Das Schicksal ungetauft verstorbener Kinder und die Idee des „limbus puerorum“ im geistlichen Schrifttum des 15. und frühen 16. Jahrhunderts

Abstract

During the High Middle Ages, the idea became established that children who died unbaptised would remain eternally in the limbus puerorum. While this scho­lastic discussion can be considered well researched, there is a lack of reflection on the late medieval treatment of this idea, especially when studies of protection and burial practices concerning foetuses and infants have indicated that the church offered no response to the concerns of the parents of such children. This paper traces three dif­ferent ways of dealing with the fate of children who died unbaptised: on the one hand, prompted by Jean Gerson’s reflections, prenatal pastoral care emerged among the Augustinian Hermits, which provided parents with ways of securing salvation for prematurely born or miscarried children. In contemplative writings, for example by Geiler von Kaysersberg, the children and limbo were used for reflective self-comparison, while the fate of children who died unbaptised was not considered in the writings on the eschata, although birth as a subject area was strongly considered here.