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Catechesis, Socialization and Play in a Catholic Household, c.1660: the ‘Children’s Exercises’ from the Blundell Papers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Lucy Underwood
Lucy Underwood*
Affiliation:
British School at Rome
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Extract

Among the papers of the Blundell family of Little Crosby, Lancashire, are two dramatic sketches entitled ‘An Exercise to Embolden the Children in Speaking’ and ‘Children Emboldened to Speak. By an Exercise’. They were written by William Blundell, recusant, royalist and Lancashire gentleman, in 1663 and 1665 for his daughters and their cousins to perform, probably at Christmas family gatherings. Humorously mingling Catholic catechesis, social education, the exercise of parental authority and childish misbehaviour, these sketches open a rare window onto the life of a Catholic household in the Restoration era. They offer an opportunity to explore the household as the location for the practice and appropriation of religion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 50: Religion and the Household , 2014 , pp. 269 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2014

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References

1 Preston, Lancashire Record Office, DDBL.acc.6121, Box 2, William Blundell, ‘Blew Book’, fols 27r–30r.

2 Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Rowlands, Marie B., ed., Catholics of Parish and Town 1558-1778 (London, 1999)Google Scholar; Dillon, Anne, ‘Public Liturgy made Private: The Rosary Confraternity in the Life of a Recusant Household’, in Bepler, J. and Davidson, P., eds, The Triumphs of the Defeated: Early Modem Festivals and Messages of Legitimacy (Wiesbaden, 2007), 245–70.Google Scholar

3 See Underwood, Lucy, ‘Childhood,Youth and Catholicism in England, c.1558-1660’ (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 2012)Google Scholar. Previous work includes Shell, Alison, ‘Furor Juvenilis: Post-Reformation English Catholicism and Exemplary Youthful Behaviour’, in Shagan, Ethan, ed., Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), 185–206 Google Scholar; eadem, ‘Autodidacticism in English Jesuit Drama: The Writings and Career of Joseph Simons’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 13 (2001), 34–56 Google Scholar; Beales, Arthur C. F., Education under Penalty: English Catholic Education from the Reformation to the Fall of James II, 1547-1689 (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Bowden, Caroline, ‘“For the Glory of God”: A Study of the Education of English Catholic Women in Convents in Flanders and France in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, in Aldrich, R., Coolahan, J. and Simon, F., eds, Faiths and Education: Comparative and Historical Perspectives (Gent, 1999), 77–95 Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, Fletcher, Anthony, Growing up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600-1914 (New Haven, CT, 2008)Google Scholar; Pollock, Linda, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Goldberg, P.J.P. and Riddy, F., eds, Youth in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2004)Google Scholar; Griffiths, Paul, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560-1640 (Oxford, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ben-Amos, Liana K., Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT, 1994)Google Scholar; Casey, J., Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada 1570-1739 (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Luke, Carmen, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism: The Discourse on Childhood (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Sommerville, C.J., The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Athens, GA, 1992)Google Scholar; French, Anna, ‘Possession, Puritanism and Prophecy: Child Demoniacs and English Reformed Culture’, Reformation 13 (2008), 133–61 Google Scholar; Walsham, Alexandra, ‘“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings”: Prophecy, Puritanism and Childhood in Elizabethan Suffolk’ and Moore, Susan Hardman, ‘“Such perfecting of praise out of the mouth of a babe”: Sarah Wight as Child Prophet’, in Wood, Diana, ed., The Church and Childhood, SCH 31 (Oxford, 1994), 285–300, 313–24 Google Scholar respectively; Mendelson, Sara and Crawford, Patricia, Women in Early Modem England, 1550-1720 (Oxford, 1998), 75–123, 148–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Underwood, ‘Childhood,Youth and Catholicism’, esp. chs 1-3.

6 Cf. his letter to Anne Bradshaigh, 5 February 1657, from Liverpool gaol: DDBL. acc.6121, Box 3, account book 1646-70, fols 61v–63r; also (for the sequestration) Blundell, Cavalier, 40-1, 303.

7 DDBL.acc.6121, Box 2, Letter Book 1672-3, fol. 12r; Box 2, accounts 1663-1680, fols 24-28v, 87r-v.

8 Baker, Geoffrey, Reading and Politics in Early Modern England: The Mental World of a Seventeenth-Century Catholic Gentleman (Manchester, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Shell, , ‘Autodidacticism’; White, Paul Whitfield, Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485-1660 (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 5.

10 Underwood, ‘Childhood,Youth and Catholicism’, ch. 3.

11 Mary Blundell was born on 3 February 1654/5, making her just under nine at the date of the first play. Clare Frances was born on 1 August 1656, and Bridget in March 1659/60: DDBL.acc.6121, ‘Great Hodge Podge’, fol. 184.

12 Shell, ‘Autodidacticism’, discusses autodidacticism (of a different kind) in the school dramas of the Blundell girls’ male counterparts.

13 Bryson, Anna, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), esp. 43–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But John Gillingham qualifies the posited contrast between medieval and early modern concepts: ‘From Civilitas to Civility. Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England’, TRHS 6th ser. 12 (2002), 267-89.

14 Bryson, , Courtesy to Civility, 70.Google Scholar

15 Ibid. 71-3.

16 Hawkins, Francis, transl., Youth’s Behaviour: or Decency in Conversation amongst Men, 4th edn (London, 1646)Google Scholar; this work was still being reprinted in 1672. Hawkins became a Jesuit in 1649: Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 31; ODNB, s.n. ‘Hawkins, Francis (1628-1681)’. The 1646 title page describes Youth’s Behaviour only as ‘Composed in French by grave persons for the use and benefit of their youth’; see Bryson for its Jesuit influence.

17 Fletcher, , Growing up in England, 259–80 Google Scholar, although his material focuses mainly on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See also idem, Gender, Sex and Subordination in Early Modern England 1500-1800 (London, 1985), 364-76. Mendelson and Crawford perceive a similar bias in girls’ education: Women in Early Modern England, 75-92.

18 Allestree, Richard, The Ladies Calling, in The Works of the Author of the Whole Duty of Man (London, 1684), 1–12 Google Scholar; cf. Fletcher, , Growing up in England, 5–6, 25.Google Scholar

19 Allestree, , Ladies Calling, 5.Google Scholar

20 Ibid. 58-9, 63.

21 Relatively little writing on ‘civility’ was addressed to women: Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 38-9, 270.

22 Fletcher, , Gender, Sex and Subordination, 364.Google Scholar

23 Shell, , ‘Furor Juvenilis’, 196–7 Google Scholar, quotation at 197.

24 Cf. Allestree, , Ladies Calling, 63.Google Scholar

25 Russel, Robert, A little book for children and youth, 2 parts (London,, 1693–6), Part 2, 15–16 Google Scholar; Avery, G., ‘The Puritans and their Heirs’, in idem, Briggs, G. and Briggs, J., eds, Children and their Books (Oxford, 1989), 95–118, esp. 102–3.Google Scholar