Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis dissertation is the first sustained study of how the emotional capacities, experiences, and expressions of infants under the age of two years were sensed and understood in early modern England. Within early modern histories of pregnancy, the family, and childhood, infants’ perspectives are under-explored, their biological speechlessness traditionally equated with historical silence. Contemporary writers theorised that infants’ lack of speech was due to their overly wet humoral bodies, yet infants received their rational soul in the womb and were perceived to be capable of communicating meaningful emotions from this time. The dissertation utilises an emotions history approach to reconstruct the religious and scientific frameworks which early modern people used to make sense of infants’ emotions, and to examine representations of infants’ bodily gestures and noises as emotional expressions within those frameworks. It draws on a range of sources to recreate the infant’s sensory and relational world, including natural philosophical treatises, midwifery manuals, baptismal tracts, popular pamphlets, petitions, and parents’ life writings. In doing so, it innovatively pulls together historiographies of religion, medicine, the senses, and the life cycle, to bring new socio-cultural insights to the history of early modern infanthood. The structure of the thesis roughly follows the development of the infant, beginning at conception. Chapter One establishes the foetus’s capacity for emotions in the womb, expressed and sensed through motion. Chapter Two looks at how aural infant prodigies, including ‘crying in the womb’ and miraculous speech, were heard as extraordinary and powerful emotional expressions which in turn shed new light on ordinary infants’ voices. Chapter Three explores ‘frowardness’ as the infant’s emotional language of pain, particularly during the breeding of teeth. Chapter Four traces the multivalences of infants’ sweetness, especially as it was tied to ideas about infants’ happiness in the afterlife. The key methodological contribution of the thesis is that it shows how premodern emotions could be meaningfully and powerfully conveyed by nonverbal gestures and sounds, especially crying. The key historical contribution is that it highlights how infants’ emotions were vitally connected to dynamic, shifting conceptions of early modern humanness and personhood.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2025
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Formby, Olivia
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Walsham, Alexandra
Subjects
dc:subject × 5Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.117850
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/383510