Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe

Katie Barclay is DECRA Fellow in the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She is the author of Love, Intimacy and Power, and numerous articles on family life and emotions.Kimberley Reynolds is an award-winning author who founded the UK’s National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature and co-edited one of the first studies of representations of childhood death.Ciara Rawnsley works at the University of Western Australia, and has published on Shakespeare and Emotions. After completing her PhD, she worked at the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions.

• Small Graves: Histories of Childhood, Death and Emotion; Katie Barclay and Kim Reynolds.- 1.‘he nas but seven yeer olde’: Emotions in Boy Martyr Legends of Later Medieval England; Andrew Lynch.- 2. Rhetorics of Death and Resurrection: Child Death in Late-Medieval English Miracle Tales; Philippa Maddern.- 3. Beholding Suffering and Providing Care: Emotional Performances on the Death of Poor Children within Sixteenth-Century French Institutions; Susan Broomhall.- 4. ‘Rapt up with joy’: Children’s Emotional Responses to Death in Early Modern England; Hannah Newton.- 5. Facing Childhood Death in English Protestant Spirituality; Alec Ryrie.- 6. Memorials and Expressions of Mourning: Portraits of Dead Children in Seventeenth-Century Sweden; Karin Sidén.- 7. Child-Killing and Emotion in Early Modern England and Wales; Garthine Walker.- 8. Grief, Faith and Eighteenth-Century Childhood: The Doddridges of Northampton; Katie Barclay.- 9 Responsibility and Emotion: Parental, Governmental and Almighty Responses to Infant Deaths in Denmark in the Mid-Eighteenth to Mid-Nineteenth Century; Anne Lᴓkke .- 10. Child Death and Children’s Emotions in Early Sunday School Reward Books; Merete Colding-Smith.- 11. Childhood Death in Modernity: Fairy Tales, Psychoanalysis, and the Neglected Significance of Siblings; Chantal Bourgault du Coudray.

“The contributors offer an array of potential new approaches, sources, and interpretations, and open up many new and exciting avenues of research, an invitation that is perhaps this volume’s most important contribution.” (Margaret B. Lewis, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 73 (1), 2020)