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A woman’s rite: rediscovering the ritual of churching in Denmark, c. 1750-1965

ABSTRACT Taking Denmark as a case study, this article retraces the ritual of churching of women after childbirth 1750c-1965. Churching offers a new angle into women’s religiosity and perception of their procreative body. Placed at the intersection of religion and everyday life, churching was as much a clerical ritual as a social custom at the centre of communal life and a feast day for the married mother. Rooted in Levitical childbirth impurity, adopted as a Christian purification ritual, then redefined by Lutheran reformers as a thanksgiving rite, churching continued along parallel tracks in Europe into the nineteenth and twentieth century in many places. Yet churching has fallen out of common memory in Denmark as elsewhere. This article first examines the clerical rite, demonstrating how churching elevated a mother’s status in the congregation, affording her time, space and honour, a position she lost when churching ceased. The second part analyses the childbirth cycle from pregnancy to churching when society imposed different norms on women. Childbirth was dangerous and physical vulnerability compounded by widespread fears of evil spirits and a sense of being impure. Rather than simply a thanksgiving ceremony, churching often represented an apotropaic and healing passage back to safety.