Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England (review)

What social and religious changes occurred with the institution of sponsorship in baptism in England during the early modern era, and what do those changes tell us about the character of the English Reformation? Will Coster has sought to answer these questions by making a careful sample of the available evidence, principally parish registers, wills, and records from ecclesiastical courts. The result illustrates both the strengths and the limitations of a demographic approach to social and religious history.

He began with the assumptions of the "Revisionist School" of Reformation studies now in the ascendant. It holds that godparenthood, like many other traditional religious practices, held a strong place in the lives and affections of English people on the eve of the Reformation. The institution furnished "social andreligious cement" with a "cohesive power" (pp. 7-8), linking families and people together with ties of spiritual fellowship. The arrival of Protestantism meant the diminution of those ties, and the weakening of that much-loved fellowship.

Coster set out to go beyond these romantic assumptions, and to test them by compiling statistics and examining several questions. Who served as godparents, where did they come from, what was their social status, what were their duties, how well did they perform them, and did they bequeath anything to their godchildren? He cast a wide net, taking statistics from wherever he could find them but devoting his greatest attention to three Yorkshire parishes, Bilton in Ainsty, Almondbury, and St. Margaret's, York, for which the surviving records are particularly informative. The author's industry has produced some interesting and informative figures, for example, on the class of the sponsors chosen and their kinship relation to the children baptized (pp. 139-155). He has been able to discover how many of the godparents left bequests for their godchildren and even what many of the bequests were (p. 241). Exactly parallel figures are not available for the medieval period, but most of the evidence suggests that not much changed until the mid-seventeenth century, when the Puritans were in control and made a frontal attack on the institution of godparenthood. Before then, there was more continuity than change. A notable exception was the elimination in the 1530's of the impediments to marriage created by sponsorship in baptism—impediments considered by the Reformers to be an invention of the papacy devised to extort money for dispensations.

The shortcomings of the study grow out of the limitations in the sources themselves. The samples are small; they contain considerable variation within them, and we often do not know whether the variations depended upon actual change or instead upon the interests and capacities of the compilers. Coster recognizes the problem. His conclusions are correspondingly cautious. However, what he has done, he has done well, and for it he deserves our admiration and thanks.