Something I remember reading about pre-modern cities was that they had to have a constant flow of people coming to dwell in them because the death rate was so high that they would've been swiftly depopulated if not.
Which is another something I should remember when and if I write a story with someone from an Medieval or Early Modern period to the modern world. Have them boggle at not just how many people are in the city, but at how long they all live.
And you're very right about 'no place had a low death rate'. I've looked at local cemeteries, and it can be especially sobering to see how many young children died in the years leading down to the early 1950's or so. Our main local cemetery even has a Poor Sinners' Corner where you can find run-down headstones for infants who died before they could be baptized as well as one for an adult man who may have been a suicide. These headstones are all from pre-1920's, most of them the 19th century, and all in a Slavic language in English lettering.
If you say so, though I can remember asking some older Catholics years ago about it, and they swore to me that /only/ a priest could do a real baptism. Maybe not everyone in the RCC knew that at the time?
Probably they weren't in situations where it would come up. Nurses would know, for instance.
It was practice if the baby survived to have the priest do a conditional baptism at church, part just in case the first one had an error and part so that there would be witnesses and records.
But it is the official teaching of the Church that anyone can baptize anyone else with water, the formula in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and the intent to baptize with the baptism that Christ instituted.
Something I remember reading about pre-modern cities was that they had to have a constant flow of people coming to dwell in them because the death rate was so high that they would've been swiftly depopulated if not.
Oh, yes. Someone did a careful study of the registers of London. Its baptism rate was equal to the countryside's, but its death rate was higher.
Not that any place had a *low* death rate by our standards.
Which is another something I should remember when and if I write a story with someone from an Medieval or Early Modern period to the modern world. Have them boggle at not just how many people are in the city, but at how long they all live.
And you're very right about 'no place had a low death rate'. I've looked at local cemeteries, and it can be especially sobering to see how many young children died in the years leading down to the early 1950's or so. Our main local cemetery even has a Poor Sinners' Corner where you can find run-down headstones for infants who died before they could be baptized as well as one for an adult man who may have been a suicide. These headstones are all from pre-1920's, most of them the 19th century, and all in a Slavic language in English lettering.
And considering at the time people knew that anyone could baptize a dying newborn. . . .
If you say so, though I can remember asking some older Catholics years ago about it, and they swore to me that /only/ a priest could do a real baptism. Maybe not everyone in the RCC knew that at the time?
Probably they weren't in situations where it would come up. Nurses would know, for instance.
It was practice if the baby survived to have the priest do a conditional baptism at church, part just in case the first one had an error and part so that there would be witnesses and records.
But it is the official teaching of the Church that anyone can baptize anyone else with water, the formula in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and the intent to baptize with the baptism that Christ instituted.