Mothering, matrescence and the changing meanings of ceremonies of churching after childbirth in Ireland, c.1800–2000

Ceremonies of churching tend to have a negative reputation, as rituals imposed by clerics on women in the vulnerable time after childbirth. Their perceived associations with ‘cleansing’ or ‘purification’ have long caused disquiet. However, the term might be applied to quite different rites, there were different views of churching’s nature and purpose, and it was often promoted by people other than the clergy. The sources relating to churching are unusually difficult: neither the Catholic Church nor the Church of Ireland were inclined to record it, and those instances where it does appear in surviving records are limited and opaque. This article aims to draw attention to several distinct sets of sources that reference churching. These fragments offer glimpses of how churching ceremonies (and the early days of maternity) were understood by communities and families and experienced by women in the throes of ‘matrescence’.

Childbirth · Ethnography · Participant observation · Period (music) · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Historical Studies of British Isles · Irish and British Studies