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‘Such perfecting of praise out of the mouth of a babe’: Sarah Wight as Child Prophet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Susan Hardman Moore
Susan Hardman Moore*
Affiliation:
King’s College London
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Extract

Recovering the voice of the child in the Church is hard. Christians must reckon with Jesus’ instruction to be like a child, yet the Church usually measures faith by mastery of an adult vocabulary of religious experience. The historian has to dig past adult prejudices and silences. Recent research has done much to rescue the children of early modern England from anonymity. We know, for example, about the ideal of an ‘ordered society’, in which children and youths took their place as ‘inferiors’, and yet were valued and loved. We also know that the vision of order was rarely achieved, in a country swarming with juveniles. Attempts to make the vision outward and visible can be seen in arrangements for seating in church, where the young sat apart from their elders, and in the all-pervasive discipline of catechizing, where the assumption that age instructs youth is inherent in the pattern of proceeding by question and answer. Most of the sources that tell us about childhood, however, are heavily prescriptive, or rush past youth after listing a few predictable sins.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 31: The Church and Childhood , 1994 , pp. 313 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1994

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References

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18 Jessey, ER, p. 24. Jessey’s insistence reflects the notion that mental disturbance could be measured best against the proper patterns of family order: MacDonald, Michael, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 126–8 Google Scholar.

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37 Ibid., p. 119. On discernment and fraud, Sharpe, Witchcraft Accusations, p. 13; Walker, Unclean Spirits.

38 Fisher, James, The Wise Virgin (London, 1653), pp. 17–18 Google Scholar.

39 Jessey, ER, pp. 150-1; MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria, pp. xxxix-xlvii.

40 Thomas, ‘Age and authority’, p. 210.

41 Smith, ‘Martha Hatfield’, p. 79.

42 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’.

43 Avery, ‘Puritans and their heirs’, and John Sharp, ‘Juvenile holiness: Catholic revivalism among children in Victorian Britain’, JEH, 35 (1984), pp. 220-38, comment on the changing context for children’s spirituality.

44 Fisher, Wise Virgin, pp. 135–6; Jessey, ER, p. 151.