Rite Out of Time: A Study of the of Churching of Women and Its Survival in the Twentieth Century - Softcover

Houlbrooke, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1907730109 ISBN 13: 9781907730108

Publisher: Shaun Tyas, 2011

Synopsis

This book discovers an area of ancient belief and ritual: women’s thanksgiving and purification following the births of their children. Backed by Biblical legend and hints of ancient folklore religion, churching celebrated childhood, but also used hints of shame and uncleanness, controlling the mothers, restricting their activities and confining them indoors until the ceremony completed the rite of passage. The author has investigated the tenacity of this established custom and its interaction with liturgy in the construction of religious belief and practice. She also gives an account of how the rite survived well into the twentieth century and why it has finally disappeared in the twenty-first. The book contains personal testimony based on interviews with elderly women who were churched after the births of their children, sources of information are fully acknowledged (it is an academic study) and there is an index. In the practice of churching, there was clearly a difference between theory and practice. On the one hand, the words of the ceremony are an unobjectionable expression of thanksgiving (made at a time when childbirth was indeed a very perilous time), but on the other hand women were treated to widespread social taboos by their families and neighbours, often forcing them into a period of social ostracism until they had been ‘cleansed’. It is the popular superstition about churching which eventually brought about its downfall, but that makes it all the more interesting for the social historian.

Edition details

• Publisher: Shaun Tyas
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1907730109
• ISBN 13: 9781907730108
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160