Icons of Unity

Mortality made the Renaissance family fluid in its composition. Every childbirth threatened the mother; infections now regarded as minor ailments could kill a child within hours. Children died from such diseases as measles, but far more succumbed to the gastro-intestinal infections which are the concomitants of a low standard of hygiene: every sneeze must have aroused in the parent's mind the dread which is now associated with leukaemia. Estimates of mortality rates vary, but between 1588-1640, up to 50 per cent of children may have died before they reached adulthood, while three-quarters of gentry wives who died within ten years of marriage did so in childbirth. Those marriages themselves lasted, on average, only seventeen to twenty years before they were cut short by the death of a partner: it seems that more than half those contracting first marriages had lost either one or both parents.