Poetry and Parental Bereavement in Early Modern Lutheran Germany. (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs) by Anna Linton

Abstract

900 Reviews Poetry and Parental Bereavement inEarly Modern Lutheran Germany. By Anna Linton. (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. xv+319 pp. ?55. ISBN 978-0-19-923336 6. As many as 50 per cent of children died before their tenthbirthday during the early modern period inEurope: such is the estimate provided by various demographers, as Anna Linton reports (p. 1). The topic of the emotional attachment to their children by parents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been much contested ever since Philippe Aries (VEnjant et la viefamiliale sous Vancien regime (Paris: Pl?n, i960)) questioned whether they grieved for their deceased children. Linton's study of poetic attempts to console the bereaved, as expressed in epicedia (funeral poems) written on the sad occasion of the death of an infant or young child, contributes to the growing body of evidence supporting the contention that parents of the period did indeed grieve for their deceased children as ardently as bereaved parents do today. The focus in this study is on occasional poems, most of which can be described as competent but subliterary, authored by an assortment of pastors and friends of the grieving parents, and, in a few cases, by the parents themselves. Linton's study culminates in detailed discussion of the pertinent epicedia of two important poets, Paul Fleming (1609-1640) and Margarethe Susanna von Kuntsch (1651-1717). In the latter case, the poet is also the grieving mother. Following careful treatment of the theology and poetics that form thebackground for the epicedia, Linton turns to discussion of substantial extracts and complete poems, which she examines in relation to conventions ofmourning. Through these analyses, Linton is able to illustrate inmultiple examples the acceptable actions of earlymodern Lutherans faced with parental bereavement: acknowledge feelings of parental grief, allow mourning as long as itwas not excessive, and provide con solation thatwould enable the grieving parent to achieve both psychological and spiritual recovery. At the same time, she elucidates themeans used by the poets when addressing the grieving parent (or the grieving self). This book should be of interest to social historians (especially those working on the history of the family and the history of emotions), as well as to scholars of literaryhistory. Historians of earlymodern Lutheran theology and religious history will likewise findmuch of value in this study. Although Linton juxtaposes poems by a man and a woman as her culminating focus, she rarely addresses the issue of gender explicitly, aside from discussion of the choice of (stereotypical) metaphors for deceased girls or boys. Gender may in fact be less relevant when comparing the poems of Fleming and Kuntsch than their respective roles as distanced friend and bereaved parent. But gender is a fascinating issue in this context, and to deal with it, the author would have had to compare male and female authors of consoling poems written for the use of others, and/or poems written by bereaved fathers and mothers. However, Linton mentions only two women other than Kuntsch as authors of epicedia, and she MLR, 104.3, 2009 901 offersonly a short excerpt from a poem by one of them (p. 157). Linton does not directly confront the question of themale gender of nearly all her authors. Do more poems by women exist?Might those authors identified only by initials in the funeral pamphlets have been women, prevented by convention from publicly revealing their names? Are devotional songs to be excluded from the genre of epicedia7. (She mentions only one, p. 81.) Writing and disseminating devotional song textswas considered an acceptable activity forwomen, and they sometimes used such poems designed to be sung to a popular hymn melody in order to express theirwords of grief and consolation on the loss of a child, whether their own or that of another woman. See, for example, the songs on the deaths of children inAemilie Juliane von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Geistliches Weiber-Aqua Vit (1683). The issues surrounding authorial gender deserve more discussion in this context. The book isbeautifully printed and painstakingly copy-edited; I encountered only a few typographical errors, and thesewere confined to the footnotes and appendices. The volume includes an appendix of short...