This strange medieval ritual was designed to protect a mother from grief. How did it work?

An early medieval text describes rituals intended to protect pregnancies and address the loss of a child.

中世纪早期的文本描述了旨在保护怀孕和解决失去孩子问题的仪式。

Historian Elinor Cleghorn explains what it can tell us about maternal grief and attitudes towards children

历史学家埃莉诺·克莱格霍恩 (Elinor Cleghorn) 解释了它可以告诉我们有关母亲悲伤和对儿童的态度的信息

There is one early medieval English childbirth charm that contains a rather unusual instruction.

有一种中世纪早期的英国分娩咒，其中包含一个相当不寻常的说明。

According to the text of the charm, a woman whose child has died should take soil from the grave, wrap it in black wool and sell it to a merchant, speaking a short formula as she does so.

根据符咒的文字，孩子死了的女人应该从坟墓中取出泥土，用黑羊毛包裹起来，然后卖给商人，同时说出一个简短的公式。

The passage forms part of a group of rituals commonly known as For a Delayed Birth .

这段经文是通常被称为“延迟出生”的一组仪式的一部分。

They concern the difficulties of bearing and rearing children, combining prescribed movements, spoken words and objects associated with pregnancy and loss.

它们关注生育和养育孩子的困难，结合了与怀孕和流产相关的规定动作、言语和物体。

For historian Elinor Cleghorn, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast , these instructions offer evidence of how medieval society acknowledged maternal bereavement.

对于历史学家埃莉诺·克莱格霍恩（Elinor Cleghorn）来说，这些指示提供了中世纪社会如何承认母亲丧亲之痛的证据。

They also challenge the assumption that parents became emotionally detached from their children, because so many children died so young.

他们还挑战了这样一种假设，即父母在情感上与孩子疏远，因为很多孩子都这么年轻就去世了。

“It was a common assumption for a while that parents in history, especially in the Middle Ages, didn't really love their children in the way that we do today because lives were so precarious and short,” she says.

“有一段时间，人们普遍认为历史上的父母，尤其是中世纪的父母，并不像我们今天那样真正爱他们的孩子，因为生命是如此不稳定和短暂，”她说。

Clearly, she says, that wasn't true.

她说，显然这不是真的。

Cleghorn places For a Delayed Birth among the “metrical charms”: writings that use the rhythms and patterns of poetry as part of a prescribed ritual.

克莱格霍恩将《延迟出生》归为“韵律魅力”：使用诗歌的节奏和模式作为规定仪式的一部分的作品。

They were, she says, “medical prayers”, which “could be recited to aid all sorts of things”.

她说，它们是“医疗祈祷”，“可以背诵以帮助各种事情”。

Their subjects included concerns familiar to medieval households.

他们的主题包括中世纪家庭所熟悉的问题。

“There was a metrical charm for protection on journeys,” she says.

“旅途中的保护有一种韵律魅力，”她说。

Other charms addressed bees, the protection of cattle and the recovery of stolen livestock.

其他咒语涉及蜜蜂、保护牛和找回被盗的牲畜。

These texts belong to a world in which religious practice, certain words, and ritual actions offered ways of seeking protection alongside other responses to illness or misfortune.

这些文本属于这样一个世界，在这个世界中，宗教实践、某些词语和仪式行为提供了寻求保护的方式以及对疾病或不幸的其他反应。

“ For a Delayed Birth [is] a beautiful set of birthing rituals, not just around birth, but also around the hope for a child,” Cleghorn explains.

“延迟分娩是一套美丽的分娩仪式，不仅围绕着出生，还围绕着对孩子的希望，”克莱格霍恩解释道。

The text survives in British Library Harley MS 585, a manuscript containing medical remedies, prayers and charms.

该文本保存在大英图书馆 Harley MS 585 中，这是一份包含医疗疗法、祈祷和咒语的手稿。

The collection in which it appears is known as the Lacnunga, an Old English word meaning “remedies”.

它出现的集合被称为 Lacnunga，一个古英语单词，意思是“补救措施”。

The childbirth passages were copied in approximately between the years 1000 and 1050, before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 .

分娩段落大约在 1000 年至 1050 年之间（即 1066 年诺曼征服英格兰之前）被抄写。

They combine prose instructions with short passages of Old English verse intended for recitation.

它们将散文说明与供背诵的古英语诗歌短文结合起来。

The title of the charm doesn’t fully describe the text’s concerns.

魅力的标题并没有完全描述文本的关注点。

A modern reader might understand “delayed birth” as prolonged labour, but the instructions extend to carrying a pregnancy successfully and keeping a child alive.

现代读者可能会将“延迟分娩”理解为延长分娩时间，但这些说明也适用于成功怀孕并保住孩子的生命。

Cleghorn interprets them as intended for “a woman who has experienced trauma and tragedy in childbirth, so perhaps has lost a child, or by a woman who hopes to again become pregnant and give birth safely after experiencing such a loss”.

克莱格霍恩将其解释为“在分娩过程中经历过创伤和悲剧，因此可能失去孩子的女性，或者在经历这种失去后希望再次怀孕并安全分娩的女性”。

This connects the experience of bereavement with expectations surrounding another pregnancy.

这将丧亲经历与对再次怀孕的期望联系起来。

The rituals address both an earlier death and the possibility that it might be repeated.

这些仪式既解决了早期死亡的问题，也解决了死亡可能再次发生的问题。

One sequence instructs that a woman hoping for a smooth pregnancy should step over her husband as he lies in bed.

其中一个片段指示，希望顺利怀孕的女性应该在丈夫躺在床上时跨过他。

It recommends an “elaborate stepping sequence, and the woman has to make sure that her husband doesn't wake up while reciting her intentions to become pregnant again and have a healthy child,” Cleghorn says.

克莱格霍恩说，它建议“精心设计的步骤顺序，并且妇女必须确保她的丈夫在背诵她再次怀孕并生下健康孩子的意图时不会醒来”。

Another passage concerns what a woman should do if she has previously lost a child.

另一段内容涉及如果一个女人曾经失去过一个孩子，她应该做什么。

“One of the sequences involves a woman going to the grave of her dead child and taking some of the soil and wrapping the soil in some black wool,” Cleghorn explains.

“其中一个场景涉及一名妇女前往死去孩子的坟墓，取出一些土壤，并用黑色羊毛包裹土壤，”克莱格霍恩解释道。

The instruction specifies material from her own child’s grave, linking the ritual to a particular bereavement.

该指示指定了来自她自己孩子坟墓的材料，将仪式与特定的丧亲之痛联系起来。

The soil is then transferred to someone outside the household.

然后将土壤转移给家庭以外的人。

“The ritual was completed if she gave this black wool containing the soil from her child's grave to a travelling merchant, who would then take it away from the area where she lived to symbolise her grief and the threat of another loss being taken far away from her.”

“如果她将含有孩子坟墓土壤的黑色羊毛交给一位旅行商人，然后商人将其从她居住的地区带走，以象征她的悲伤和另一次失去的威胁将远离她，那么仪式就完成了。”

“So there was also a little collaborative element as well in this,” she says, “that the merchant would then leave town, taking with him the grief and the danger.”

“所以这其中也有一点合作的因素，”她说，“商人随后会离开城镇，带走悲伤和危险。”

This reading suggests a practice that joined remembrance of a deceased child to concern for future pregnancies.

这种阅读表明一种将纪念已故孩子与关心未来怀孕结合起来的做法。

It also provided a defined action through which a woman might respond to circumstances she had been unable to control: a way of reasserting some agency in a decidedly uncertain context.

它还提供了一种明确的行动，通过这种行动，女性可以对她无法控制的情况做出反应：一种在绝对不确定的环境中重新确立某种能动性的方式。

The evidence has clear limitations.

证据有明显的局限性。

The charm survives as a written prescription, rather than a description of an observed ceremony or a mother’s account of her own experience.

这种魅力以书面处方的形式存在，而不是对所观察到的仪式的描述或母亲对自己经历的描述。

“We know they exist and were written down, but we don't know how these rituals were performed, or by whom,” Cleghorn cautions.

“我们知道它们存在并被记录下来，但我们不知道这些仪式是如何进行的，也不知道由谁进行，”克莱格霍恩警告说。

Nor can the text establish how common these practices were or whether women found them reassuring.

文本也无法确定这些做法有多普遍，或者女性是否觉得它们令人安心。

However, its survival demonstrates that certainly someone considered these responses to reproductive difficulty worth recording.

然而，它的生存表明，肯定有人认为这些对生殖困难的反应值得记录。

For Cleghorn, that’s significant in itself.

对于克莱格霍恩来说，这本身就很重要。

It indicates “a real sense of a necessity to create practices around mothering and childbirth that could bring some safety, bring some degree of protection”.

它表明“真正有必要围绕母亲和分娩创造一些做法，从而带来一定的安全，带来一定程度的保护”。

So, the assumption that frequent childhood deaths produced parental indifference confuses two different questions: how often families experienced bereavement, and how they responded to it.

因此，童年频繁死亡导致父母冷漠的假设混淆了两个不同的问题：家庭经历丧亲之痛的频率以及他们如何应对。

These birth charms, however, show that the loss of a child was understood as an experience requiring emotional action and attention.

然而，这些诞生咒表明，失去孩子被理解为一种需要情感行动和关注的经历。

Grief may certainly have been more common, though no less profound.

悲伤当然可能更常见，但同样深刻。

Elinor Cleghorn was speaking to Lauren Good on the HistoryExtra podcast.

埃莉诺·克莱格霍恩 (Elinor Cleghorn) 在 HistoryExtra 播客上与劳伦·古德 (Lauren Good) 交谈。

Listen to the full conversation .

听完整的对话。

James Osborne is a senior content producer at HistoryExtra

James Osborne 是 HistoryExtra 的高级内容制作人

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