Gendering the Nordic Past
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Book Series
Women of the Past, vol. 7
A Woman's Rite
The Ritual of Churching of Women after Childbirth in Denmark, 1500–1965
Mette Maria Ahlefeldt-Laurvig
- Pages: approx. 300 p.
- Size:216 x 280 mm
- Illustrations:14 b/w, 65 col., 4 tables b/w.
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2026
- € 145,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-62069-5
- Hardback
- Forthcoming (Jun/26)
- € 145,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-62070-1
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- Forthcoming
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A Woman’s Rite explores the long-hidden history of churching after childbirth in Denmark (1500–1965), tracing its development from late medieval origins through its Lutheran reinvention, offering new insights into women’s everyday lives, their religiosity and experience of bodily regulation, and into broader conceptions of gender, ritual, and the shaping of social order across centuries, enriching current debates on the ‘Long Reformation’.
Subject(s)
BIO
Mette M. Ahlefeldt-Laurvig is a historian working on the religious, cultural, and social history of women in Denmark and wider Scandinavia, primarily in the early modern period, but with research that extends into the twentieth century. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2019 and has published in English and Danish on the ritual of churching, marriage, and other historical subjects. She holds an earlier degree in classical music from Denmark.
Summary
The Lutheran rite of ‘churching’ women after childbirth was long performed across Europe. It marked the liminal end of a woman’s cycle of procreation — from pregnancy through to her first months as a new mother. Dating back to ancient Christianity, churching has rarely been studied in depth. Spanning four centuries, this volume offers a compelling case study of how religious practices persist, change, and disappear — and what they reveal about the enduring tensions between gender, ritual, and institutional control. It is a history of women and their everyday lives, but also a history of forgetting, for it centred on the messiness of childbirth — a female world long marginalized in historical narratives.
This book examines the rules imposed on procreative women, whether during pregnancy or in the seclusion of confinement, and shows how churching became a feast day for the married mother, marking her return to church and society after weeks of separation. Unmarried mothers, by contrast, faced public shame and church discipline. These disparities expose how Lutheran society enforced moral boundaries, upheld sexual norms, and regulated procreative women’s bodies. Drawing on a wealth of source material — most of it previously unexplored — this book reveals churching at the centre of communal life for centuries. Rooted in Denmark but with far wider resonance, A Woman’s Rite restores churching to the history of European ritual and gendered religious life.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations and Conventions
Introduction
Chapter One. Churching on the Eve of the Reformation
Chapter Two. Reformation of Churching in Denmark
Chapter Three. The Curse of Eve
Chapter Four. The Ceremony
Chapter Five. The Material Culture of Churching in Danish Churches
Chapter Six. Feast and Shame
Chapter Seven. Conflict and Change
Chapter Eight. The Long Decline of Churching
Conclusion
Appendices
Works Cited
