional investment in newborn children in light of the high rate of infant mortality in the period.¹⁴ An awareness of the stylized representations of these symbolic forms, however, discounts that assumption: responding directly to Stone’s thesis, Hurtig argues that the proliferation of monuments for mothers dying in childbed reflects an increased adoption of the model of companionate marriage advocated by Protestant writers in the early seventeenth century, and a concomitant elevation in “the importance and value placed upon women as wives and mothers.”¹⁵ What is clearly also at issue in these tombs, iconographically, is a willingness to encode dynastic concerns within public representations of domestic roles and relationships. The changing artistic conventions of monumental forms both respond to and foster changes in perceptions of the interplay between dynastic and domestic values and their defining influence on the roles of parents and children within the family.

The thesis of parental indifference to child-loss is also deeply shaken when one compares the stylized effigies on maternal tombs with other monuments from the same decade, where the recorded devastation of husbands and fathers following the deaths of wives and children is heartfelt and profound. On a monument in St. Mary’s, Battersea, Daniel Caldwall commemorates his wife, Elizabeth (d. 1620), who died in childbed at age...