Beholding Suffering and Providing Care: Emotional Performances on the Death of Poor Children in Sixteenth-Century French Institutions

Abstract

This chapter explores emotional performances produced in charitable institutions on the deaths of the poorest children in sixteenth-century French society. Interpreting primarily administrative sources, the chapter examines how emotions about child suffering and potential death were articulated and how care was delivered in these institutions as a result. Broomhall argues that varied emotional performances and practices of individuals in medical, legal and institutional positions of power over children governed perceptions and realities of child deaths, murders and mortality rates. ‘Beholding suffering and providing care’ concludes that the emotions of child death were inextricably linked for contemporaries to feelings about the suffering of children and complex notions of care.