ABSTRACT
This essay examines the role of baptism in linking fathers to their children socially and legally, not just spiritually, in post-Reformation Edinburgh. Baptism provides a unique window on the social expectations of fatherhood and illuminates the roles of fathers at all levels of Scottish society. This essay examines the purposes, form and enactment of the sacrament as recorded within the session minutes of St Cuthbert’s parish during the period 1560 to 16251 to argue that fatherhood was a communally recognised social, not necessarily biological, connection between men and their children. Within the session, the parochial kirk court, men and women were called before lay elders to account for their immoral and irreligious behaviours and interactions, they were made to answer for illicit relationships and they had to explain illegitimate pregnancies. The session urged mothers to name the fathers of their bastard children and these men were in turn ordered to baptise ‘and traine upe the bairne’ accounted to be theirs. These cases do not represent common or everyday understandings of parenthood in the early life of the child, yet they can shed light on contested and irregular parental and paternal relationships within early modern Scotland.
