ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some of the key ideas related to the image of the early modern infant. It focuses on early modern England during and after the Protestant Reformation. The birth of infants in early modern society was seen to be a crucial and extremely important part of life, and of the life-cycle, for a myriad reasons. The infant is truly defined by the older children and adults who remarked on their lives, who held them in their view. Price invokes the recurring trope of the blood-stained and crying infant making their way from the womb and into the world, and it is a powerful one, since it clearly portrays the relationship, in the early modern mind, between the image of the child, the new mother and the potent idea of sin. Perceptions of infants in post-Reformation England were far from straightforward.
