Introduction: How a Cat Was Christened, and What It Can Tell Us About the Upbringing of Children and Family Ideals in Early Modern Finland
In 1678, a group of children and their parents found themselves before the rural district court in Taivassalo, Southwest Finland, due to the children’s inappropriate play. Three girls aged between twelve and fourteen, among them the daughter of the late chaplain, had decided to baptise a cat, and they talked a couple of boys, aged six and seven, into standing in as godparents.
They had dressed the cat in a baptismal cloth (in Swedish original ‘Christningz Klädher’) owned by the chaplain’s widow—the mother of one of the girls. The cat was given the name Sophia and christened. Afterwards, the children held a house-to-house procession with the cat, apparently in the manner people did after a real baptism. Once the cat had grown tired of its role and began to resist, the children continued their play with a piece of firewood (Court Record 1678, 14 February, 23v-24v and 16–17 December, 59–60).At first, the court was reluctant to do anything about the matter. The children were underage, and their parents were considered respectable people. The first court record only relates the narratives of the witnesses who had seen the children’s procession. The parents were cautioned, but that was it. Nevertheless, the case was submitted to the Court of Appeal among all the other records of the district; within six months, the Court of Appeal ordered a more thorough investigation of the matter. At this point, both the parents and the villagers were asked what they had seen. Most either denied having witnessed the affair or otherwise provided some excuse for not having stopped the inappropriate play. The blame was shifted away from the children and onto the parents and the witnesses who had mismanaged the children and the situation. Nevertheless, the court seems to have accepted that sometimes children were impossible to supervise; consequently, no adult was formally punished.
Nevertheless, the loss of authority of the children’s parents is evident in the outcome: the children were to be ‘well birched’ by a close relative (the court record does not mention the father, although admittedly at least one of the children had lost her father) in the presence of a juror or another representative of the court. The power to discipline the children was thus taken from the parents but retained within the kin—yet the kin was to be supervised by a crown and communal authority. Moreover, both the children and the parents were to be cautioned by the Cathedral Chapter—in reality, this meant the parish priest. Since all judicial matters against the clergy were legally the prerogative of the Cathedral Chapter, the involvement of the chaplain’s family also required this, but it does not seem to have had any effect on the outcome (Court Record 1678, 14 February, 23v-24v and 16–17 December, 59–60).This chapter looks at the religious education and the creation of patriarchal authority in early modern Finland through the case study of the above incident. I will examine the ways in which the case portrays children’s religious education and the parents’ responsibility for and authority over children in the rural community. Second, I will consider the creation of power and authority in education through discipline. This case offers a rare opportunity to study how society dealt with discrepancies between the ideals and the realities of upbringing and the value transfer from parents to children. Matters between children and parents or indeed other adults rarely came to court. Home and family spaces were often open to outsiders in what Joahcim Eibach (2011) has called the open household: neighbours and villagers would come and go across the permeable boundaries of the house and the yard; noises and smells carried over the boundaries, and people visited, worked, and observed what was going on. Nevertheless, even if these matters would be known to many, they were discussed only unofficially and meddled in by few.
Neighbours were in general reluctant to interfere in what went on inside another household, whether it was a matter of domestic violence or bringing up children. If intervention was necessary, informal ways were preferred to the official space of the courtroom (Roper 1989; Karlsson Sjogren 1998, 129–133, 157–191) In this particular case, the children had brought the matter into the public space of the village, and the outrage of the villagers brought it into the realm of public discussion. Matters that were normally considered within the power and the disciplinary rights and duties of the household head were forced into the public life of the village and reluctant state control.In the early modern period, the education and upbringing of children was a sphere of life both idealised and contested. Historians have long been aware that pace Aries’ and Stone’s claim that societies before the nineteenth (or eighteenth, for Stone) centuries were ‘ignorant of childhood’, childhood was understood to be a phase of human life of its own, and children were entitled to both love and care (Stone 1977; Aries 1960). In the British and continental European context, a lot of research has been done over the last couple of decades on the concept of childhood and the ideologies and emotions concerning the education and upbringing of children. Since many historians who entered the study of children started out as gender historians, family has always been viewed in terms of gendered spheres; the traditional assumption has been that childcare was an area dominated by women. Especially during the last decade, the role of fathers in childcare and children’s education has also been proven increasingly important. In general, considerable investment in children was common not only in terms of the time their upbringing claimed from their parents and families but also emotionally. This investment was conceptualised as something that oriented towards the future: the adults hoped that the children would work, worship, reproduce, and care for the future and for the earlier generations, in this and the other world.
Children were understood as a potential rather than present asset, one that needed attention and care in the present (Crawford 2010; Bailey 2012; Newton 2012; Grace 2015; Coolidge 2014, 223).The importance of upbringing and children’s education was also a sphere of tension and power struggle. The turn from the medieval to the early modern period in society has been described as a period when the family (understood as the extended family of the household, including not just the modern conception of the nuclear family but also the servants and other relatives and possibly their spouses and children) rather than a larger kin community became the central structure of society. This turn is often illustrated with the then-customary political parable of the family as a kingdom in miniature: the father and the master of the household was presented as the king of the household, just as the king was the father of the kingdom. The various governmental figures in each kingdom or empire were often equated with the mother of the household, and the various other members—children, labourers, lodgers, etc.—were compared to the estates and the subjects of the realm. According to contemporary teaching, both kings and fathers—and everyone else as well—were placed in their positions of authority by God, which should have cemented the social order and therefore rendered it unquestionable (Roper 1989, 191–192).
While the comparison of the family and household to the wider community was by no means new in the early modern period, it was emphasised. This parable of the miniature kingdom in the family stresses the sovereign power of the father and household master over the family or household, but—at the same time—it makes the upbringing of children a wider communal and societal issue. In failing to do his duty, a father jeopardised not only his own authority but also that of the king and the crown and every other authority figure in the patriarchal society, both symbolically and in very tangible ways.
If one authority figure proved defective, the others could be suspect as well. Therefore, as studies show, parental authority was usually backed up by magistrates and officials in all situations whenever possible (Roper 1994, 146ff. Hanawalt 1986, 257; Katajala-Peltomaa and Vuolanto 2013, 113–115).A more tangible problem was presented by the fact that by failing in the tasks of upbringing and socialising their children to the values of the society, unsuccessful parents risked raising offspring who would no longer respect the existing hierarchies and values of society and instead cause disruption and upheaval. This was also a communal interest, one that drew not only the immediate kin and the village community but also the society and the emerging state in the arena of education into the struggle for power over the family, the upbringing of children, and the values transferred in the process.
Of the central concepts in this volume, upbringing is the most important since it includes all the others: values and value transfer, religious education, and discipline. The way children—especially older children—were brought to workplaces was not only a way of minding the children and keeping them relatively safe; it was also a way to gradually transfer to the children both the values and skills needed in society. The children would play their games and participate in the work intermittently when there was a suitably easy task for them to perform, all the while listening and observing the talk and the work of the adults. It is in this context that I understand the term ‘value transfer’. Values are the preferences and expectations of good and bad. In early modern Finnish society, they remained unspoken most of the time; they were expressed and transmitted in the continuous toils and tasks of daily life and face-to-face encounters. Largely, these values were shared by the community, be that the family, household, village, or realm, but these overlapping communities were also differentiated from each other by sets of values they did not share.
Since I am dealing with an essentially peasant population, the transfer of values could only intermittently take the form of formal education: schooling outside the home was available to this kind of people only at the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, most of the time it was also an effective way of passing on the values to the next generation; rather than in abrupt failures in transmitting values from generation to generation, the problems scholars see in such an apprenticeship type of education system are in the lack of adaptability to change and modernisation, plus the transfer of harmful habits alongside the beneficial ones.The other important concepts in this chapter are religious education and discipline. The definition of the former here has a broader meaning than usual; it refers not only to the teaching of religious dogma as put forth by the church but also to the practical teaching of religious values in lay life. Discipline, a part of religious education at the time, was understood as a physical duty exercised in love and charity by all superiors in social relationships, although it also refers to practices we would today call violent. These concepts, and how they evolved from the aims present in the upbringing of children in early modern Finnish lay society to the failure of an individual family, will be closer examined in this chapter.