Discipline and Patriarchal Power
The early modern culture of learning and religion—then one and the same thing—has been thought to be one of punishment: in religious terms, the Old Testament emphasis on punishment for sin and its relationship to survival in this life and the salvation of eternal life has been considered to dominate the seventeenth-century worldview.
Discipline was what ensured both that people learned and that they kept to what they learned (Laasonen 1977, 100–109). As the Taivassalo case reached court, disciplining the children became a major part of the discussion, and the problem of authority and teaching responsibility eventually focused on discipline. The court record does not explicitly state that the children had not been punished before the matter reached the court of law, but, at the time when the courts usually held to the principle that one crime should be punished once, the court ended up ordering a punishment for the children. This was difficult, however, which is shown by the fact that the first court session did not arrive at a conclusion. The difficulty reflects the ambiguity of the power to punish in this case: was it held by the court as a crown authority, or was it held by the children’s families?In early modern—and indeed already in late medieval—European culture, discipline was thought to be the duty of the father, rightly enforced by physical means. Disciplining was not a right but a duty of most superiors in social relationships, including parents towards their children. Discipline was understood as an essential part of fatherly love, in a context where love in general was understood as a set of duties towards others rather than as a passion. According to Philip Grace, fathers were expected to love more rationally than easily indulgent mothers did; therefore, they were also trusted to discipline their children. The rhetoric of fatherly love and discipline was then extended towards the higher earthly rulers, whose disciplinary duties towards the subjects were explained as those of a father (Grace 2015, 9, 163–165).
The rhetoric used also mirrored the rhetoric on the catechisms and the message given in sermon literature in Finland, too. Refusal to administer discipline was thought of as a refusal to perform one’s social duties and was therefore a loss of honour for someone in a position of power (Getzelius 1666; Laine 2017a, 855–866; Laine 2017b, 40–49).
Nevertheless, the duty to discipline was never unambiguous. All the catechisms also suggest that children should first be brought up by example and good advice, that discipline was needed only when they failed. There were no books on etiquette or appropriate conduct, no catechisms or folk tales recommending casual violence—even if one had a theoretical right to it; it was thought better to command by mental and spiritual authority based on sense and righteousness (Getzelius 1666). As it was known that not all parents could be relied upon to give the loving example and help for their children, authorities such as parish priests were supposed to organise help and guidance (Laine 2017b, 46). Ending up in a court of law for excessive discipline—that is, violence—was therefore both a loss of honour for the violent person and a sign that the church courts and the minister had failed in their duty to prevent or stop the violence. Therefore, the use of violence as discipline was both a right and a duty, as well as a source of honour and shame of the socially superior in a domestic relationship (Roper 1989, 191–192; Jokiaho 2002; Sharpe 2018).
In popular literature in Europe, the emphasis on example is even stronger. Because upbringing was such an important part of life and society, there were also a number of advice books, both across Europe and specifically in Sweden and Finland. Most of these, however, were meant for the use of the higher estates—the nobility and gentry or at least wealthy merchants. The Swedish clergy wrote succinct advice for merchant and trading families; the advice collections for nobles could also consist of suggestions for further improving reading, such as the second part of Per Brahe’s Oeconomia (Brahe 1581), suggesting that its young readers should improve their religious ideals by reading Melanchton and their Latin skills by reading authors ranging from Erasmus of Rotterdam to Cicero and Quintilian.
Satu Lidman’s chapter in this volume makes further use of the educational literature in early modern Sweden. Per Brahes Oeconomia serves as a specimen of the Swedish or Finnish nobility’s endeavours here, but, like the printed material introduced in Lidman’s chapter, it was rather far from the lives or needs of the peasant people active in Taivassalo.For the use of the rural peasant population, which in Finland formed the overwhelming majority, there was less theoretical guidance available, apart from the catechisms. However, there was clearly an interest: when both literature and literary efforts started to advance among the peasant population, one of the earliest sets of peasant religious literature also included texts on educating and bringing up children. The texts in question were compiled by a group of Osthrobothnian peasants and artisans, who translated into Finnish and circulated manuscripts of Quietism and French Pietist mysticism. While Pietism in general was officially frowned upon, Quietist influences brought into these texts views of authority so pronouncedly subversive that they were banned and the manuscripts had to be circulated secretly. According to a late eighteenth-century secret translation of a seventeenth-century text by Pierre Poiret, ‘if parents take heed of the Divine Truth—their example produces an influence in the children, which is laborious to overcome with schooling and discipline’2 (Lyhyt ja ytimellinen ulosveto, sine anno, the following quotations are from the same source). Parents were exhorted to ‘show not so much severity but kindness and love’.3 Many parents, the text complained, saw that their children were unwilling to take heed of their responsibilities and were not able to do any better than to say ‘if they will not, they must and give all their might to that force—but that is more like forcing an animal than bringing up a Christian child’.4 Physical discipline was not forbidden, however; the manuscript merely suggests that it should be used only after the child had been brought to understand that the punishment was right and for his or her benefit.
This can be taken to mean two things. First, while example and love were thought to teach children right from wrong, the children—or indeed people in general—were not necessarily expected to be able or willing to follow the correct values without punishment. Second, punishment was not so much understood as a deterrent or an enforcement of the values—they were already understood and internalised before the punishment—but rather as an atonement for the sins committed.French mysticist literature, including the ideas of Poiret and Guyon, circulated in widely manuscript and printed form in Europe from the latter half of the seventeenth century. There is no direct evidence that the literature reached Finland before the secret translations flourished, at least in Ostrobothnia—still in manuscript form since it was banned—in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The text Lyhyt ja ytimellinen ulos weto muutamain ylos walaistuin sielun kirjoituxista nijn kuin ensixi P.Poirettilta, as well as the translation of a text by Madame Guyon (Christillinen neuwo nuorukaisille, sine anno) that was bound in the same volume, consists of excerpts picked and chosen from Poiret’s publications from the last decade of the seventeenth and the first of the eighteenth centuries (Mehtonen 2016, Mehtonen 2017; Cross and Livingstone (2005) Oxford English Dictionary of the Christian Church (third revised edition) on Poiret, Pierre (1646–1719); Kors (2002) Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (Poiret, Pierre) or Krieg 1975, 311–315). Therefore, it would have been impossible for parents of the wayward children in Taivassalo to ground their behaviour on Poiret, if indeed they had left the children unpunished before the court procedure. Nevertheless, such views seem to have struck a chord among the seventeenth-century Europeans, even Finns. Despite the lack of direct evidence, there is also reason to suppose that the mental world which formed the background of Poiret’s educational views were not completely unknown in Finland.
There was actually quite a wide circulation of ideas between Finland, the Baltic region, and Northern German areas at all levels of society, which was enabled by the travels of the learned to the universities but also of the uneducated for purposes of trade and warfare (Salminen 2010, 2015; Droste 2017). Therefore, it is also possible that similar ideas had gone through the minds of the parents of the Taivassalo children.In the case of Taivassalo, the exemplary and disciplinary duties were apparently left unfulfilled by the parents. The court had to order the execution of the latter. It is evident from the first trial that the court was not comfortable in taking over the discipline, which is why the case was originally left without a decision and the Court of Appeal had to order a proper investigation. The criminal law was ambiguous about how far legal minors were considered responsible and punishable by the court. Whereas a number of other parts of the rural law stipulated different ages for who could consent to marriage, who was capable of handling saleable and landed property, who was considered part of the taxable workforce, and who was required to go to service or have a workplace, the criminal code did not stipulate a clear age limit. There was an understanding that children were not fully capable of comprehending the consequences of their actions, and different methods were invented and used for determining just how advanced individual children were and whether or not they were punishable under the law (Mispelaere 2009). No such method was employed in Taivassalo. Together with the fact that the court at first did not deal out any punishment at all, this suggests that the children’s responsibility was not the main interest of the court. The witness statements include short explanations of why the witnesses—having noticed that something odd was happening—did not intervene and stop the children. This suggests that the responsibility was at least partly seen to have lain with the adults. Nevertheless, none of them were formally punished in the first session or the later. When the rural court was forced to action by the Court of Appeal, it ended up treating the children as the main culprits and order them to be birched by their relatives, at home but in the presence of the representatives of the crown and the community.
The court took over the disciplinary power to punish the children but only in part. The court ordered that a punishment must take place, and it also stipulated what punishment this was—‘a good birching’—but it left the execution to the parents or relatives. Because the parents had previously failed in their upbringing duty, the court ordered its own supervisors to oversee the punishment. This shared the disciplinary power yet let the tangible parts of it stay in the hands of the parents.