ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to ask questions about sorrow in the early modern period and, in particular, to examine how many of the men and women of John Calvin's Geneva sought to address life's sadness through worship. It describes briefly how Calvin understood sorrow and how this understanding might have shaped the liturgical practices of Geneva. The chapter reconstructs in a very general way the elements of a typical Sunday service in the city, particularly confession and the singing of the psalm. Calvin's comments about children and proper child-rearing reveal a number of sorrows present in the family lives of his parishioners. The death of a child, negligent parents, disobedient children, insufficient spousal affection, these were frequent causes of social, economic and moral distress. Calvin had stressed the importance of singing the psalms in unison in the vernacular because he was well aware of the distinctive capacities of music.
