This book draws on original material and approaches from the developing fields of the history of emotions and childhood studies and brings together scholars from history, literature and cultural studies, to reappraise how the early modern world reacted to the deaths of children.

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.

This book draws on original material and approaches from the developing fields of the history of emotions and childhood studies and brings together scholars from history, literature and cultural studies, to reappraise how the early modern world reacted to the deaths of children. Child death was the great equaliser of the early modern period, affecting people of all ages and conditions. It is well recognised that the deaths of children struck at the heart of early modern families, yet less known is the variety of ways that not only parents, but siblings, communities and even nations, responded to childhood death. The contributors to this volume ask what emotional responses to child death tell us about childhood and the place of children in society. Placing children and their voices at the heart of this investigation, they track how emotional norms, values, and practices shifted across the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries through different religious, legal and national traditions.This collection demonstrates that child death was not just a family matter, but integral to how communities and societies defined themselves.Chapter 5 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Draws on original material to reappraise early-modern responses to the death of children Recognises the significance of child death to early-modern families Asks what these responses tell us about the place of children in society