‘A heart terrifying Sorrow’: the Deaths of Children in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Manuscript Journals

Abstract

In 1605 Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, friend of Philip Sidney and author of popular texts of Reformation theology, lost his son at the Battle of Geldre. The diary of Charlotte Baliste, his wife, finishes with this event. For her, the death of her son marked the end of talking as well as writing. She is literally struck dumb for a while: on recovery she utters the spiritual commonplace authorized for such circumstances: ‘the will of God be done’. Thereafter, she and her husband could find nothing to say to each other.¹ For Duplessis-Mornay, however, the experience provided the impetus for a new, public literary genre. In 1606 he published, in the authoritative language of Latin, an exploration of the spiritual legitimacy of extreme grief for his son. Unlike his previous treatises, however, this was an apparently intimate and deeply emotional discourse, addressed to the wife to whom he could no longer talk. Sadly, it was of little benefit to Charlotte. As her husband’s pamphlet was published, she herself was dying, a death thought to be the direct result of her bereavement. The responses of this famous Protestant couple follow a gendered pattern broadly typical of written responses to the death of children for much of the rest of the century. Fathers make didactic spiritual texts from their responses to the deaths of children, and often publish them.² Mothers’ responses are written in manuscript, into spiritual journals, in discourses which can themselves constitute an act of silencing.