Baptism and Religious Education
The Taivassalo children’s game reached the court arena because the children imitated baptism, one of the most important religious rites of the Lutheran church. Indeed, it was one of the two sacraments left in the Lutheran church.
Symptomatically, cases of adults mimicking the Eucharist—either in earnest for religious reasons or for fun and mockery—also reached the court every now and then, but no playing children were among the accused, although at least one case involved a teenage boy acting with adult men (Kuha 2012, 99–104; Toivo 2016, 92–93, 159). This in a way reflects the division of religious education and authority in early modern Finnish society into the theoretical and pragmatic on the one hand and the church and the lay on the other.The catechism teaching of the populace in Finland, however, remained relatively narrow. It consisted mostly of Luther’s Smaller Catechism as preached in catechism sermons in church, which were heard by the congregation. After the church service, the parents and household masters—the father, mainly—were expected to repeat the most important parts of the catechism sermon to the members of their households who could not be present in church and to question their family and household members on the points of catechism learned (Hanska and Vainio-Korhonen 2010).
Printed catechisms only became popular items after the printing of Gezelius’ Lasten Paras Tawara in 1666. Although considerably more affordable than previous catechisms, even this was too expensive for much of the Finnish peasantry, so cheap broadsheet excerpts of the Table of Duties taken from the Lutheran Smaller Catechism were printed to fill the need for formal educational material. Nevertheless, in reality, educational ideals were mostly transferred orally (Getzelius 1666; Laine et al. 1997, 80–101; Laine 1993).
Religious education transferred the core Lutheran or Christian values of the early modern period—the ideas of sin and salvation but also the correct societal order.
A declaration of patriarchal values as well as the order between parents and children and between the genders was inextricable in this. The Table of Duties consisted of short excerpts of the Pauline letters, which organise society into fairly straightforward hierarchical pairs of social relationships: rulers and subjects, teachers and pupils (which meant not only schools but also in parishes where the priests were understood as teachers and the congregation as the pupils), husbands and wives, masters and servants, and parents and children. The grouping of these pairs into three estates, which was usual in early modern catechisms, was absent in the first Finnish catechisms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This can be thought to have made the hierarchical relationships within each pair clearer, but it also highlighted that everyone belonged to multiple pairs of relationships (Getzelius 1666). In the case of Taivassalo, the parents of the wayward children were placed in a double role, both as the parents, who were supposed to train and discipline their children to ensure proper behaviour, and subjects to be disciplined by the authority of the court officials. This applies especially to the chaplain’s widow, the mother of one of the girls, who had not prevented the children from taking the baptismal cloth. The role and responsibility of the other villagers—the neighbours and witnesses who had seen the children’s play—was more difficult to place into the existing social theory. This may be why it was discussed by implication; no one said aloud that they had some sort of responsibility—according to any formal criteria, they did not. Yet some hinted at an apology for not putting an end to the matter, claiming that the events passed too quickly to react or that they had not realised the full implications of what the children were doing.In Scandinavia, recent studies on the early modern upbringing of children and the young have concentrated on childcare and education as work, performed both by the parents and as ‘shared parenthood’ by older siblings, neighbours, hired labour, teachers, and pastors within and outside the families or households.
In Sweden, Linda Oja has investigated childcare as part of the household division of labour and thereby gendered power relationships (Oja 2015). Susanna Hedenborg has investigated the ideological, economic, and social conditions of infant care in Stockholm. Like most of the currently available historical work on Scandinavian childhood, this analysis concentrates on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hedenborg’s analysis draws on records of infant mortality and household structure; although she manages to draw a picture of how the care of small children was organised, the information available on the values, preferences, and aims of the people involved remains indirect (Hedenborg 2004). The present chapter focuses on how values and important skills were transferred to older children through example and imitation in play and on the conflicts that may arise when the transfer (temporarily) failed.Several scholars have pointed out that the demands of childcare and other duties could not always be reconciled in early modern society. This caused problems especially for women, and sometimes led to the neglect of children (Lithell 1988, 99–100; Crawford 2010, 52–59). These interpretations may reflect the old tendency of downplaying the importance of children (Bohman 2010; Mispeläere 2013). This idea starts with Lawrence Stone’s and David Gaunt’s by-now classic—but in many aspects outdated—studies (Stone 1977; Gaunt 1983) and may reflect the old tendency of downplaying the importance of children. As Stine Bohman suggests, solutions to free up mothers for other labour seem to have been found, for example, by using babysitters or bringing children into workplaces (Bohman 2010; Mispeläere 2009, 2013).
A considerable amount of the literature concerning children’s upbringing and training in the pre-modern dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and there is considerably less literature on the seventeenth century—the period of my study—let alone the sixteenth century. It is therefore necessary to contextualise the events in Taivassalo in a picture extrapolated from the following and previous centuries, but it is equally necessary to remember that the centuries were not alike in social and cultural terms.
According to scholars such as the medievalist Barbara Hanawalt and Swedish scholars on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries like Jan Mispelaere and Orvar Lofgren, children were taken along in the daily tasks of the parents and other carers (siblings, grandparents, hired childminders) in order to see that they came to no harm, to teach them the ways and methods of the work, and to socialise them into the customs and values of the community—like gender order and age or status hierarches1 or, in the case in Taivassalo, religious and communal expectations. Often children as young as five were also given small paid or unpaid tasks of their own to perform, from fetching and carrying things with their elders to minding younger children and horses in the transport duties of the so-called skiutsning—a tax-like duty levied on the peasant population, who had to organise the transport of crown authorities and the post; farmsteads took turns in providing a horse, carriage, and a driver from one inn to another. Mispeläere has found children as young as eight taking their household’s turns (Lofgren 1977; Hanawalt 1986; Mispeläere 2009, 2013).It may be worth noting that although there are currently strong efforts to treat children in history as the subjects and actors of their own lives, the material we have on children tends to treat them as objects and targets of other people’s actions. However, it also seems that the nature of children as people and the requirements of play and fun were understood. There are, for example, cases where accused witches successfully managed to defend themselves against charges in court by saying that although they had done various things that had seemed out of order and were interpreted as witchcraft by their neighbours—they had, for example, tied bells around the cattle’s necks or blown horns—these things had been done in order to amuse the children, who had been taken along in the work. Bringing up children was then presented as a respectable task, and amusing the children by indulging in fun was perfectly respectable.
It also served the purpose of implying that the people training children were good people who were not likely to be witches (Court Record 1676, 53–4v; Court Records 1687, 183–185; Toivo 2008, 187–188).The family sphere was the main arena of religious upbringing for children in early modern Finland. While there where schools for the different levels of education in more southern parts of Europe in the early modern world, they were not meant for the bulk of the population. Private education was, until the eighteenth century, usually considered more effective and less dangerous. In early modern Finland, around seven schools were available for men aspiring to clerical or secretarial careers (in addition to around twenty often short-lived children’s pedagogia). All the rest of the education was carried out by the households and household workshops, either by the children’s biological families or by their masters’ families when they went out to service and apprenticeship (Hanska and Vainio-Korhonen 2010; Laine 2007).
In many ways, the children’s play was completely natural: they seem to have experimented and ‘rehearsed’ the baptismal rites as well as the social customs afterwards. The children had seen baptisms enough to borrow a baptismal cloth. Indeed, there was some discussion of the nature of the clothes since the eldest of the children, the fourteen-year-old Elsa, tried to say that it was not a real baptism cloth but only a woollen frieze wrap, but eventually the children had to admit that it had really been the baptism cloth. While the discussion was recorded only to cover the extent of the children’s play, it also demonstrates that the children not only knew what a baptismal cloth was, but they were also aware of the different gradations of the sacred regarding what could or could not be played with. Sacred markers—rituals and processions but also material objects like candles, or, in this case, clothes—upheld the boundaries and the communication between the holy and the profane without which early modern people felt the world might collapse into chaos.
Theologically, the danger of blasphemy lay in appropriating the rite of baptism. In the eyes of the children, and probably the village neighbourhood, the clothes reserved for use in the sacrament were thought to manifest or possess some sort of sacredness, too, in a manner reminiscent of Catholic secondary relics. The transformation and continuity of gradations of sacredness after the Lutheran Reformation was far from complete (Duffy 1992; Duffy 2001, 105; Scribner 1987; Bossy 1973).The baptised cat and its ‘godparents’ were paraded from house to house around the village in the same way the children had obviously seen real babies being presented. The children had apparently been taken along with adults to see and take part in the real baptismal ceremonies in much the same way they were taken along to most of the village’s events, from daily work to leisure and the sacrament.
It can be suggested that using the baptismal cloth, the discussion of the cloth afterwards, and the parade show the children testing their relationship with the gradations of the sacred in terms of how to manage it and what they could and could not do with different sacred things. In this, the more visible aspects for the village lay community may have been more important for the children to play with and learn about than the more purely theological ones. They also were more important in the sense that the children defended themselves against violating the sacred rituals of the village community in particular. Communality seems to have been a value transferred and shared, even when its sacred markers were violated.