ABSTRACT
The specter of pain and death hovers over the topic of maternity in Stuart women’s diaries. Spiritual journals, particularly, tend to depict pregnancy and its aftermath as fraught with peril. In seventeenth-century England, women feared dying in labor, miscarriages and stillborn babies were common and infants took ill with alarming frequency. The terror of experiencing some form of bereavement, therefore, was not unfounded. Nonetheless, maternal grief was not always privileged in mothers’ personal journals. Secular Anglican diaries, for instance, devote ample space to the discussion of healthy children. By contrast, Puritan clerics helped to popularize a form of spiritual journal in which maternity is almost synonymous with bereavement. In these journals, Puritans, Dissenters and non-conformists1 mention children solely when these children are in the process of being born or dying. The children figure as liminal, transient entities, acknowledged only in prayers for pregnancy and childbirth, in prayers for deliverance from accidents and illness and in maternal elegies written to commemorate a child’s death. Although spiritual diarists do celebrate instances of successful childbirth, albeit in a formulaic manner, they attend far more urgently to discussions of child loss. Fear of bereavement, and resignation towards it, are hallmarks of the maternal spiritual diary.
