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‘Very Sore Nights and Days’: The Child’s Experience of Illness in Early Modern England, c.1580–1720

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Hannah Newton
Hannah Newton
Affiliation:
Hannah Newton, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of History, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Exeter, The Queen’s Drive, Exeter, Devon EX4 4QJ, UK, and Part-Time Lecturer at Bath Spa University. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Sick children were ubiquitous in early modern England, and yet they have received very little attention from historians. Taking the elusive perspective of the child, this article explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual experience of illness in England between approximately 1580 and 1720. What was it like being ill and suffering pain? How did the young respond emotionally to the anticipation of death? It is argued that children’s experiences were characterised by profound ambivalence: illness could be terrifying and distressing, but also a source of emotional and spiritual fulfilment and joy. This interpretation challenges the common assumption amongst medical historians that the experiences of early modern patients were utterly miserable. It also sheds light on children’s emotional feelings for their parents, a subject often overlooked in the historiography of childhood. The primary sources used in this article include diaries, autobiographies, letters, the biographies of pious children, printed possession cases, doctors’ casebooks, and theological treatises concerning the afterlife.

Keywords

ChildPatientParentsSicknessPainDeathEmotionProvidencePuritanismHeavenHellDoctorPaediatricsLoveSiblingsGenderDiariesLettersCasebooksPossession
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 153 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 The painting is housed at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Holland. Metsu lived between 1629 and 1667. He was the son of the Flemish painter Jacques Metsu (c.1588–1629).

2 My thanks to the art historian Catrionia Murray for confirming that the child is supposed to be female.

3 This interpretation is encapsulated by L.M. Beier in Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1987).

4 John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

5 This is a subject that I would like to explore in the future: I will examine the experiences of the ‘four ages of man’, children, youths, adults, and the elderly.

6 Edward Anthony Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 249; Edward Anthony Wrigley and Roger Schofield, ‘Infant and Child Mortality in the Late Tudor and Early Stuart Period’, in Charles Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 61–95.

7 Adriana Benzaquén, ‘The Doctor and the Child: Medical Preservation and Management of Children in the Eighteenth Century’, in Anja Müller (ed.), Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 13–24; Iris Ritzmann, ‘Children as Patients in German-Speaking Regions in the Eighteenth Century’, in Müller, idem, 25–32; Iris Ritzmann and Urs Boschung, ‘“Dedi Clysterem Purgantem”: Haller et la Médecine de L’Enfance (1731–1736)’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 22 (2005), 175–82. Others who have mentioned sick children include Andrew James, ‘A Georgian Gentleman: Childcare and the Case of Harry Tremayne, 1814–23’, Journal of Family and Community History, 9 (2006), 79–90; Lucinda McCray Beier, ‘In Sickness and in Health: A Seventeenth Century Family’s Experience’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 101–28; Margaret Pelling, ‘Child Health as a Social Value in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 1 (1988), 135–64; Andrew Williams, ‘Eighteenth-Century Child Health Care in a Northampton Infirmary: A Provincial English Hospital’, Family and Community History, 10 (2007), 153–66; Helena M. Wall, ‘“My Constant Attension on my Sick Child”: The Fragility of Family Life in the World of Elizabeth Drinker’, in James Alan Marten (ed.), Children in Colonial America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 155–67; James C. Riley, ‘The Sickness Experience of the Josselins’ Children’, Journal of Family History, 14 (1989), 347–63.

8 Beier, op. cit. (note 3), 4.

9 Charles Ronald Sawyer, ‘Patients, Healers, and Disease in the Southeast Midlands, 1597–1634’ (unpublished PhD thesis: University of Wisconsin, 1986), 476–80.

10 Mary Ann Lund, ‘Experiencing Pain in John Donne’s “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions” (1624)’, in Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A.E. Enenkel (eds), The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 323–45; Lisa Wynne Smith, ‘“An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper”: The Experience of Pain in Early Eighteenth-Century England and France’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 41, (2008), 459–80.

11 Andrew Wear, ‘Historical and Cultural Aspects of Pain: Perceptions of Pain in Seventeenth-Century England’, Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin, 36 (1985), 7–21; Andrew Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century England’, in Porter, op. cit. (note 7), 55–99; Andrew Wear, ‘Religious Belief and Medicine in Early Modern England’, in Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (eds), The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands, 1450–1800 (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1996), 145–69; David Harley, ‘The Theology of Affliction and the Experience of Sickness in the Godly Family, 1650–1714: The Henrys and the Newcomes’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), 273–92; Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, ‘Partakers of Pain: Religious Meanings of Pain in Early Modern England’, in Van Dijkhuizen and Enenkel (eds), op. cit. (note 10), 189–220; Jenny Mayhew, ‘Godly Beds of Pain: Pain in English Protestant Manuals (ca.1550–1650)’, in Van Dijkhuizen and Enenkel (eds), idem, 299–322.

12 For example, Lucinda M. Becker’s Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); and Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

13 Please see Hannah Newton, ‘Children’s Physic: Medical Perceptions and Treatment of Sick Children in Early Modern England, c.1580–1720’, Social History of Medicine, 23 (2010), 456–74, idem, ‘The Sick Child in Early Modern England, c.1580–1720’ (unpublished PhD thesis: University of Exeter, 2009), for an extended discussion of these topics.

14 Ian Mortimer, The Dying and the Doctors: The Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society Publications, 2009).

15 Kimberley Reynolds and Gillian Avery, for example, have complained that ‘there is little evidence of what young people themselves thought or felt in the face of death’: Representations of Childhood Death (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 3.

16 Peter Stearns, ‘Challenges in the History of Childhood’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1 (2009), 35–42: 35.

17 Muriel St Clare Byrne (ed.), The Lisle Letters, 6 vols (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), Vol. 4, 496–7.

18 John Evelyn, John Evelyn’s Diary: A Selection, Philip Francis (ed.), (London: Folio Society, 1963), 385–8.

19 Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Pearson Longman, 1995), 2.

20 Wall, op. cit. (note 7), 157.

21 Samuel Jeake, An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye, Michael Hunter (ed.), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). The instances of childhood illness are found on 85, 86, 88, 89–90, 91, 92, 206.

22 Samuel Johnson, An Account of the Life of Dr Samuel Johnson, From his Birth to his Eleventh Year, Written by Himself. To Which are Added, Original Letters to Dr Samuel Johnson, by Miss Hill Boothby (London: Richard Phillips, 1805), 11.

23 For a definition of ‘puritanism’ see John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Basingstoke: MacMillan Press, 1998), introduction.

24 Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, Alan Macfarlane (ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). This statistic was provided by Riley, op. cit. (note 7), 347.

25 Becker, op. cit. (note 12), 20, 105.

26 The term ‘puritan’ was an insult according to Spurr, op. cit. (note 23), 17–27.

27 William Bidbanck, A Present for Children: Being a Brief, but Faithful Account of Many Remarkable and Excellent Things Utter’d by Three Young Children (London: John Darby, 1685), 31.

28 Becker, op. cit. (note 12), 105.

29 Anon., An Account of the Admirable Conversion of One Sarah Howley, a Child of Eight or Nine Years Old, Her Wonderful Ejaculations and Sayings, Very Good for the Use of Children, to Read and Imitate (Edinburgh: John Reid, 1704).

30 James Fisher, The Wise Virgin, or, a Wonderfull Narration of the Hand of God… in Afflicting a Childe of Eleven Years of Age (London: John Rothwell, 1653), 174.

31 James Janeway, A Token for Children being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (London: John Wilkins, 1671), preface.

32 Gillian Avery, ‘Intimations of Mortality: The Puritan and Evangelical Message to Children’, in Avery and Reynolds (eds), op. cit. (note 15), 87–110, at 104; Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘Death in Childhood: The Practice of the “Good Death” in James Janeway’s “A Token for Children”’, in Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (eds), Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 47–51: 51.

33 Houlbrooke, ibid., 47–51.

34 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 (London: Yale University Press, 1992), 2. Similar statements have been made by Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 20, 331.

35 Alexandra Walsham, ‘“Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings”: Prophecy, Puritanism, and Childhood in Elizabethan Suffolk’, in Diana Wood (ed.), The Church and Childhood, Studies in Church History, Vol. 31, (Oxford: Ecclesiastical History Society, 1994), 285–300: 286, 295.

36 King James Version [hereafter KJV], Matthew 18, 3–5.

37 According to William MacLehose, this act served to ‘validate… dignify, and even to sanctify’ childhood: A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties Over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), ch. 2, para. 54.

38 Wall, op. cit. (note 7), 157.

39 Alison Shell, ‘“Furor juvenilis”: Post-Reformation English Catholicism and Exemplary Youthful Behaviour’, in Ethan H. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 185–206: 188–9.

40 James Sharpe, ‘Disruption in the Well-Ordered Household: Age, Authority and Possessed Young People’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 187–212: 195.

41 Of course, God was the primary cause of all illness, so in a sense all illnesses were supernatural, but in the case of possession, there was usually no intermediary natural (or ‘secondary’) cause.

42 Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts and their Cultural Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5–6.

43 This was the case in John Dee’s diary, according to the editor James Orchard Halliwell: The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, Camden Society, Vol. 19 (London: 1842). Likewise, the editor of Alice Thornton’s autobiography has noted that although Thornton was of ‘good birth and fortune’ she spent at least fifty years struggling with poverty: The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton, Charles Jackson (ed.), Surtees Society, Vol. 62 (London: 1875), xii.

44 Houlbrooke, op. cit. (note 32), 39.

45 Ysbrand van Diemerbroeck, The Anatomy of Human Bodies… to Which is Added a Particular Treatise of the Small Pox (London: W. Whitwood, 1689), 208–9.

46 A similar method has been used by Lund, op. cit. (note 10).

47 Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Thomas Dunlap (trans.), (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 89.

48 Mayhew, op. cit. (note 11), 299.

49 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 16.

50 Ariel Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 44; Lucinda Bending agrees that Scarry is wrong: The Representation of Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 115.

51 Alison D. Wall (ed.), Two Elizabethan Women: Correspondence of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575–1611 (Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society, 1983), 24.

52 Please see Chapter Four of my PhD thesis for a full discussion of parents’ emotional distress during the illnesses of their children.

53 Scarry, op. cit. (note 49), 3–5; Esther Cohen, ‘Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages’, Science in Context, 8 (1995), 47–74: 48; Duden, op. cit. (note 47), 89.

54 William Brownrigg, The Medical Casebook of William Brownrigg, MD, FRS (1712–1800) of the Town of Whitehaven in Cumberland, Jean Ward and Joan Yell (eds), Medical History Supplement, Vol. 13 (London: The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1993), 8.

55 Scarry, op. cit. (note 49), 15; others who have made similar statements include Esther Cohen, ‘The Animated Pain of the Body’, The American Historical Review, 105 (2000), 36–68: 48; Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience, 1650–1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 103.

56 Glucklich, op. cit. (note 50), 44.

57 Wynne Smith has also found that ‘imagery of torture’ was used ‘frequently’ in patients’ accounts of their pains, op. cit. (note 10), 467.

58 Fisher, op. cit. (note 30), 135 (dated c.1652).

59 British Library [hereafter BL], Add. MS 28052, fol. 100r (Domestic correspondence of the Godolphin family, 1663–1782; a letter from Charles Trelawny to Colonel Godolphin, dated 7 November 1700).

60 This definition is provided by Oxford English Dictionary Online [hereafter OEDO].

61 Sharon Howard, ‘Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-Century Childbirth: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World’, Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), 367–82: 374–5.

62 Ibid., 374.

63 Cohen, op. cit. (note 53), 69.

64 Janeway, op. cit. (note 31), 46–7. The story of Thomas Bilney is given in John Foxe, Acts and Monuments: Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition Online, version 1.1, Summer 2006 (1576 edn, Book 8), 985.

65 John Swan, ‘“A True and Briefe Report, of Mary Glovers Vexation”, London, 1603’, in Almond (ed.), op. cit. (note 42), 318.

66 Cohen, op. cit. (note 55), 45–7, and Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8–9.

67 Elizabeth Isham, “My Booke of Rememenberance”: [sic] The Autobiography of Elizabeth Isham, Isaac Stephens (ed.), previously online <http://history.ucr.edu/people/ grad_students/stephens/TheAutobiography.pdf>, 37, accessed 10 June 2009.

68 John Barrow, The Lord’s Arm Stretched Out in an Answer of Prayer, or, a True Relation of the Wonderful Deliverance of James Barrow, the Son of John Barrow (London: John Barrow, 1664), 5–7.

69 Wynne Smith, op. cit. (note 10), 462, 465.

70 John Symcotts, A Seventeenth Century Doctor and his Patients: John Symcotts, 1592?–1662, F.N.L. Poynter and W.J. Bishop (eds), (Streatley: Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 1951, Vol. 31), 72.

71 Gail Kern Paster has written extensively on the subject of metaphor in early modern conceptions of the body and the emotions, arguing that what might seem like metaphor to us was actually literal to early modern people: Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 20–6.

72 Henry Greenwood, Tormenting Tophet; Or a Terrible Description of Hell (London: George Purslowe, 1650), 241; William Gearing, A Prospect of Heaven: Or, a Treatise of the Happiness of the Saints in Glory (London: Tho. Passenger and Benj. Hurlock, 1673), 226.

73 Greenwood, ibid. 240.

74 I.D., The Most Wonderfull and True Storie, of a Certain Witch… as Also a True Report of the Strange Torments of Thomas Darling, a Boy of Thirteene Yeres of Age (London: John Oxenbridge, 1597), 7; Bidbanck, op. cit. (note 27), 52.

75 Walsham, op. cit. (note 35), 291–2.

76 Cohen, op. cit. (note 55), 54–5, 68. Cohen distinguishes between ‘positive and negative’ pain, with positive pain being associated with saints and martyrs, and negative pain linked to the pains suffered by the damned in Hell.

77 Ibid., 55.

78 Christopher Love, Hells Terror: Or, a Treatise of the Torments of the Damned (London: John Rothwell, 1653), 44. This aspect of Hell has been examined by Philip Almond in his book, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 89.

79 Love, ibid., 43.

80 H.P., A Looking-Glass for Children being a Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with Some Little Children… Recollected by Henry Jessey in his Life Time (London: H.P., 1673), 16.

81 I.D., op. cit. (note 74), 6, 8, 21.

82 Francis Grant Cullen, A True Narrative of the Sufferings and Relief of a Yong Girle; Strangely Molested, by Evil Spirits (Edinburgh: James Watson, 1698), xxx, xix.

83 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic [1971] (repr. London: Penguin, 1991), 566.

84 Oliver Heywood, The Rev. Oliver Heywood, BA: His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, H. Turner (ed.), 4 vols (London: Brighouse, 1883), Vol. 1, 203.

85 James Clegg, The Diary of James Clegg of Chapel-en-Frith, 1708–1755: Part 1, Vanessa S. Doe (ed.), (Matlock: Derbyshire Record Society, Vol. 5, 1978), 20.

86 This was, in fact, the title of the possession case: Mary Moore, ‘“Wonderful News from the North; Or, a True Relation of the Sad and Grievous Torments, Inflicted on the Bodies of Three Children of Mr George Muschamp, Late of the County of Northumberland, by Witch-Craft”, London, 1650’, in Almond, op. cit. (note 42), 363.

87 Wynne Smith, op. cit. (note 10), 464–5.

88 Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘Aesthetic and Anesthetics: The Art of Pain Management in Early Modern England’, in Van Dijkhuizen and Enenkel (eds), op. cit. (note 10), 19–38: 29.

89 Scarry, op. cit. (note 49), 18.

90 Lund, op. cit. (note 10), 343.

91 Historians who have explored the impact of physical pain on the emotions include Wynne Smith, op. cit. (note 10) and Howard, op. cit. (note 61).

92 Scholars who have investigated the perceived effect of the mind on the body include Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 72–3; Andrew Wear, ‘Fear, Anxiety and the Plague in Early Modern England: Religious and Medical Responses’, in John Hinnells and Roy Porter (eds), Religion, Health and Suffering (London: Kegan Paul, 1999), 339–63; Fay Bound Alberti (ed.), Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), xvii, 2–15; Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills (eds), Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 21; David Gentilcore, ‘The Fear of Disease and the Disease of Fear’, in William Naphy and Penny Roberts (eds), Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

93 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘Emotion in Early Modern England, 1660–1760: Performativity and Practice at the Church Courts of York’ (unpublished PhD thesis: University of York, 2000), 4.

94 Alberti (ed.), op. cit. (note 92), xvi–xvii. A similar approach has been taken by Linda Pollock in ‘Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships in Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 567–90.

95 Wynne Smith, op. cit. (note 10), 461.

96 BL, M.636/8: this manuscript is un-foliated (a letter from Ralph Verney to Dr Busby, 22/12 December 1647).

97 Van Diemerbroeck, op. cit. (note 45), 137–8, 190.

98 Wall (ed.), op. cit. (note 51), 22–3.

99 OEDO.

100 Wynne Smith, op. cit. (note 10), 463.

101 Jean-François Senault, The Use of Passions Written in French by J.F. Senault; and Put into English by Henry, Earl of Monmouth (London: W. Godbid, 1671), 480–2.

102 John Norden, A Pathway to Patience in All Manner of Crosses, Trials, Troubles, and Afflictions (London: E. Allde, 1626), 78.

103 Isaac Archer, Two East Anglian Diaries, 1641–1729, Matthew J. Storey (ed.), (Woodbridge: Suffolk Records Society, Vol. 36, 1994), 160–1.

104 John Vernon, The Compleat Scholler; Or, a Relation of the Life, and Latter-End Especially, of Caleb Vernon (London: J.W. and W.S., 1666), 25–6.

105 Katherine Paston, The Correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston, 1603–1627, Ruth Hughey (ed.), (London: Norfolk Record Society, Vol. 14, 1941), 80.

106 Josselin, op. cit. (note 24), 369.

107 Jackson (ed.), op. cit. (note 43), 124–5.

108 OEDO.

109 John Hervey, Letter-Books of John Hervey, First Earl of Bristol, Vol. 1, 1651–1715, S.H.A. Hervey (ed.), 3 vols (Wells: Jackson, 1894), 117.

110 W.S., A Family Jewel, or the Womans Councellor: Containing, I. An Exact Method of Preventing or Curing All Diseases, and Grievances Incident to Children (London: A. Baldwin, 1704), 50.

111 For more about children’s need for sleep and the illnesses attributed to sleep deprivation, see Newton, ‘The Sick Child in Early Modern England’, op. cit. (note 13), ch. 1.

112 Nevertheless, Pollock has argued that the expression of anger was considered morally acceptable in certain circumstances, and at times, even honourable: op. cit. (note 94).

113 Cotton Mather, A Token, for the Children of New-England: Or, Some Examples of Children, in Whom the Fear of God was Remarkably Budding, Before they Dyed (Boston: Timothy Green, 1700), 7–9.

114 OEDO.

115 Thomas Becon, The Sycke Mans Salve Wherin the Faithfull Christians May Learne… How to Behave Them Selves Paciently and Thankefully (London: John Day, 1561); this treatise went through multiple editions in the seventeenth century.

116 James Janeway, A Token for Children: The Second Part (London: D. Newman, 1673), 12.

117 Isaac Watts, Preservative From the Sins and Follies of Childhood and Youth (London: E. Matthews, 1734), 32.

118 Sir Thomas Browne, The Letters of Sir Thomas Browne, Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1931), 222–3.

119 Symcotts, op. cit. (note 70), 61.

120 For the most comprehensive, extended discussion of this doctrine, see Walsham, op. cit. (note 34).

121 John Calvin, The Institutes of Christian Religion (London: 1559), 173.

122 Walsham, op. cit. (note 34), 331.

123 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1930], T. Parsons (trans.), (repr. Guilford: Allen & Unwin, 1976), 95–139; S.E. Sprott, The English Debate on Suicide (La Salle: Open Court, 1961); David Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Stachniewski, op. cit. (note 4).

124 Stachniewski, ibid. 2, 5–6.

125 Walsham, op. cit. (note 34), 20; Harley, op. cit. (note 11), 283; Thomas, op. cit. (note 83), 94–5.

126 Fisher, op. cit. (note 30), 11.

127 Wear, op. cit. (note 11), ‘Puritan Perceptions’, 71.

128 David Harley, ‘Spiritual Physic, Providence and English Medicine, 1560–1640’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Medicine and the Reformation (London: Routledge, 1993), 101–17: 106.

129 Vernon, op. cit. (note 104), 27.

130 Isham, op. cit. (note 67), 5–9; A. Deans, An Account of the Last Words of Christian Karr, Who Dyed at Edinburgh… 1702, in the Eleventh Year of Her Age (Edinburgh: Andrew Anderson’s successors, 1702), 7.

131 James Clavering, The Correspondence of Sir James Clavering, Harry Thomas Dickinson (ed.), (Gateshead: Surtees Society, Vol. 178, 1967), 157–8

132 Elizabeth Walker, The Vertuous Wife: Or, the Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker, Anthony Walker (ed.), (London: N.R., 1694), 108–10.

133 Bidbanck, op. cit. (note 27), 77.

134 Janeway, op. cit. (note 31), 61.

135 Ibid., 63–6.

136 Wear, op. cit. (note 11), ‘Puritan Perceptions’, 75.

137 Archer, op. cit. (note 103), 156.

138 Rebecca Travers, The Work of God in a Dying Maid… Susanna Whitrow (London: 1677), 16–17.

139 John Bunyan, Meditations on the Several Ages of Man’s Life: Representing, the Vanity of It, From His Cradle to His Grave (London: J. Blare, 1700), 14.

140 KJV.

141 Harley, op. cit. (note 11).

142 Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 124. Other historians of pain agree that the experience of physical suffering is drastically affected by the meaning of pain, for example, Cohen, op. cit. (note 55), 49–50; Glucklich, op. cit. (note 50), 17, 21.

143 Walker, op. cit. (note 132), 96–100.

144 Heywood, op. cit. (note 84), 235–6.

145 Fisher, op. cit. (note 30), 33–4, 69, 133.

146 Glucklich, op. cit. (note 50), 21, 23. The medical metaphor has also been discussed at length by David Harley in, ‘Medical Metaphors in English Moral Theology, 1560–1660’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 48 (1993), 396–435.

147 To give an example of theological treatise which frequently mentions the medicine and punishment metaphors, Richard Younge, A Christian Library, Or, a Pleasant and Plentiful Paradise of Practical Divinity in 37 Treatises of Sundry and Select Subjects (London: M.I., 1660), 9.

148 Mayhew, op. cit. (note 11), 312–14.

149 KJV, Proverbs, Article 3, Verses 11–12.

150 Thomas Gwin, A Memorial of Our Dear Daughter Anne Gwin, a Prudent and Virtuous Maiden (London: J. Sowle, 1715), 18.

151 Younge, op. cit. (note 147), 9–11.

152 Ibid., 12.

153 Bidbanck, op. cit. (note 27), 43–68.

154 H.P., op. cit. (note 80), 16.

155 Van Dijkhuizen, op. cit. (note 11), 231.

156 Dewey Wallace, Jr, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 48–9.

157 Vernon, op. cit. (note 104), 26.

158 For an extended discussion of the doctrine of predestination, see Wallace, op. cit. (note 156).

159 Stachniewski, op. cit. (note 4), 19.

160 Van Dijkhuizen, op. cit. (note 11), 212–13.

161 Ibid., 215.

162 Walsham, op. cit. (note 34), 331.

163 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, H. Weaver (trans.), (London: Allen Lane, 1981), and his article ‘The Reversal of Death: Changes in Attitudes Toward Death in Western Societies’, American Quarterly, 26 (1974), 536–60.

164 Stannard, op. cit. (note 123), and his article, ‘Death and the Puritan Child’, American Quarterly, 26 (1974), 456–75.

165 Avery, op. cit. (note 32), 103; Houlbrooke, op. cit. (note 32), 41–2; and Houlbrooke, op. cit. (note 12), 147, 195–6, 200–2, 207.

166 Anon., The Life and Death of Mrs Margaret Andrews (London: Nath. Ponder, 1680), 60.

167 Janeway, op. cit. (note 116), 2–3.

168 For a discussion of fear of death from the point of view of early modern women, see Becker, op. cit. (note 12), 1–15, and for the same but in reference to children, see Stannard, ‘Death and the Puritan Child’, op. cit. (note 164), 50–63.

169 Janeway, op. cit. (note 116), 19–20.

170 Bidbanck, op. cit. (note 27), 44–5.

171 For a discussion of the nature of Hell, see Houlbrooke, op. cit. (note 12), 30, 33, 35, 39–40; and Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9–10, 191–2, 195.

172 Janeway, op. cit. (note 31), 62.

173 Cited by A.W.M. Bryant (ed.), Postman’s Horn: An Anthology of the Family Letters of Later Seventeenth Century England (London: Home and Van Thal, 1946), 5.

174 Greenwood, op. cit. (note 72), 239–40.

175 John Shower, Heaven and Hell; Or the Unchangeable State of Happiness or Misery for All Mankind in Another World (London: J. Heptinstall, 1700), 17–18.

176 Robert Russel, A Little Book for Children, and Youth (London: 1693–6), n.p.

177 Janeway, op. cit. (note 31), preface.

178 Joseph Taylor, Grace, Grace: or, the Exceeding Riches of Grace (London: 1702), 7–8.

179 Janeway, op. cit. (note 31), preface.

180 Bidbanck, op. cit. (note 27), 76.

181 Frances Seymour, The Gentle Hertford: Her life and Letters, Helen Hughes (ed.), (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940), 77.

182 Janeway, op. cit. (note 31), 46–9.

183 Gwin, op. cit. (note 150), 9–10.

184 For example, Tabitha Alder’s family helped her to reach a state of confidence: Janeway, op. cit. (note 116), 20–1.

185 Houlbrooke, op. cit. (note 32), 195–6, 200.

186 Fisher, op. cit. (note 30), 6.

187 Janeway, op. cit. (note 31), 67.

188 H.P., op. cit. (note 80), 12–13.

189 Vernon, op. cit. (note 104), 66.

190 F.N. Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, With their Causes and Effects, Edward Grimeston (trans.), (London: Nicholas Okes, 1621), 352–3.

191 Houlbrooke, op. cit. (note 12), 62.

192 See Becker, op. cit. (note 12) for a description of this ideal emotional response to death, esp. 15–22.

193 Janeway, op. cit. (note 116), 84–5.

194 Deans, op. cit. (note 130), 7.

195 Houlbrooke, op. cit. (note 32), 49.

196 Vernon, op. cit. (note 104), 66.

197 Gearing, op. cit. (note 72), 114–15.

198 Janeway, op. cit. (note 116), 21–2.

199 Ibid., 84–5.

200 H.P., op. cit. (note 80), 9.

201 This image also undermines Ivy Pinchbeck’s and Mary Hewitt’s assertion that early modern children had a ‘cruelly distorted image of God’ owing to all the emphasis on death and its perils: Children in English Society, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), Vol. 1, 265.

202 Simonds D’Ewes, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Bart., J.O. Halliwell (ed.), 2 vols, (London: Richard Bentley, 1845), Vol. 1, 157.

203 Gearing, op. cit. (note 72), 239. Peter Marshall has provided a nuanced account of social relations in Heaven: ‘The Company of Heaven: Identity and Sociability in the English Protestant Afterlife, c.1560–1630’, Historical Reflections, 26 (2000), 311–33.

204 Thomas Brockbank, The Diary and Letter Book of the Rev. Thomas Brockbank, 1671–1709, Richard Trappes-Lomax (ed.), New Series, Vol. 89 (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1930), 5–7.

205 Archer, op. cit. (note 103), 160–61.

206 Mather, op. cit. (note 113), 14.

207 Mortimer, op. cit. (note 14).