ABSTRACT
In contrast to England, churching in Germany has received little attention.2 Robert Scribner has noted the early Lutheran clerical and magisterial ambivalence toward the postnatal rite of purification, but it is apparent to him, as it is to me, that Protestant authorities quickly came to insist that women undergo some sort of ritual, the particulars varying from place to place.3 Churching (kirchgang in New High German) is a particularly promising rite for the anthropological historian. Its forms both before and after the Lutheran Reformation, and, more to the point, the failure of Reformers to abolish it, provide additional evidence of the deteriorating position of women in late fifteenth-and sixteenth-century society.4 That is one way to interpret the evidence. But as we know, every ritual is viewed differently by each individual observing it.5 We cannot recover the perceptions of discrete participantswhether priests, new mothers, their relatives and friends, or other members of the congrega-tion-but it is plain that elite men’s aims were likely to diverge from the purposes of the women themselves who were churched. Underlying this divergence are distinctions both between masculine and feminine moieties and between magisterial and popular ones.
