A woman’s rite: rediscovering the ritual of churching in Denmark, c. 1750-1965

ABSTRACT

Taking Denmark as a case study, this article retraces the ritual of churching of women after childbirth 1750c-1965. Churching offers a new angle into women’s religiosity and perception of their procreative body. Placed at the intersection of religion and everyday life, churching was as much a clerical ritual as a social custom at the centre of communal life and a feast day for the married mother. Rooted in Levitical childbirth impurity, adopted as a Christian purification ritual, then redefined by Lutheran reformers as a thanksgiving rite, churching continued along parallel tracks in Europe into the nineteenth and twentieth century in many places. Yet churching has fallen out of common memory in Denmark as elsewhere. This article first examines the clerical rite, demonstrating how churching elevated a mother’s status in the congregation, affording her time, space and honour, a position she lost when churching ceased. The second part analyses the childbirth cycle from pregnancy to churching when society imposed different norms on women. Childbirth was dangerous and physical vulnerability compounded by widespread fears of evil spirits and a sense of being impure. Rather than simply a thanksgiving ceremony, churching often represented an apotropaic and healing passage back to safety.

KEYWORDS:

• Churching
• ritual
• women
• childbirth
• parishioners
• clergymen
• Denmark

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Introduction

In his 1757 handbook for budding clergymen, Bishop Erik Pontoppidan (1698–1764) regretted that it was hardly worth discussing the ritual of churching of women because two recent laws had as good as abolished the rite. It was only a matter of time, he mused, before the many words of the church agenda devoted to this ‘age-old custom of leading-in of childbirth matrons some weeks after their childbirth’ would be forgotten.¹

Pontoppidan was an erudite theologian and by 1755, also the newly appointed Dean of the University of Copenhagen, but he was nonetheless mistaken. To be sure, a law of 1748 had exempted all women of rank from churching obligations, and in 1754, another law had ostensibly abolished churching of burgher or peasant women too.² What Pontoppidan failed to take into account was the caveat that churching should continue in areas where it was customary. Had he looked beyond the walls of the Danish capital, he would have realised that churching was customary in most of rural Denmark and in smaller market towns, which accounted for more than eighty per cent of the population. But the Copenhagen-centric focus of eighteenth-century Denmark was so profound that Pontoppidan, and many of his brethren, assumed that cessation in Copenhagen meant cessation everywhere. Their misapprehension has dominated scholarship ever since to the extent that churching has fallen out of modern memory.³ This article will show, however, that far from dying out in the mid-eighteenth century, rural churching continued in many areas in the nineteenth century, and in smaller parishes, even into the twentieth: the last churching identified by this study took place in the mid-1960s.⁴

Originally a purification ritual, churching was rooted in mosaic notions of childbirth impurity, which mandated that the mother should undergo a purification period at home for some weeks, followed by an offering ceremony at the Temple. Adopted into Christianity and commonplace throughout late medieval Europe, churching was redefined by Lutheran reformers as a thanksgiving ritual shorn of Catholic sacramentals. Henceforth, Lutheran and Catholic churching continued along parallel tracks for the following centuries. In many areas, churching was as familiar as baptism and a feast day for the mother who was celebrated in Church and society. Yet the dearth of Danish scholarship has similarly afflicted international scholarship, prompting Gail McMurray Gibson to declare in 1996 that churching was ‘the purloined letter of women’s experience’ being ‘in such plain view it is invisible’.⁵ Little has improved since.

Taking Danish churching in the period of c. 1750–1965 as a case study, this article’s overall purpose is to prove the longevity of churching and reinstate the rite in the scholarly debate. It aims to do so by arguing three main points.

First, that churching not only ‘filled’ a service, but it also elevated a mother’s status in the congregation to the point that when churching ceased, women became far less visible in the church.⁶ Churching thus affords a new avenue into women’s position in communal worship. Second, it is demonstrated that the rediscovery of churching necessitates a reconsideration of liturgy and clerical duties. Danish churchings typically took place in the privacy of the church porch, where the mother received a personal sermon before being ceremoniously led into the waiting congregation. These sermons have never before been identified, nor have the dedicated churching hymns that accompanied a churching and gathered the congregation in contemplation of the mother.

This study, moreover, operates from the new position of insight into the degree to which churching influenced nineteenth-century church interiors. Although sporadic sources of churching material are known to scholarship, these are scarce, serendipitous, and usually ignored. This examination, by contrast, benefits from having amassed a ground-breaking database of material culture of churching. As a result, it has become clear that many church porches had benches reserved for churching retinues as well as honorary pews near the altar. Hymn boards were designed with an allotted space for churching hymns, waiting rooms were provided in newly built churches, and although rare, even some door signs marked ‘churching’ were fashioned to warn off latecomers.⁷ The discovery of the material culture of churching in nineteenth-century Danish church interiors underpins the third argument of this paper: that there is a need to reassess not just the (considerable) impact but also the longevity of the rite of churching.⁸

Childbirth was dangerous, and women were naturally fearful of pain and the potential meeting with death, not only during the birth but also from post-partum complications. For any meaningful discussion of churching from a mother’s perspective, the full childbirth cycle should thus be included. This not only helps to explain enduring notions of post-partum impurity but also why the solemn rite in the church was often followed by rumbustious celebrations in the parish. If clergymen shaped and staged the churching, this paper will further argue that churching offers a unique window into women’s lives, religiosity, and perception of their body and that women added their own understanding and customs to a ritual which was, more than anything, a woman’s rite.

This article uses the term ‘churching’ throughout except where the issue of purification is deliberately brought into context.

The paper is divided into two main sections. Following a brief outline of early modern churching in Denmark, the first section focusses on the clerical rite, mapping each element of churching as it unfolded within the church service. In addition to source material from clerical ego-documents, visitation records, liturgies, and parish registers, the discussion is informed by the identification of printed churching sermons from 1791 onwards, drawn from collections of ‘occasional sermons’ comprising homilies for weddings, churchings, funerals, confessions and so forth, as well as from clerical handbooks, liturgical proposals, clerical journals and homiletics.⁹ Crucial, too, are the identified churching hymns, unknown today, but familiar to eighteenth and nineteenth-century parishioners. A collection of more than 150 topographical narratives from 1775–1900 further informs this section.¹⁰ Reliance on folklore narratives is not unproblematic, but as David Hopkins has reminded us, if taken across a wide field of sources, they yield important information on everyday beliefs among non-elite people.¹¹ In the present case, informants’ narratives also throw light on how parishioners and pastors shaped the rite of churching, information that cannot be gleaned from liturgies or clerical handbooks. Underpinning this insight is the new database of material culture mentioned above.

Adding medical handbooks and female ego-documents to the source material, the second section concentrates on the mother for whom churching was a rite of passage on two levels, as a body-mind ritual and as a social marker. Divided into three parts, the second section opens with a discussion on the dangers of childbirth and the new norms imposed on women in pregnancy and lying-in. It then turns to the day of churching as seen and shaped by women. The final part examines the lingering issues of impurity, suggesting that churching was a cathartic, physical and spiritual release, a rite of passage rooted in the procreative female body.

The clerical rite of churching

Churching, a problematic inheritance

That churching weathered the upheavals of the Danish Reformation in 1536 was far from evident because the first evangelical Church Agenda of Denmark-Norway of 1537/39 expressly stated that childbirth rules from ‘Mosi Law’ were no longer valid and churching was abolished. Only the six-week lying-in should be retained.¹² Adopted from Levitical Law into Christianity, and as common in late-medieval Denmark as in other parts of Europe, what reformers thus apparently swept away was a deep-seated custom. At the cusp of the Reformation, a mother’s purification had developed into a rite of healing and thanksgiving in most of Europe, but traces of purification still lingered and the rite was at best ambiguous. Paired with its ties to the Feast of the Purification of Virgin Mary, the annual celebration of Mary’s purification after the birth of Jesus, churching was an unattractive prospect to many reformers.¹³ Less so, it would seem, to the general population and no sooner had it been abolished than the Danish King Christian III issued a counter order.¹⁴ His trusted primate, the superintendent of Zealand, Peder Palladius (1503–1560) was charged with formulating a Lutheran thanksgiving ritual without sacramentals, such as the churching candle around which the late-medieval ceremony and the Feast of Mary’s Purification had centred.¹⁵ Moreover, such ‘superstitious’ customs as the churching of dead childbed mothers could not be tolerated anymore. Repeated regulations show, however, that parishioners and their pastors only reluctantly relinquished Catholic practices. Indeed, as late as 1666, a Pastor Mogensen noted in his parish register that ‘because [Johanne] had died before her churching they brought her to church to the altar and gave offering’.¹⁶ What both state and parishioners agreed upon, however, was that churching was a celebration of marriage and fecundity, and in early modern Denmark, churching was as popular in the elite as in other spheres of society.

In 1685, a new agenda was issued and contrary to the Reformation agenda, the Church Ritual of Denmark-Norway of 1685 had a generous section on childbirth and churching. As it had already been enshrined in Christian V’s Danish Law of 1683, churching looked set to continue with the same popularity it had enjoyed since Reformation. Paradoxically, however, the new agenda of 1685 also marked the decade when churching entered its first phase of decline.¹⁷ In a development that had begun in the sixteenth-century, the Danish elite were increasingly separating their mores from those of the rest of society. By the end of the seventeenth century, the elite were even entitled to perform church rituals separately from the rest of the congregation.¹⁸ Thus a law of 1686 entitled the nobility to give confession and take communion outside the normal service and two years later, in 1688, the wives of officers of the Royal Horse Guard, an elite institution, were exempted from churching obligations.¹⁹ Although this decision arose from practical considerations, it was perceived as a rejection of churching and the 1688 regulation became the catalyst for decline among the higher spheres of society and most of the Danish capital, if with notable exceptions.²⁰ Queen Louise (1724–1751) had a splendid churching feast in Copenhagen in 1749, for example, and in 1777, when Countess Schulin was churched in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, her husband paid Pastor Borch an impressive 16 Rigsdaler in churching offering, when 1 Rigsdaler was already generous.²¹ By the 1750s, when Pontoppidan spelled the end of churching, it was becoming a rural rite, and a rite that was practised in almost every county on almost every Sunday. It is this ritual that provides the focus of this paper.

The framework of churching

Churchings usually took place at the beginning of a Sunday service, or less usually, after the main sermon. They could also fall on a holy day and in urban areas where access was easier and services more plentiful, mid-week might be used too. The number of churchings in any one parish naturally depended on the number of women of fertile age living there. Drawing upon parish registers, Table 1. gives an example by comparing the numbers of baptisms, churchings and weddings from three rural parishes in the three main regions of Denmark (Jutland, Funen, Zealand) taken over three different centuries.²²

Table 1. Churchings, Baptisms and Weddings

Year	Parish	Baptism (Legit.)	Baptism (Illeg.)	Churching	Wedding	Comments
1693	Paarup	10	1	9	4
	Aagerup(Merløse)	19	2	17	6
	Skjold	14	0	17	4	Five weeks missing from register
1755	Nørre Næraae	13	0	14	4	1 stillborn
	Drejø	5	0	4	6	1755 was below average. For 1754: 12 baptisms, 11 churchings, 3 weddings
	Storring	10	0	11	0
1855	Kauslunde	27	3	26	11	1 twin birth
	Aagerup	18	0	17	11
	Hygum	45	0	45		3 stillborn 1 twin birth 1 unwed mother (not churched)

As to be expected, the number of churchings is slightly below that for baptisms. This is because a twin birth required two baptisms but only one churching, an illegitimate birth required one baptism, but rarely a churching because unmarried mothers were seldom churched, and finally, women of the nobility or lower elite who resided in a rural parish had no obligations to be churched, although there are many examples that they were. If none of these conditions applied, churchings could be more frequent than baptisms because a stillbirth or death soon after birth meant no church baptism, but one churching.

The above numbers are taken from parish registers where churchings and baptisms were clearly marked and held on separate days. In many cases this was the norm, but there was also a practice which this study has termed ‘double celebration’, the celebration of churching and baptism on the same day.²³ In a custom that predates the Reformation, parents would not infrequently have their infant home baptised a few days after birth and then arrange for a publication of the christening six weeks later.²⁴ This was despite regulations that only allowed for home christenings if the infant was in mortal danger. One such regulation from 1645 has been explained as ‘directed at the habit of postponing a ceremony due to ambitions regarding splendour and participants’.²⁵ While correct, it was more than that because parents did not wait for an arbitrary period, they waited until the nearest Sunday, six weeks after the birth so that the mother could be churched just before the christening and thus participate. This was a privilege she otherwise had to forego because social custom dictated that a new mother had to remain at home for the six-week lying-in period. For modest households, double celebrations were equally advantageous because they saved on the cost of a feast.

By the 1790s, double celebrations seem to have become almost the norm, with some parents even skipping the home christening altogether. In a letter dated October 1794, the authoritative primate, Zealand Bishop Nicolai Balle (1744–1816) gave this piece of advice to Danish Cancelli, the central government:

It is now almost the norm, even for the clergyman, that the infant is not taken to church and, if healthy, not christened, before the time when the mother can have her churching and thus partake in her own child’s christening. That this must be precious and moving for the mother I readily comprehend, and I do not think it should be banned.²⁶

It was not until the 1820s that delayed baptism was finally sanctioned by the authorities.²⁷ In a prizewinning painting of 1860, A Woman’s Solemn Churching after Childbirth, (Figure 1), Danish painter, Christen Dalsgaard (1824–1907), has foregrounded the infant wrapped in baptismal garments in the arms of what is probably its godmother, indicating that baptism would follow after the churching in a double celebration.²⁸ The churching ritual itself was solely focussed on the mother and did not require the presence of the child.

Figure 1. ‘A woman’s solemn churching after childbirth’, 97x114cm, 1860, Christen Dalsgaard (1824–1907), Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), Copenhagen.

The church porch

When in 1833 Pastor Lange applied for permission for the porch of North Søby Church to be enlarged this was ‘particularly for the sake of churching women’.²⁹ Indeed, Danish churching remained intrinsically linked to the church porch throughout its history. The ceremony was usually one of the first elements of a service but not always, and the mother and her attendant matrons (følgekvinder) could sometimes be in for a long wait. For this reason, church porches were often equipped with dedicated churching benches ‘for the sake of those women who are churched after their childbed’.³⁰

The porch ritual was minutely described in the Church Ritual of Denmark-Norway of 1685, republished verbatim in 1761, in 1855, and again in a slightly condensed form in the rituals handbook of 1955.³¹ The 1685 text instructed:

On the morning of the churching, the mother arrives at church in the company of a few attendant matrons in time for the service but remains in the porch, or in front of the church door, until the pastor comes out to her. With the pastor standing just inside the church [door] and the mother remaining in front of him just outside the door, the pastor gives her a brief admonition, reminding her of the gratitude she should feel that God has helped her out of her distress and the thanks she should give to God for granting her a safe delivery.³²

As can be seen, Dalsgaard’s painting of 1860 depicted these instructions exactly. Perhaps rather too exactly because in reality, most eighteenth and nineteenth-century sources speak of churchings taking place within the porch, and a few pastors even closed the door to the nave so as to be able to speak to the mother in private.³³ If the mother’s attendant matrons could thus witness the churching, the general congregation could not. Still a threshold ritual of sorts, the nineteenth-century rite was hardly what in 1735 had made a disgruntled Bishop Peder Hersleb (1689–1757) criticise it for ‘smacking too much of ceremonial law’.³⁴ A thanksgiving ritual after childbirth was laudable enough, he had argued, but not in the porch. The rite should be a blessing from the pulpit and not ‘six pages long’ when three or four minutes surely sufficed.

It would not be until 1754 that the authorities offered women a pulpit ritual, presenting this as progress because it saved on ‘the inconvenience’ and ‘unnecessary delay’ a churching caused; time that was better spent, the regulation continued, on ‘the more important catechisation’. Besides, this was far healthier for new mothers as it eliminated the often extended wait in cold and unsanitary porches.³⁵

Did this persuade mothers to opt for pulpit churchings? Far from it. Though adopted in some market towns and the few parishes of Copenhagen where churching was still performed, rural mothers largely retained the porch ritual. When in 1803, a Funen pastor, Jens Smid, boldly announced that churchings would henceforth be conducted from the pulpit, his Højerup-Broby parishioners felt shortchanged and refused to be churched.³⁶ In 1807, Pastor Sand had more luck with his Jutland parish when for the sake of mothers’ health and ‘using the example of my wife, I introduced pulpit churching, as permitted by law’.³⁷ But this was rare. Perhaps Sand was emboldened by a churching debate, prompted by the 1806 proposal for a new agenda by Bishop P. O. Boisen (1762–1831). The Enlightenment, Boisen wrote, had brought information but also raised questions. At a time when the church service was increasingly perceived to be irrelevant and remote, churching was one of the few ‘moments’ that still spoke to the hearts of the congregation.³⁸ Boisen, therefore, wanted churching moved to the altar so that the whole congregation could benefit.³⁹ Some pastors approved while others argued it would deprive the ritual of its core value, its ‘sensual element’ as Pastor Hjort (1765–1818) warned, and if that happened, the rite would soon be a thing of the past.⁴⁰ Anyone who had ever witnessed a mother’s pain and anxiety in pregnancy, Pastor Krog (1762–1830) joined in, and seen a mother’s fear of death in childbirth, would know what a cathartic experience a porch churching could be.⁴¹ The intimacy of the porch was also far better suited, Krog added, for correcting any misconceptions about impurity and for helping the less instructed mothers to put words to feelings and give comfort in grief.

One of the issues of a pulpit churching was thus exposure. The mother remained in her normal pew until her churching but at that point some pastors made her rise for the blessing. One parishioner born in 1848 recalled it with horror: ‘Believe me it was terrible!⁴² The porch churching, by contrast, offered intimacy, it afforded time, and its choreography over a liminal threshold, or “performance” as ritual scholars have it, was a powerful representation of a mother’s journey back to normality – even if this meant the inconvenience of a cold and dilapidated porch. Because the authorities’ remark in 1754 about the dangers to health posed by draughty porches was no exaggeration. Forty years later, conditions had not improved. Among its eleven points, a governmental circular of 1791 enquired whether broken windows had just been boarded up and not replaced, whether walls were black and green from damp and whether church porches ‘lacked a roof, which meant churching women risked their health while waiting, at length, for the pastor to come down to church them’.⁴³ From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, many churches underwent major restorations and when in the 1870s, a spate of new churches was constructed, particularly in Jutland, some even had a purpose-built churching-cum-waiting room. This study has identified a total of fifteen such rooms from the period between 1766c-1904, invariably described as ‘warm’ or ‘cosy’ or, as in Them in 1873, where the church was given ‘a beautiful, new porch equipped with a small waiting room for the mothers’.⁴⁴ If the central authorities were reticent about churching, local parishes were clearly not. Neither, indeed, were the many local pastors who invested time, thought and effort into what was the core of a churching, the ‘churching speech’.

The churching sermon

‘Did you ask yourself’, began Pastor Kruuse, ‘when they prepared your birthing bed, if you would survive, and should you survive, if it be with a body so weak, that your sufferings would follow you to the grave?’⁴⁵ Another of Kruuse’s churching mothers was gently reminded that it was to God not the doctor that she owed her thanks. By 1834, when his sermons were published, Manderup Kruuse (1760–1846) had been the cherished pastor of Højelse on Zealand for forty-seven years. He had known from childhood many of the mothers he churched, and although not all pastors could claim this, or indeed Kruuse’s reputation for beautiful, sincere sermons, the churching sermons identified from 1791–1925 bear witness to remarkable pastoral care.⁴⁶

The sermons were usually published in collections of ‘Occasional Sermons’ and aimed at fellow clergymen to help colleagues in what Pastor Albert Leth (1796–1849) described as a ‘far from easy part of their duties’.⁴⁷ From the 1830s onwards, however, pastors increasingly included popular readership as well. Most stressed that apart from a few minor alterations, the sermons were printed as given.⁴⁸

The Church Ritual of 1685 had included two illustrative sermons, and following this pattern, the churching sermons fell into two main categories, congratulatory and comfort sermons. The congratulatory sermon reminded the mother of her gratitude to God, her duty to attend to the physical and spiritual needs of her child, imbuing it with proper Christian values. To do so, the mother had to lead a life of virtue herself. If not in the capable hands of the likes of Pastors Kruuse and Leth or Pastors C. F. Ingerslev (1764–1841) and Edvard Mau (1808–1885), the congratulatory sermon could tend towards the slightly predictable, but that is the nature of occasional speeches, and to the childbirth mother, it would have been her speech.

It is the comfort sermons that attract particular attention, however, because they not only bear testimony to what we would now call grief counselling, they also offer astonishing insight into a mother’s everyday life and the demands of childbearing. Pastors spoke to mothers who had been widowed in pregnancy, mothers whose deliveries had incapacitated them or their child in some way, and some nineteenth-century pastors even acknowledged that children were not always as wanted as the church wished them to be. In the 1685 sample sermons, children were always a blessing. If the contents of churching sermons centred on female-only situations which a pastor could only ever imagine, he often drew upon his own experience when comforting a mother who grieved for her child. In 1837, when Madam Kofod was churched in Holbæk, she was met with empathy: ‘at the churching from the pulpit I spoke to her words of comfort on a subject which is also close to my heart, as I too, have suffered the fate of losing five children and have but one left’.⁴⁹

Churching sermons usually opened with a biblical quotation. To a bereaved mother, it was typically ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord’ (Job, 1,21), or, as one of many suggestions in Pastor Birch’s handbook for young clergymen of 1791: ‘The maid has not died, she merely sleeps’ (Matth, 9,24).⁵⁰ As for congratulatory speeches, Albert Leth did not hold back: ’Rejoice, you highly favoured one! The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women!’ (Luke, 1,28).⁵¹ More common was: ‘A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her infant is born, she forgets the anguish’ (John, 16,21). As theologians Pastor Henrich Ussing (1743–1820) and Erik Høyer Møller (1818–1904) both reminisced, a well-chosen churching quotation, especially in cases where the mother was physically weakened by labour, had given many a mother ‘a fresh impulse for life’.⁵²

As for comfort sermons, the development from the 1685 text is striking. Where the 1685 comfort sermon was didactic, emphasising a correct (Lutheran) way of mourning, nineteenth-century churching sermons were intimate, personal and often empathetic. What had changed little, however, was the female ideal that underpinned the sermons. A good nineteenth-century woman remained a virtuous married woman, content with a life of domesticity and fulfilled by caring for hearth and home.

This leads us to a third type of churching sermon, the admonition, as exemplified in one of Frederik Bloch’s (1805–1879) twenty-four churching sermons.⁵³ Published in 1844, this sermon was addressed to a mother who had become widowed in pregnancy. As we understand it from Bloch’s hints of ‘bodily desire’, the mother must have been seeing another man in her recent widowhood. Non-marital sexual relations overstepped the boundaries of society and clergy alike, particularly during lying-in. That Bloch reproached her was therefore within the realm of pastoral care. This was not always the case, however. In the late eighteenth century, a lack of clarity in the legislation enabled a slightly larger number of unmarried mothers to be churched, which risked mothers receiving a ‘thorough dressing-down’, as Bishop Balle expressed it in 1791.⁵⁴ Even so, truly condemnatory sermons seem to have been rare.

Comfort sermons lasted between five and eleven minutes, congratulatory sermons between three and ten.⁵⁵ Writing a sermon, especially for inexperienced priests, was thus time-consuming and delivery was a challenge because preaching from a manuscript was deemed unacceptable.⁵⁶ In 1827, after the later Bishop of Ribe, Jacob B. Daugaard (1796–1867) had given his first two churching sermons, he confessed to his fiancée that he had become hopelessly stuck despite having practised the whole day before.⁵⁷ Some clergymen never conquered their nerves. The shy and reticent Pastor Schiønning of Kallehave, born in 1730, found churching so terrifying ‘he would quiver and shake every time he churched a mother’.⁵⁸

The churching hymn

Churching typically called for two hymns, one to be sung while the mother was churched in the porch and another to accompany the churching offering. The churching hymn thus acted as a ‘waiting’ hymn (lente·salme) for a congregation not privy to the churching and it set the mood. The parish had its own favourite hymn that formed part of oral memory, so familiar it was often referred to simply as ‘the’ churching hymn. Describing a Northern Funen parish of the mid-1800s, folklore collector Christine Reimer (1858–1943) remarked that it only took a few notes of the local churching hymn to be played before ‘everyone turned to see who was churched’.⁵⁹

This study has identified eight dedicated churching hymns from 1569–1888 and another nine general hymns used in a parish as ‘the’ churching hymn.⁶⁰ All apart from one were written by men. ‘Be filled with holy gladness’ (Bliv fuld af hellig glæde) was composed by the once famous hymn writer, Birgitte C. Boye (1742–1824) and is among the 140 hymns she contributed to ‘Guldberg’s Hymnal of 1778’. Because of a regime shift, the hymnal was short-lived and Boye forgotten, but her hymn lived on, although in an almost unrecognisable version.⁶¹ Reprinted in the rationalist Evangelical-Christian Hymnal of 1798, and in common with many other hymns, it was altered to fit with rationalist taste. Gone were the passionate outbursts of female emotion and the cry of relief from a mother who had ‘cheated the waiting grave’, gone were three of the six stanzas and gone was the title which became Sing! Glory, Praise and Thanks and Honour’ (Lov, pris og ære og tak).⁶² Even so, the hymn remained popular, especially after 1857, when a mourning stanza was added for churchings where the child had died. By acknowledging a mother’s grief, the hymn offered the same pastoral care as demonstrated in many of the contemporary comfort sermons.

A local hymnal from 1845 by the long-standing clergyman of Store Magleby Church in Dragør, Zealand, Pastor H. A. Timm (1800–1866) contained two churching hymns.⁶³ The first, a hymn ‘for the young mother’ which centred on the life-changing and frightening experience of childbirth, was set to a melancholy tune in a minor key, as was the norm. The other hymn, ‘for the older matron’, was set to a cheerful tune in a major key and focussed instead on the contented mother and her growing brood. Timm also had a hymn ‘for the matron who senses she is with child’ and ‘for the joy of a mother at the birth of her child’. In a link to churching sermons, all the hymns were prefaced with the biblical quotation that guided the content.

One of the last churching hymns to be sung in Denmark, a translation of Frans Michael Franzén’s ‘To thine House with Songs of Praise’ (Til dit hus med takkesang) was a an uncomplicated, joyful hymn. When in 1943, Pastor Filtenborg of Fole learnt that a hymnal committee in Copenhagen was planning to omit Franzén’s hymn in the forthcoming authorised hymnal, (published in 1953), he wrote them an animated letter enquiring how it was possible to exclude the very hymn that was sung ‘more often than any other’ in Fole church.⁶⁴ ‘When within one year’ Filtenborg averred, around ‘fifteen infants are born in this parish of Fole, we sing this hymn a good fifteen times’. Franzén’s hymn was not reinstated but Filtenborg continued to church until 1958.

None of the dedicated churching hymns features in modern hymnals but they have left a hitherto unobserved legacy in the form of nineteenth-century hymn boards, some of which had pre-printed headers for ‘ministerial businesses’ such as weddings, baptism and so forth. Among these, this study has identified fifteen boards marked with ‘churching’ from all areas of Denmark, two of which even with the number of the churching hymn still shown.

Leading in and offering

‘Enter now into God’s house’ was the cue that the churching had ended, and it was time for the mother to join the congregation. In a slow and dignified procession, the mother emerged from the porch and walked up the aisle followed by her retinue. Some pastors saved the dedicated churching hymn for this moment.⁶⁵ In Ejby Church, western Funen, the congregation even rose when the churching mother appeared and remained standing for the churching hymn.⁶⁶ This is remarkable because in nineteenth-century Denmark it was, and still is, customary to remain seated whilst singing and rise only for biblical readings.

The final element of the churching was the offering and this too, unfolded in accordance with 1685 ritual. Stipulating that the mother ‘and her attendant matrons go up to the altar and give offerings to God’s servants according to inclination and means’, churching offering was a strangely composite act. On the one hand it was a prosaic money transaction from parishioner to pastor, a fee paid for a service as in all other ministerial businesses, but it was also a stylised ritual shaped by women.⁶⁷ The offering generally took place after the main sermon of the service. If so, the mother’s attendant matrons took their customary seats apart from one who accompanied the mother to a special pew near the altar.⁶⁸ Seats near the altar were the most prestigious and sitting there was a particular honour.

Once the mother had given offer, she regained her normal seat as a reintegrated member of the congregation.

Churching as a woman’s rite

The childbirth cycle

Churching was the liminal closure to what Adrian Wilson has aptly called the ‘childbirth cycle’ which extended from pregnancy, through to birth and the lying-in.⁶⁹ Pregnancy was not only bodily taxing; it was a time of heavy responsibility for the gravida because seemingly harmless experiences were potentially injurious. Frights and shocks were naturally to be avoided, but everyday sights could be harmful too.⁷⁰ A common belief known all over Europe was that the sight of a hare might give the child harelip (cleft palate).⁷¹ Rooted in humoural thought, this transmission theory, or ‘secretive sympathy between mother and child’ in the words of pastor and folklorist Henning Feilberg, was refuted by medical discoveries of the seventeenth century, but its hold was tenacious. When in 1778, theologian Andreas Hviid (1749–1788) still thought ‘monsters’ particularly dangerous for pregnant women, he was far from alone.⁷² Nineteenth-century North Zealand dialect even had a verb for it: a mother could ‘vulle’ her foetus to harm.⁷³ If, in frightened agitation, the gravida took her hands to her face or touched some other part of her body, it was thought the infant risked being blemished or deformed in corresponding parts of its body. Although clearly a precautionary measure, the warnings would have restricted the expectant mother’s ambit. They would also have compounded whatever fear a woman naturally harboured as childbirth drew near, in case she had harmed the foetus.⁷⁴

‘Pregnancy is irrefutably a time of danger’ Pastor Ussing commented in 1788, ‘and childbirth in many cases life-threatening’.⁷⁵ This was true enough. A Danish study for 1640–1700 calculated the puerperal mortality rate per childbirth at 2%, which seems unusually low compared to the 6–7% mortality rate reported in a study for early modern England.⁷⁶ Ostensibly, puerperal death in Denmark even fell to 1% in 1700, but it is doubtful whether these figures can be relied upon or whether mortality was in fact much higher, as obstetrician, Emmerik Ingerslev (1844–1916) proved for late-nineteenth century Denmark.⁷⁷ An expert in puerperal deaths and respected to this day, Ingerslev demonstrated that statistics of the 1860–1890 were marred by errors, not least the misreading of death certificates by non-medical office staff. He also pointed out that to obtain an accurate picture of puerperal deaths, these should be seen only against the rate of death (by other causes) among women of probable procreative age, or 15–45 years of age, not as a percentage of deaths among all women. Looking at market towns and women within this age group, Ingerslev found that between 1868–77, puerperal mortality was a staggering 11.1% decreasing to 5.32% in the 1880s. Even if compared to women of all age groups, the percentage of puerperal deaths in the 1880s was still at 3.33%. From then on, however, childbirth mortality fell drastically due to antiseptic methods introduced in the 1870s.⁷⁸ It is not possible to obtain a full picture of childbirth mortality in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Denmark, but childbirth, as mothers knew, posed a very real risk of dying until the final third of the nineteenth century.

‘Mother Mary, lend me your key so I can open my loins’ went a prayer from late-medieval Denmark, still whispered in many eighteenth-century birthing rooms. Other measures included the wearing of amulets to ward off pain and danger. According to Danish Pastor J. N. Wilse, some of his female parishioners in his 1779 Norwegian parish of Spydeberg referred to such amulets as angerster or ‘anguish-ors’, worn, not just in childbirth, but throughout lying-in and churching.⁷⁹ Their fear was grounded in ancient folklore belief that otherworldly creatures, particularly werewolves, prowled the lying-in room in the hope of stealing the newborn or harming the mother. ‘My mother was terribly afraid of the werewolf and kept scissors in her bed’ stated one typical nineteenth-century Jutland narrative.⁸⁰ The werewolf might even attack the pregnant woman in order to tear the unborn child from her womb and drink its blood.⁸¹ It is impossible to ascertain the level of credence attached to these beliefs, but it is a given that eighteenth and nineteenths-century scholars overwhelmingly blamed peasants for such ‘superstition’ and that until the mid-1800s and possibly longer, many rural mothers kept metal, an erstwhile protection from witches, in their lying-in chamber for protection.⁸² Linked to this was the belief among parishioners that a childbed mother was somehow ‘unclean’ or ‘heathen’.⁸³ If taken as read, a childbed mother’s Christianity was thus temporarily suspended, and the mother impure. The implications of this will be discussed further below.

In Denmark, lying-ins were traditionally of six weeks’ duration and strictly guarded where possible.⁸⁴ When theologian, hymn writer and inspirer of the hugely influential movement Grundtvigianism, N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), was in London in 1843, he was dismayed that the wife of his host scarcely kept the rules of confinement and even ended it after only three weeks. ‘Lying-ins’, he wrote to his wife in Denmark, ’are far less restrictive here than in Copenhagen’.⁸⁵ The lying-in mother’s curfew was underpinned by yet another set of warnings that foresaw all manner of calamities if she ventured out before time.⁸⁶ Convention was so strong in small communities that when in the 1870s, a lying-in mother on the Island of Drejø learned that her mother lay dying next door, custom prevented her from visiting. When, a generation later, the lying-in mother’s now adult daughter decided to break the norm, she ‘was branded a heretic and shunned … for decades’ as a result.⁸⁷

Intriguingly, society saw no problem in a lying-in mother receiving guests, and there was often a string of female visitors at her bedside. To regard the lying-in period only as morose and fearful would therefore be wrong. But it was a time of contradictions, particularly manifesting itself in the often rowdy ‘Matron feast’ (Konegilde) celebrated around seven to ten days into the lying-in. As Zemon Davis has persuasively argued for early modern lying-in feasts in France, these often turned into carnivalesque inversion rituals on the basis of a shared sense of power at female procreation.⁸⁸ Nineteenth-century Danish narratives echo this phenomenon describing how, when returning from these Konegilder, the women would tease and provoke any male person they met on their way, most notably by attempting to steal his hat, the very emblem of manhood.⁸⁹ If a mother’s recent procreation thus enabled her guests to enjoy a shared feeling of power, the mother’s moment of liberation had to wait until her churching.

Churching as a shared celebration

The day of the churching was an occasion for the mother and her household to mark the family’s social standing: she wore her best clothes, sometimes with a special headpiece or other accessory used only for churchings, she gave the best breakfast she could, and if at all possible, another feast followed when the churching was over.⁹⁰ Churching feasts were so ingrained in Danish society that they sometimes gave name to local (now archaic) terms for foodstuffs such as the ‘churching sausage’ (kirkegangskonepølse) or ‘churching rolls’ (kirkegangsstykker).⁹¹ Guests contributed to the meal and if means were limited, or the mother lived in a parish without a church, the breakfast might be held at a friend’s home nearer the church, or even at the vicarage.⁹² The breakfast was a female gathering only, typically including the midwife and (preferably married) female friends and relatives. Male presence at these breakfasts is never mentioned except for one source from the 1880s that noted the husband might help out at the table.⁹³ The churching breakfast was only a prelude to the mother’s second feast which followed after the service. If a double celebration, the afternoon feast also included men. Again, these were sumptuous gatherings with narratives dwelling on the copious amounts of food: the meat, the dried fish, the butter, the bread, the soup, the beer and the coffee. The sharing of a meal reinforces a sense of kinship and belonging, and churching feasts were clearly a means to reinforce communal bonds and confirm shared values.

Celebrations gradually became smaller, quieter, and far less inebriated as the nineteenth century matured, with fewer and fewer attendant matrons. Eventually, they consisted of no more than a cup of coffee with the family. When Eline Boisen, a pastor’s wife, was churched in the small Jutland town of Skørping in 1835, she was content to have only one friend who ‘took me to church’.⁹⁴ This was no linear development, however, and at the same time in Ringe, another small town on mid-Funen, churching feasts involved the whole of the local community.⁹⁵ So, too, did celebrations in tight-knit communities such as the Islands of Ærø, Læsø, Drejø and Fur, which sometimes boasted up to fifty female guests.⁹⁶ At the churchings of Sofie Jürgensen on the Island of Agersø in 1831, 1833 and 1834, she ‘had all the matrons of the Island at [her] churching’.⁹⁷ They were so many, Sofie gushed, that ‘they could not fit into the church porch’.

With such a gathering of matrons, Sofie would have had an impressive churching procession, which is yet another aspect of churching that has hitherto eluded scholarship. After the celebratory breakfast, the mother and her guests would form a train of honour (æresfølge) much like a wedding train, except all-female. An 1826 account for Ringe is not unusual in stating that the mother was taken to church ‘by all the women of the town or guild’.⁹⁸ The mother and the most important guest led at the top and the other women lined up behind them, two by two. The hierarchy of the churching train was of such importance that when breached, it could end in court as was the case with Madam Augustinus’ churching in October 1724 in Fredericia.⁹⁹ Her celebratory breakfast took place at the vicarage and troubles began when one of the highest-ranking women, Maren Bang, chose a lower-ranking friend, Maren Eriksdatter, as her partner. This so upset Apelone Larsdatter, who was of higher rank than Maren Eriksdatter, that she tried to push the usurper away. And thus the procession set off with a fighting threesome within its ranks. Once at the church, the women quietened down long enough for Madam Augustinus to be churched in respectful silence, but as soon as the women entered the church and prepared to take their seats, Maren dragged her lower-ranking friend into Apelone’s pew. This so incensed Apelone, she tried to squeeze in between the two Marens only to end up on their laps. The skirmish continued during the main sermon until the women were warned by an elder.¹⁰⁰

The disorder in Fredericia stands in contrast to eighteenth-century churching retinues on the Island of Sylt. Dressed in splendid local costumes, processions of up to thirty women were not unusual. The Sylt women used a slow, gliding double step, which, with feet concealed under long skirts, lent a majestic air to the procession that must have been impressive to passers-by.¹⁰¹ These large processions ended in the first half of the nineteenth century, on Sylt as elsewhere, but with exceptions. Much to her surprise, Copenhagen born Mrs Prip, wife of Pastor Laurids Prip (1842–1925), discovered that island life on Strynø in the late 1880s still involved large churching breakfasts and processions.¹⁰² If more convivial than majestic, the Strynø processions had retained the rules on hierarchy and ritual.

The final task of the attendant matrons was to join the mother for the offering. Local customs varied, but in churches where this was possible, it would seem that women had generally retained the rite of circling the altar. Originally a pre-Reformation custom, known from Communion and used in Germany too, circling the altar in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Denmark had become peculiar to churching.¹⁰³ In some parishes, the mother walked with one attendant matron only, in others with an attendant matron and the wives of the pastor and the clerk, and in others still, with all her attendant matrons while the congregation sang the specific offering hymn.¹⁰⁴ The act of circling the altar echoes early modern rituals such as carrying the coffin three times around the church, which served, not least, as a symbol of honour.¹⁰⁵ When, to the sound of the specific offering hymn and under the gaze of the whole congregation, the women circled the altar, this, too, was a symbol of honour.

As with so many other aspects of churching, circling the altar barely figures in scholarship but in 2010, Amager Museum made an important contribution. Based on local source material, they arranged and filmed an authoritative re-enactment of churching and other church rituals as they had unfolded in Store Magleby Church in Dragør near Copenhagen in the nineteenth century.¹⁰⁶ In the DVD, the (acting) churching mother and her many attendant matrons can be seen walking behind the altar from the left, putting a coin in an offering bowl behind the altar and leaving on the right.¹⁰⁷

No laws dictated how churching mothers should be taken to church. The churching procession was chosen by women who clearly delighted in this ritualised expression of strength and pride. Similarly, no clerical imposition regulated the custom of circling the altar. This was a rite shaped by women that marked a proud finale to the mother’s childbirth cycle. Indeed, the pride of churching mothers might occasionally seem provocative. Looking back at the churchings of his youth, Poul Terp, a Jutlander born in 1845, thought churching the ‘ugliest’ spectacle in a church service. With repugnance, he recalled the churching mothers of his youth ‘parading’ up the aisle as he put it.¹⁰⁸ ‘I felt it an offence against all modesty as she went up there, still pale from her childbed. For she could not say with Virgin Mary: I know of no man’. Terp’s description of mothers ‘parading’ is noteworthy in part because of his antipathy to churching altogether, but mostly because of the unrecognised intimidation at the display of pride and power of female procreation.

A rite of passage

Churching represents a multitude of meanings. It was a thanksgiving ritual, assuredly, but for women it was also, as expressed by Pastor Krog, a cathartic experience, a release from bodily weakness and from physical confinement. Although not in accordance with Lutheran teaching, for mothers who thought themselves unclean and feared evil spirits in childbed, it was even apotropaic. What is unclear, however, is the nature of eighteenth and nineteenth-century perceptions of childbirth impurity as sources do not elaborate.

Childbirth impurity is a study in its own right. For heuristic purposes, however, we should identify that from antiquity, there were two understandings of impurity at play although they intertwined: one was blood pollution, the other sexual impurity. According to Levitical blood pollution, the post-partum mother needed purification, not because of sin, but due to the shedding of lochia and menstruation.¹⁰⁹ In Christianity, however, childbirth impurity soon became linked to sin. It was due to Eve’s Fall, wrote Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215), that Adam and Eve discovered sex. Sexual impurity, by default, was thus the result of Original Sin. Saint Augustine (354–430) qualified this to mean that Original Sin was linked to sexual pleasure, not sex itself.¹¹⁰ Yet, as Jeffrey Richards points out, Augustine’s semantics were lost on the majority of clergy and laypeople who henceforth made ‘the simple equation that Original Sin equals sex’.¹¹¹ To complicate matters, some theologians also linked menstrual blood to Original Sin. Indeed, female blood was not infrequently described in highly negative terms, revealing a mixture of awe and disgust.¹¹² Recent scholarship has convincingly argued that by the late medieval era, menstrual blood was far from as vilified as hitherto thought although it is conceded that many early modern theologians continued to link female blood to Original Sin.¹¹³ And if early modern medicine tended to describe female blood in neutral terms as a necessary purging to maintain humoural balance, it is noteworthy that as late as in 1878, a trained physician still maintained the supernatural powers of menstruation. Writing to the prominent British Medical Journal, he argued:

I thought the fact was so generally known to every housewife and cook that meat would spoil if salted at the menstrual period, that I am surprised to see so many letters on the subject in the Journal … It is undoubtedly the fact that meat will be tainted if cured by women at the catamenial period, whatever the rationale may be. I can speak positively as to the fact.¹¹⁴

Although a rare example, and not from Denmark, notions of blood pollution, or indeed blood power, cannot be fully excluded from perceptions of nineteenth-century childbirth impurity until further researched. It seems far more likely, however, that it was sexual impurity that loomed in the background of the rite of churching.

At the time of the Reformation, Luther had insisted that childbirth did not render women impure. Yet labour pains were still explained as a punishment for Eve’s Fall, and women indeed understood them as such.¹¹⁵ But did they also understand that while one link, childbirth pain/Original Sin, was retained, the other link, childbirth/sexual impurity, was not? The authors of The Church Ritual of 1685 still felt obliged to remind pastors that churching was not about impurity. Indeed, pre-Reformation expressions for the lying-in, such as ‘lying without the church’ or even ‘lying heathen’, survived into early nineteenth-century rural Denmark. In a Danish dictionary of c. 1700, ‘heathen’ was defined as a person ‘who is not Christian’, as ‘the child who is not christened’ and as a term ‘used by peasants for a woman who is in her cleansing period after childbirth until the pastor re-integrates her into the congregation when she is churched’.¹¹⁶ On the cusp of the nineteenth century, ‘heathen whoring’ (hedenhor) remained a common rural term for spouses who had sexual congress during the wife’s lying-in.¹¹⁷ It seems overwhelmingly likely, therefore, that when nineteenth-century rural mothers thought themselves impure, it was a sexual impurity that was implied. There are no indications, however, that women equated ‘impure’ with ‘unworthy’. Perhaps ‘unclean’ was a welcome metaphor for post-partum otherness, or bodily vulnerability, and churching the rite that took them out of this state.

Rituals have rightly been defined as ‘sequences of ordinary action rendered special by virtue of their condensation, elevation, or stylisation’.¹¹⁸ By ritualising a mother’s return to Church after childbirth, the Church recognised that childbirth was a liminal experience between life and death. Yet churching remained an orphan among church rituals. It was not a sacrament nor was it on par with the theological importance of weddings and confirmations. It was, to use philosopher Catherine Bell’s definitions, a life ritual, and a ritual of healing and coping.¹¹⁹ Anthropologist Mary Douglas has memorably argued that rituals are about transformation and liminality. The best way to illustrate this is through Arnold van Gennep’s tripartite rite of passage. If we apply its stages of Separation, Transition and Incorporation to the entire childbirth cycle of a rural mother (see Table 2), it immediately becomes clear to what extent churching was about the procreative body.

Table 2. A Rite of Passage: the childbirth cycle

Stage	Separation: Pregnancy and Birth	Transition: Lying-in	Incorporation: Churching
From pregnancy to churching	Physical freedom curbed to protect foetus from transmission dangers	Physical freedom curbed: sequestered at home for weeks	Physical freedom regained: reintegrated in pre-pregnant place in society
	Discomfort and gestation pain	Excluded from Church	Reintegrated within Church
		Household duties reduced. Marital congress suspended	Household duties resumed Marital congress resumed
	Fear for child’s wellbeing Fear of death in childbirth	Post-partum weakness and potential physical complications	Bodily recovery
	Physical labour pain	Until 1850/70s: notions of being ‘impure’ and ‘heathen’; fears of evil spirits	Safe from evil spirits
			Celebrations and Status

The separation begins in pregnancy when the mother’s ambit is curbed to protect her foetus and ends with childbirth and the meeting with potential death. The transition is the lying-in, a phase of otherness: the mother is still in danger, physically and even spiritually. Her physical freedom is yet more restricted, with no access to Church or outer society. At her churching, the mother regains her pre-pregnant position, her physical freedom and her physical healing. She is incorporated into the community and celebrated.

Applied to the day of churching only (Table 3), van Gennep’s model further clarifies the mother’s relationship with her fellow parishioners.

Table 3. A Rite of Passage: the churching day

Stage	Separation: Breakfast, Procession and Churching	Transition: Leading in, Offering	Incorporation: in own pew
On the Day of Churching	Mother celebrated by female guests at churching breakfast	Pastor, mother, and attendant matrons enter church viewed by the waiting congregation
	Mother brought to church by female guests who, if numerous enough, form train of honour
	During service, pastor leaves congregation to give mother personal sermon and blessing in church porch while congregation sings first churching hymn	Congregation shares mother’s joy or grief
		Mother given honorary seat near altar
		Mother and attendant matrons give offering while congregation sings second churching hymn	Returning to her normal pew, the mother is reintegrated into Church and Society
			Celebrations and Status

Separation lasts from the morning when the mother is surrounded by females only, through to her churching in the porch. Transition sets in when the mother is led into the nave. Here, the waiting congregation participates in the mother’s triumph (if her child lives) or extends its comfort (if her child has died). The mother is still in transition while performing the offering ritual – again in front of a waiting congregation – until, finally, she is reincorporated into the congregation and celebrated.

Cessation and conclusion

The laws of 1748 and 1754 transformed churching in Denmark into a rural rite, and as time went by, mostly among the lower spheres of the rural population. In the rituals’ debate of 1806–7, this came up for criticism. ‘Why should the wife of a labourer need churching more than the wife of a count?’ argued the well-known Pastor H. G. Clausen (1759–1840), ‘when it comes to religion, we are all equal’.¹²⁰ Pastor Claus Pavels (1769–1822) represented many rationalists when he wanted nothing to do with churching in any shape or form. The custom was ‘plainly Jewish’, he said, perpetuating a sense of impurity among his least instructed parishioners when childbirth was a woman’s noblest, worthiest vocation.¹²¹ But as Pastor Knap (1775–1850) reposted, no-one accused women of being impure, and why reject a beneficial ritual because of the ignorance of a few mothers?¹²² Nor was it. The majority of the printed churching sermons were published between 1830 and 1870 when Denmark was in the grip of religious awakening. When this began to diminish towards the end of the century, churching took a sharp downward turn. Yet governmental surveys show that in 1893, churching remained in use, if only to a modest extent, in 579 out of Denmark’s 1100 parish municipalities (sognekommuner). By 1911, churching remained extant in 110 municipalities.¹²³ Almost exclusively double celebrations by now, churching even endured in a few parishes into the 1930s, and as we know, Pastor Filtenborg in Fole continued to church into the late 1950s. This coincides with an ethnological survey of church habits conducted by the Danish National Museum in 1957 among the older population. The survey included a question on churching and if this alone is noteworthy, so are the many replies with recollections of churching.¹²⁴

When during his tenure in Ravsted (1963–1970), Pastor Erik Stidsen was asked by a mother to conduct what is probably the last churching in Denmark, he was unaware that his own mother, Susanne Stidsen, had been churched in 1924.¹²⁵ Unsure as to its execution, Pastor Stidsen looked it up in his 1955’s handbook and closely followed instructions from the rubric on ‘A mother’s churching in accordance with Royal Rescript of 22 November 1754’. We know, therefore, that the (likely) last churching of the mid-1960s was either a pulpit blessing or, more probable, the porch ritual as outlined in The Church Ritual of 1685.¹²⁶ By then, Lutheran churching had been practised in Denmark for over four hundred years ceasing only within living memory. The lack of previous scholarship is not a question of silence in the archives, it is a question of wrong identity. In 1944, a Danish historian aptly observed of churching that if its religious significance was minor, its cultural role was significant.¹²⁷ The rite escapes observation because we have looked in the wrong place. Churching was not primarily a clerical ritual and cannot be fully understood as such, even if it did afford women an extraordinary place in the Church. Churching was a life ritual rooted in the procreative female body. It was a mother’s rite of passage, shaped and used by women as a coping mechanism and as a celebration of survival after the dangers of childbirth. When from the mid-1700s, the central authorities left the ritual to its own devices churching did not cease. It continued because women needed it and local clergy supported it. Placed at the intersection between religion and everyday life, churching mattered in both spheres. It influenced liturgy and communal worship, it gave mothers a tool to cope with the dangers of childbirth and the community a reason to celebrate.

Acknowledgements

Warm thanks to Lyndal Roper and the members of her informal Oxford Workshop for their helpful discussion of the manuscript. Many thanks, also, for the insightful comments of Martin Schwarz Lausten and the anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mette M. Ahlefeldt-Laurvig

Mette M. Ahlefeldt-Laurvig holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford (2019). She is an associate member of the Faculty of History at Oxford and an external collaborator of the Institute for History at Luxembourg University. She is currently working on a monograph on the ritual of churching (Brepols Publishers, 2022/23) and has recently contributed to the forthcoming anthology, ‘Reformation and Everyday Life’ (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2022/23). A social historian, Ahlefeldt-Laurvig’s research interests include the Reformation, marriage and the broader dynamics between pastor and parishioner.

Notes

1. Pontoppidan, Collegium Pastorale Practicum, 453–54. The agenda in question was the Church Ritual of Denmark-Norway of 1685, still valid in 1757 and beyond.

2. Rescript of 8 November 1748 and 22 November 1754, see Fogtman, Kongelige Rescripter, V, 1.

3. This article is based on M.M. Ahlefeldt-Laurvig’s doctoral thesis, The Ritual of Churching of Women after Childbirth in Denmark, 1500–1900, University of Oxford (2019). With regard to previous literature on Danish churching, the only study entirely devoted to the subject is a short 1882 study by Pastor L.J. Bøttiger. His ‘Childbed Matrons’ Churching’ (Kirkegangskoners Indledelse) gave a quiet defence of the rite through a well substantiated overview of the rite’s history. For brief chapters on churching, see also J.S. Møller, Moder og Barn (1940), B. Kaiser, Historien om barnedåben (1995) and A. Steensberg, Dagligliv i Danmark (1969–74). T.F. Troels-Lund, Dagligt Liv i Norden (1880–1890s) is important too, although it mainly focuses on the 1500s. Very brief references to churching can be found in the works of scholars such as Nina Koefoed, Charlotte Appel, Beth Grothe-Nielsen, Henrik Horstbøll, Grethe Jacobsen, Georg Hansen and theologian Ludvig Koch (1837–1917). For Sweden, the broad and excellent 1972 study by A. Gustavsson, Kyrktagningsseden, foregrounded that women actively shaped the ritual and that Lutheran churching differed little from its Catholic forerunner. For Norway, see the short work by A.H.B. Skjelbred, Uren og hedning (also 1972). Building upon a national survey of the mid-twentieth century, Skjelbred pointed to the crucial role that the nineteenth-century pastor played in the popularity of churching. For publications in English, see the brief discussions of the 1990s, which tended to fall into two categories. Scholars such as David Cressy and Adrian Wilson read the rite as a positive ritual chosen by women while William Coster and Susan Karant-Nunn saw churching as a means of male oppression. Karant-Nunn, however, offered scope for nuanced interpretations and felicitously called for further research: indeed, the title of this paper is a reference to her chapter, ‘Churching, a Woman’s Rite’, in the 1997 work, The Reformation of Ritual.

4. With thanks to Pastor Emeritus Johannes Stidsen (b.1934) for informing me that his brother, Pastor Erik Stidsen (1926–2015) performed a churching during his tenure in Ravsted parish, 1963–1970, at the behest of the mother using his handbook of 1955 for guidance.

5. G. McMurray Gibson, ‘Blessing from Sun and Moon’, 143–44. Gibson refers to Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 play ‘Purloined Letter’, which centres on a letter lying in plain view, yet never found.

6. As discussed later, until the 1820s, a mother was prevented from participating in her child’s christening because the rule of law dictated that baptism should follow soon after birth when the mother was still observing her lying-in period (and therefore not supposed to leave home). However, this changed in the 1820s when the authorities legalised the postponement of christenings until the lying-in period came to an end (see also note 27). It could therefore be argued that mothers were afforded a new kind of visibility in Church after the 1820s and that this visibility continued, also, after the cessation of churching. But there was a crucial shift in focus. At a churching ceremony, the mother was the sole focus of attention – the child’s presence was neither required nor expected. At christenings, in contrast, the child was the main protagonist, not the mother.

7. For the door signs, see Kauslunde Church, Funen, 1857, see Kauslunde-Gamborg Archive, and Stenlille Church, Zealand, 1800s, see ’Stenlille Kirke’ in Danmarks kirker, Holbæk Amt, IV, 1 (1979), 464.

8. A detailed discussion of the churching database will be included in my forthcoming monograph on Danish churching to be published in the series ‘Women of the Past’ by Brepols Publishing.

9. Michael Bregnsbo has provided an insightful discussion on Danish sermons 1750–1848, although churching sermons are not examined, see Bregnsbo, Samfundsorden og statsmagt.

10. Due to space limitations, this article will only provide a few representative sources for each subject.

11. Hopkin, Voices of the People, 39.

12. Schwarz Lausten (ed.), Kirkeordinansen 1537/39, 74. The church agenda was printed in Latin in 1537 and in Danish in 1539, hence 1537/1539 is the customary annotation.

13. The Feast of Purification was also referred to as Candlemas due to an amalgamation of several church feasts on 2 February.

14. Letter of 14 November 1539 in Rørdam, Danske Kirkelove, I, 146–47.

15. Synodal regulation of 10 August 1540 in Rørdam, Danske Kirkelove, I, 158–59, and in Peder Palladius’ ’Visitation Book’, c. 1543, in Jacobsen, Palladius’ Visitatsbog, 106–15.

16. Danish National Archives, (henceforth DNA) Arkivalieronline, Todbjerg Enesteministerialbog 1665–66.

17. Christian V’s Danish Law of 1683, (2-8-9).

18. Burke, Popular Culture, 244–86.

19. Rescript of 20 November 1686 in Fogtman, Kongelige Rescripter, 1670–1699, II, 344. This privilege was revoked by rescript of 3 January 1741 §(1) but rescripts of 26 January 1742 and 3 July 1747 prove that pastors had little power to uphold the revocation, see Fogtman (1740–1746), 145–48 and 285–86 and Fogtman (1746–1754), 77. See also Matzen and Timm, Haandbog i Den danske Kirkeret, 491.

20. The Royal Horse Guard was in cantonment at the time, see Krogh, Meddelelser om Den kongelige Livgarde til Hest, 175–77.

21. For Queen Louise, see Hammerich, “Gluck som Kapelmester i Kjøbenhavn,” 442. The accounts of Countess Schulin are from a private family archive. In 1777, 16 Rigsdaler was the equivalent of the cost of an oxen.

22. Arkivalier Online: “Kirkebøger fra hele landet”.

23. Even so, churching and christening always remained separate rituals.

24. A ‘publication of christening’ includes all the steps of a normal baptism omitting only the absolution at the font.

25. Wangsgaard Jürgensen, Changing Interiors, 440.

26. Koch, “Udvalg af Biskop Balles Embedsbreve,” 654–56.

27. A rescript of 28 July 1821 Fogtman (1828) centred upon the issue of parents wishing to combine the day for churching and baptism. A rescript of 30 May 1828 finally lifted time constraints on baptism. Between 1771–72, delay of baptism had been allowed too.

28. Dalsgaard’s placement of the godmother and baptismal infant in the porch reflected the norms of the 1860s when the child’s christening and the mother’s churching often took place on the same day. Otherwise, Dalsgaard’s motif contains many artistic liberties. Thus, the churching choreography cannot be fully trusted, as nineteenth-century churchings mostly took place within the porch. Nor were folk costumes much in use by the 1860s and those depicted date from the 1840s. As for the porch itself, it is partly based on Dalsgaard’s painting of Taarup Church but with substantial changes. Crucially, the church door has been set in the West, which is extremely rare for Denmark, but it enabled a direct view to the altar in the (Eastern) background. See also Zenius, Genremaleri og virkelighed, 166.

29. DNA, Odense Amtsprovsti (1808–1837). ‘Korrespondance angående Bjerge og Åsum herreder’, 20 April 1833.

30. Quote from parishioners’ application for a churching bench in 1717, see DNA, Landsarkivet for Nørrejylland, Kirkesyn 1717. This study has so far identified fifteen churches with such benches, three of them extant. In addition, a far larger group of ‘possible churching benches’ has been identified, but unclear nomenclature prohibits certainty.

31. The churching instructions of 1955 no longer included directions on attendant matrons or offering, see Vejledning i den danske Folkekirkes gudstjenesteordning, 100.

32. ‘Danmarks og Norges Kirkeritual 1685’, 3. art., on www.retsinformation.dk.

33. Ussing, Det gamle Harboøre, 192; Høyer Møller, Den Gamle Præstegaard, 133–34. For Dalsgaard’s composition, see also note 28.

34. DNA, ‘Peder Hersleb’ in Generalkirkeinspektionskollegiet, Dokumenter til Ritualets Revision, 54–55.

35. Royal Rescript of 22 November 1754. See note 2.

36. DNA, Lunde-Skam herreders provsti. The change went well in Smid’s other parish of Allesøe.

37. Manuscript by parish clerk Christen Nielsen Sand, in Tang Kristensen, Minder og Oplevelser, 67.

38. Boisen, Plan til Forbedring ved den offentlige Gudsdyrkelse, 24–25.

39. In the nineteenth century, Swedish churchings had generally been relocated from the porch/near the entrance to the altar, see Gustavsson, Kyrktagningsseden, 253, 293.

40. Hjort, “Plan til forbedring,” No. 37, 582–83.

41. Krog, Landsbypræsten, 27–29.

42. Pedersen, Højtid og gæstebud, 79. From Strøby, c. 50 km south of Copenhagen. From c. 1880/90 onwards, pulpit churchings became steadily more common.

43. Circular of 24 February 1791 quoted in DNA, Liber Daticus, Borbjerg (1765–1798).

44. Waiting rooms were either entire rooms or a shielded-off part of a room. Some were solely for churching mothers and their retinues, but most also served as a waiting room for christenings and confessions. Them Church: church inspection of 11 November 1873.

45. Brammer, Kirkelige Leilighedstaler, II, 411.

46. Nielsen, Provsten i Højelse, 159–60.

47. Leth, Lejlighedstaler, published in 1844, 1852 and 1880.

48. This is obviously impossible to verify, but names and placements were always removed.

49. DNA, Holbæk-Tveje Merløse Pastorat.

50. Birch, Haandbog for Præster, 195–218.

51. World English Bible.

52. Ussing, Kirkeforfatningen, 505 and Høyer Møller, Den Gamle Præstegaard, 132–33.

53. Bloch, Kirkelige Leilighedstaler, 203–6.

54. Bishop Balle (1744–1816) in DNA, Danske Kancelli, Koncepter og Indlæg til Brevbøger, 1773–1799, (1791), image 95.

55. Calculated on 120 words/minute. Sermons generally became shorter towards the twentieth century.

56. Bregnsbo, Samfundsorden og statsmagt, 53.

57. Letter of 24 September 1827 in C. Daugaard, Biskop Daugaard, II, 23.

58. No. 571 in Wiberg, Personalhistorie.

59. Reimer, Nordfynsk Bondeliv, III, 341.

60. In contrast to the initial working premise of this study, none of the identified churching hymns turned out to be hymns for the Feast of the Purification of Virgin Mary. I therefore cannot support statements as to the use of purification hymns in churching made by Skjelbred and Mai, neither of whom provide documentation. See Mai “Se lige mig. …” and Skjelbred, Uren og hedning, 74–75.

61. Boye, however, remains well-known in Norway.

62. For the revision of Boye’s hymn see Malling, Dansk salmehistorie, VI, 79–83.

63. Timm, Huus-Psalmer, 83–91.

64. DNA: ’Malling, Anders’.

65. Nørgaard, “Landboforhold i Sydthy”; Møller, Moder og Barn, 494; Helgaard, Borris søndre grandelag, 40.

66. Møller, Moder og Barn, 494.

67. The mother paid the highest fee, the attendant matrons gave smaller contributions.

68. This study has identified twenty-nine churches which had churching pews near the altar, but the real number is much higher because of unclear terminology, such as ‘baptismal pew’ or ‘women’s pew’.

69. Wilson, “The Ceremony of Childbirth…,” 68–107.

70. Bircherod, Folketro og Festskik [1734], 45, 52–54, 86–87; Feilberg, Dansk Bondeliv, 65.

71. Ibid. and Lehmann, Overtro og Trolddom, 75–76, 118; For wider Europe, see, for example, Wilson, The magical Universe, 158–59.

72. Hviid Andreas Christian Hviids Europa, 232.

73. Uhrskov, Nordsjællandsk Landsbyliv, 111.

74. The warnings would also have given meaning to infant deformity in the lack of medical insight, see Duden, The Woman beneath the Skin, 87–89.

75. Ussing, Kirkeforfatningen, 494.

76. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in early modern England, 152. For Denmark, 1640-1700, see Bang, Kirkebogsstudier, 103. For Denmark 1700, see the National Museum, https://natmus.dk/historisk-viden/temaer/boern-1660-2000/boernedoedelighed/.

77. Ingerslev, Om Dødeligheden ved Barselfeber, 39, 51–53.

78. Based on Ingerslev’s corrected data from Danmarks Statistik, Ingerslev, Om Dødeligheden, 53–54.

79. Wilse, Physisk, Oeconomisk og Statistisk Beskrivelse, 420–21.

80. Olsen, “Gamle Ole Petersen fortæller,” 87.

81. Bircherod, Folketro og Festskik…’[1734], 52; Tangherlini, Danish Folktales, 78–79.

82. Magnusen, Den første November, 135; Uhrskov, Nordsjællandsk Landsbyliv, 113; Feilberg, Dansk Bondeliv, 73.

83. DNA, ‘Peder Hersleb’, 58; Kirkeforfatningen, 495.

84. The lying-in curfew was mandated by Danish Law (2-8-9) and by the Church Ritual of 1685, chap III, art. 3, but with no means of sanction. Impoverished nineteenth-century mothers typically had only 1–2 weeks of lying-in, see also Kofod, “Barselsskikke,” Den Store Danske.

85. Fabricius, (ed.), “N. F. S. Grundtvigs breve…,” Grundtvig-Studier, 5 (1), 50.

86. Pontoppidan, Fejekost, [1736], 55–56, and Bircherod, Folketro og Festskik, 52–55.

87. Friis, De Danskes Øer, I, 167.

88. Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 145, 313.

89. The stealing of the hat was immortalised in the Danish 1723 theatre play, ‘The Barns-Ale’ (Barselstuen) by L. Holberg. For nineteenth-century folklore narratives, see Tang Kristensen and others.

90. Troels-Lund, Dagligt liv, VIII, 108; Fløe, “Skikke og Levevis,” 300; Møller, Historiske Oplysninger om Slaugs Herred, 68–69.

91. “Sproget,” Berlingske Tidende, 44 (13 February 1987). Høyer and Petersen, Grevinge Sogn, 40.

92. Women from the Islands of Skarø, Hjortø or Birkholm, for example, typically held their churching breakfasts in the homes of Drejø matrons, see Tommerup, Topographie over Drejøe Sogn, 55.

93. From the memoirs of Mrs Prip, as quoted in Møller, Moder og Barn, 498.

94. Boisen-Møller, Eline Boisens erindringer, III, 328.

95. Leerbech, En Beskrivelse over Ringe Sogn, 86.

96. Ærø: Hübertz, Beskrivelse over Ærø, 269; Læsø: Bing, Physisk og Oekonomisk Beskrivelse, 184; Drejø: Tommerup, Topographie, 55; Fur: Møller, Moder og Barn, 489.

97. Høgsbro, (ed.), transcribed manuscript from interview with Sofie Brøndsted Jürgensen c. 1890.

98. Leerbech, En Beskrivelse, 86.

99. DNA Online, Justitsprotokoller, Tingbøger og Domprotokoller. Koldinghus Birkedommer (1719–1775), images 725–27.

100. A number of witness statements were taken but no sentence given.

101. Jensen, Die Nordfriesischen Inseln, 230–31.

102. Mrs Prip, in Møller, Moder og Barn, 498.

103. Pallas, Die Registraturen der Kirchenvisitationen, 139

104. Lorenzen, “Sæd og Skik i Udbjerg Sogn,” 8; Møller, Moder og Barn, 495; Tang Kristensen, Skattegraveren, 189. The custom of circling the altar is also known in Norway.

105. See, for example, Zika, “Hosts, Processions, and Pilgrimages …,“ 118, 37–42.

106. Dirchsen, Hollænderbyen, 55.

107. Jansen, producer, Livstrappen, DVD, Amager Museum.

108. Terp, Erindringer, 119–20.

109. According to Lev 15:16–17, seminal emission was a source of impurity, not the sexual act itself, see Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 732–33 and Wright, “Unclean and Clean (OT),“ ABD 6, 730. According to scholars of late medieval churching, Levitical understanding of blood pollution as a threat to sacred space changed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to become a concern about the effects of pollution of a woman’s male sexual partner, see Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 167–69 and Lee, Purification of Women, 41–42, 80–88.

110. Adhering to Augustine’s tenet that childbirth impurity hinged on sexual pleasure, Gregory the Great (c. 600) could not defend barring a new mother from church because to him, she had already been punished through the pains of childbirth. Yet, if a bleeding woman should not ‘presume’ to attend church, she should be ‘commended’, see ‘Epistles of St. Gregory the Great’ (1895). Gregory’s ambiguous view was shared by several later popes. For Pope Innocent III, see Franz, Kirchlichen Benediktionen, II (1909), 218. For Pope Gregory IX (1239), see Bøttiger (1882), 17.

111. Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation, 23.

112. As stated, for example, by Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24-79) and Archbishop Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636).

113. See, for example, McClive, Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France, 31–4, and Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 18–19. According to Galenic medicine, women continued to menstruate in the womb during pregnancy. Lochia was therefore thought to be pent-up menstrual blood.

114. Letter of 27 April 1878 in The British Medical Journal, quoted in Novak, Menstruation, 5.

115. Luther never fully committed for or against churching and left the rite in the category of adiaphora.

116. ‘Heden’, in Moths Ordbog, on https://mothsordbog.dk

117. According to Pastor Ussing, 1788, in Ussing, Kirkeforfatningen, 495.

118. Grimes, “Ritual Studies,” 12:422.

119. Catherine Bell operates with six types of ritual (a) life ritual, rites of passage; (b) calendar or annual rites; (c) rites of exchange and communion, sacrifice; (d) rites of affliction and healing; (e) feasts, festivals, and fasts; and (f) political ritual, civil ritual courts, nations, army, royalty, expressing power, hierarchy, and identity. Churching fits into the types (a) and (d). See Bell, Ritual Theory. Ritual Practice, 69–93.

120. Clausen, “Betænkninger …,” 581–82.

121. Pavels, “Anmærkninger,” 291–292.

122. Knap, “Bemærkninger …,” 234.

123. For 1893, see Kaiser, Historien om barnedåben, 205. For 1911, see DNA, Indberetninger om præstegårdes jordtilliggende.

124. The National Museum: ‘Nationalmuseets Etnologiske Undersøgelser’, begun 1957.

125. Susanne Stidsen related her Øster Snede churching to Johannes Stidsen shortly before her death in 1990, describing it as a ‘solemn and earnest occasion’. See also note 4.

126. For 1955, see note 31. Churching has never been officially abolished in Denmark, but the rite was omitted in the still valid 1992 rituals handbook.

127. Hansen, Præsten, 119.