Caring for the Liminal Dead: Lutheran Emergency Baptism and Stillbirth, ca. 1530–1720

This chapter addresses perinatal mortality in early modern Lutheran Sweden by examining the interplay between religious and medical birth practices and fetal and infant concepts and imagery. Early modern European birth intervention strategies aimed at securing baptism: the spiritual survival of unborn individuals. Lutheran doctrine demanded a complete live birth before baptism, yet emergency solutions such as intercession prayers and burial of the stillborn in churchyards were accepted and practiced. Highlighting the connection between historical practices and the articulation and production of values, this chapter demonstrates how complex negotiations between religious and medical concerns, limitations, and priorities resulted in concepts and imagery that produced and defended attachment and vitality—or the reverse. The results suggest that the emphasis in Lutheran contexts on explicit life signs, in combination with the simultaneous acceptance of divine intervention in cases of unavoidable perinatal loss, was a mental framework that encouraged essentially utilitarian solutions and arguments.