NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

“I am particularly interested in the problem of violence and the representation of children for one simple reason: When children are featured in ME literature, they are invariably the subject of violence or threat.” – D. T. Kline

Medieval Childhoods and Middle English Literature

Daniel T. Kline, University of Alaska Anchorage

Although Philippe Ariès' dual thesis (from Centuries of Childhood, trans. 1962) that (1) medieval parents were not emotionally invested in their children's lives and that (2) medieval culture did not have a clear, well-defined sense of childhood as a distinct phase of life has been put to rest by the diligent work of medieval historians like Barbara Hanawalt, Nicholas Orme, Ronald Finucane, Sally Crawford, Michael Sheehan, Shulamith Shahar, and others, scholars of late-medieval England and Middle English (ME) literature and culture (c.1066 - c. 1500) have been rather slow to incorporate these historical findings into their analyses. These investigations into the children, families, and households of the predominantly Christian west are being matched by exciting new work in Judaic (Ivan Marcus, Elisheva Baumgarten) and Islamic (Avner Gilead) culture as well. However, when children are discussed, it is often secondary or incidental to the analysis of medieval institutions (the Church, education, guild and trade organizations, royalty and nobility), specific practices (virginity, affective piety, marriage, inheritance, etc.) or theoretically driven studies of late-medieval English culture (in feminist, gender, and queer studies and psychoanalytic, New Historical, and postcolonial approaches).

Nonetheless, it is clear now that children were indeed the subjects of parental care, community investment, legal consideration, theological reflection, and literary investigation throughout medieval culture. As a result, students of Middle English literature are slowly turning their attention to medieval children and childhood to analyze, understand, and critique the representation, place, and function of children in late-medieval English culture. In this brief overview, I would like (1) to summarize some of the more important historical analysis concerning medieval children and childhood and (2) to outline some of the rich potential of ME literature and culture for childhood studies. Thus, I hope this essay provides a roadmap for those who might be interested in pursuing questions that appear at the intersection of medieval childhood and ME literature.

Beyond Ariès: Contemporary Historical Study of Medieval Children and Childhood

Ariès argued that high infant mortality essentially prevented medieval parents from investing emotionally in their children and his examination of iconography and portraiture in particular convinced him that medieval culture did not have a clear, differentiated understanding of childhood as a distinct phase of life. In perhaps the most (in)famous passage in Centuries of Childhood, Ariès wrote: "In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist; this is not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken, or despised. The idea of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children; it corresponds to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood, that particular nature which distinguishes the child from adult, even the young adult" (p. 128). Children became valued only in the early modern period.

Yet, it is important here to understand that Ariès did not say that medieval parents did not love their children; he clearly indicates that they did. However, Aries believed that the shortened life expectancy affected how medieval parents felt about their children, and there is some evidence from the study of coroner's records that medieval parents sought medical intervention earlier for boys than for girls. In his examination of the records kept at pilgrimage shrines, Ronald Finucane detects a gender dissymmetry as to when medieval parents asked for divine intervention. Boys were the subject of such petitions earlier in their illnesses and at nearly double the rate of girls who received the same attention (69.8 percent of boys versus 30.2 percent of girls; p. 96). However, in major studies following Aries, the medieval period was excoriated not simply for its lack of attention and feeling for children, but also for its supposed active and systematic abuse of children. Lloyd DeMause has been the most extreme advocate of this misleading position. "The Evolution of Childhood," DeMause’s survey of Western childhood and childrearing, begins: "The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of childcare, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused" (p. 3). The term "evolution" is key to the historians in the generation following Ariès, for it betrays their unexamined teleological biases. Even Lawrence Stone's venerable The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 fosters the same perspective, for Stone tied medieval infant mortality to lack of physical care, linked the development of contraception to a more child-friendly culture, and associated different levels of child-rearing to English class hierarchies.[1] In effect, the Middle Ages served as a childish "other" against which modern historians defined the progress of mature Western culture.

Perhaps the most important historian of medieval children and childhood, at least for medieval England, is Barbara Hanawalt, whose articles and two major books offer a full picture of the early life course. In Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, Hanawalt investigates coroners' rolls to open the doors to medieval English peasant life, for "Each inquest into a misadventure reads, not like a novel or even a short story, but like a very succinct verbal snapshot of life" (vi) because the inquiries identify the who, what, where, when, and why of a medieval person's death, including children. In another example, Hanawalt’s exemplary Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History describes the childhood from birth until marriage to depict the life of "typical" medieval children and youth, including the social practices and cultural processes informing medieval childhood like baptism, education, apprenticeship, and engagement. Sally Crawford combines archeological data as well as documentary, legal, and literary sources to great effect in her analysis of Anglo-Saxon England's view of childhood from birth through adolescence. Shulamith Shahar examines a variety of biblical, theological, devotional, and educational literature to reconstruct medieval attitudes and actions toward the conception, birth, childhood, and education of children based upon medieval understandings of the life cycle. Ronald C. Finucane looks at hagiographical records—the registers kept at saints' shrines that preserve the reasons why pilgrims have sought to visit the holy site—for abundant evidence detail a parents' concern for children from pregnancy through childhood. In a series of major articles and two recent major books, Nicholas Orme has detailed a wealth of medieval educational practices, and he has recently synthesized a wide variety of historical evidence, including the material culture of English medieval childhood, to place children in their lived world.

Simply put, not only were medieval cultures concerned with the lives of their children, medieval authorities did have an awareness of human lifespan development. The familiar "ages of man" texts generally followed one of three conceptual systems: the biological theory of three ages (youth, maturity, and old age); the physiological theory of four ages (childhood, youth, maturity, and old age), corresponding to the four humours, seasons, and elements; and the astrological theory of seven ages (infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, old age, decrepitude) paralleling the celestial spheres from the Moon to Saturn. By the later Middle Ages a fairly stable set of terms divided the childhood and youth into seven year segments: infantia (infancy), pueritia (childhood), and adolescentia (adolescence).  These demarcations were based primarily upon age and gender but also considered the social, emotional, and mental development of the child. First, from birth to age seven or infantia, children were not considered rational agents.  Second, the onset of pueritia was marked by the child’s growing personal awareness and social accountability. Finally, the change from pueritia to adolescentia was marked by the onset of menarche for girls and the development of secondary sexual characteristics for boys and girls.  At adolescentia, generally regarded as 12 for girls and 14 for boys, young people could be married according to canon law or could break a marriage contract set in their childhood by paying a fine equivalent to the value of the marriage. At adolescence, young men and women could then take on their adult roles.

Such age demarcations would seem to have little impact on our understanding of medieval texts, but Chaucer, for example, specifies the ages of two key characters in the Canterbury Tales, both of whom are of undefined age in the source material: Chaucer makes the young boy of the Prioress's Tale seven years of age, at the boundary between infantia and pueritia or the age at which a child was considered rational and responsible, and Chaucer makes the young girl of the Physician's Tale fourteen years old, at the cusp of marriageability. It is as if, in effect, Chaucer brackets the range of medieval childhood, like bookmarks, between these two characters, and by placing them at the liminal boundaries between infancy and childhood (in the Prioress's Tale) and between childhood and adolescence (in the Physician's Tale), Chaucer appears to outline the complexities of medieval childhood and a host of attendant questions, like parenting, nurture, and guardianship; education, marriage, and the Church; as well as important problems of ethics, violence, and sacrifice. The famous mystic and theologian Julian of Norwich uses the analogy of a mother who adjusts her loving discipline to the emotional and chronological needs of her child to express the loving-kindness God shows toward children. This awareness of childhood differences extended both to age as well as gender, and encyclopedists and medical authorities differentiate boys and girls from the moment of conception, and though it stands to reason that their views were scientifically incorrect and generally misogynistic, these patriarchially-inflected views indebted to Galen and Aristotle were not universally held, particularly among Trotula texts, which are now understood to extend back to a twelfth-century Italian female physician.

So rather than seeing children as an undifferentiated and simplistic "little adults," a wealth of medieval writers and texts detail the special considerations adults made for children under their charge, particularly for their educational and emotional needs. Even among specialists in children's literature, the medieval period has generally been seen as devoid of specialized texts for children and youth, but this too is a misconception (Kline, 2003). To cite just one prominent example, Chaucer wrote his Treatise on the Astrolabe, a complex device that used the sun's position to tell time, for his ten-year old son Lewis, and comparing Chaucer's text with the source materials indicates that Chaucer made a number of specific changes to cater to his son's reading ability and educational level.

Children in Middle English Literature: The Question of Violence

When I began this work in 1990, the bibliography on children and ME literature could fit literally onto a single page, but the study of medieval children has benefited from the productive intersection of feminism and social history, among many other factors, and medieval childhood is beginning to receive more attention from historians and literary critics in such recent volumes as P.J.P. Goldberg's primary source text Women in England, c. 1275-1525  (Manchester, 1995); Cathy Itnyre's Medieval Family Roles  (Garland, 1996); Lewis, Menuge, and Phillips' Young Medieval Women (St. Martins, 1999); Jacqueline Murray's Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader  (Broadview, 2001); Peter Fleming's Family and Household in Medieval England  (Palgrave, 2001); Kim Phillips' Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270-1540  (Manchester, 2003); Davis, Muller, and Jones' Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages (Brepols, 2003); Carol Neel's collection Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children (Toronto, 2004); Goldberg and Riddy's anthology Youth in the Middle Ages  (York, 2004); Albrecht Classen's anthology Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (de Gruyter, 2005), and Joel Rosenthal's Essays on Medieval Childhood: Responses to Recent Debates (Shaun Tyas, 2007). My own work seeks to integrate historical data, literary analysis, and cultural theory to untangle the often-paradoxical functions of children and place of childhood in late-medieval English culture. I am particularly interested in the problem of violence and the representation of children for one simple reason: When children are featured in ME literature, they are invariably the subject of violence or threat. Why does ME literature depict children so consistently in this way, and what are the implications of such representations for late medieval English culture?

At first glance, such an observation might seem to confirm the Aries-DeMause thesis that the medieval period was a time of casual barbarity and indifference to children. However, the opposite is true: Medieval children are represented as under threat because of their importance to the dominant cultural formations of late-medieval England, and the successful resolution of that violence reinstates the cultural conditions necessary for the social propagation of the dominant ideology. The (often nobly-born) child protagonists of medieval romance are exiled from their homes, threatened by hostile family members and external enemies, and put to exhaustive trials—before reassuming their rightful places. The children of the ME cycle plays, as in the Abraham and Isaac and the Massacre of the Innocents plays, are subjected to parental and political violence—so that Christianity may flourish and, far too often, Judaism denigrated. The children and youth of hagiography, those stories told about the saints, are routinely violated in the most horrible and creative ways—to demonstrate the superiority of Christian belief. Even in Chaucer, children like the "little clergeon" of the Prioress's Tale, the pubescent Virginia in the Physician's Tale, and the young children taken from Griselda in the Clerk's Tale are likewise murdered, sacrificed, or threatened—to establish the Blessed Virgin's mercy, save a virginal daughter from kidnapping and rape, or test a mother's courage in the face of her husband's brutality. I would even argue that stories of threat and violence against children—that is, the representation of violated children—operate in a similar fashion even today, for how many times have we heard in the contemporary media, particularly in political discourse, a candidate or office holder summon the image of "America's children" in order to foster a specific political agenda? This invocation is so common as to become a cliché, appropriately skewered on TVs "The Simpson's." Whenever Springfield finds itself under siege, someone exclaims: "What about the children?!"

At least in my own research, then, the question becomes focused upon the ideological uses to which representations of violated children are put in medieval literature and culture, a question that resonates in our own time as well. Contemporary literary and cultural theory provides the tools to ascertain the structures of domination over children and youth in medieval culture—what Foucault might call "disciplinary technologies" or Norbert Elias "the civilizing process"—and, more importantly from my perspective, the forms of resistance engendered by those processes. For example, in the ME dream-vision Pearl, the disconsolate Dreamer encounters a familiar figure, the Pearl-child, in an otherworldly landscape, and we discover that he was intimately acquainted with her during her brief earthly life though he does not fully recognize her in her spiritual form. Traditional scholarship views the child as "the Pearl-maiden," a perfect representation of virginity, whose purpose is to console the Dreamer in his grief, for we later find that he is in mourning over the loss of his pearl, this child, who may be his own daughter or close relation. In this subtle interpretive shift from "child" to "virgin," the theological concept of virginity overshadows the youthfulness of the child and invariably colors the interpretation of the text. My own analysis of the dynamics of age in the poem indicates a subversion of the traditional hierarchies of age over youth and male over female as the young girl reverses medieval pedagogical practice by authoritatively correcting the Dreamer's faulty theology (of baptism, for example) and by leading him into a renewed understanding that his grief is for a dead child, a person to whom he was related, and not a theological abstraction. The Pearl-child must "reincorporate" herself—give herself a body once again—before the Dreamer's eyes. Seen in this light, the poem itself critiques late-medieval religious practices by creating a "theology of childhood" that embodies the gospel promise that "the last shall be first and the first shall be last."

As a result, the representation of violated and threatened children in ME literature raises for me the question of ethics in what Rene Girard calls a "sacrificial culture"; that is, a society that finds coherence in theologically rationalized death or, even more pointedly, theologically justified murder. The questions are presented most pointedly in the Abraham and Isaac episodes of the medieval "cycle drama" or "mystery plays." These were extravagant corporate productions of dramatic biblical scenes from creation to the last judgment in the fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries in towns like York and Chester. Four complete cycles have been preserved (the York, Chester, Towneley, and N-Town plays) as well as other medieval play texts, giving us six different versions of the Abraham and Isaac story (from Genesis 22: 1-19). To briefly recount the tale, God commands Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice and, at the very last moment before the blade falls, again commands Abraham to withhold the deathblow. Medieval Christianity generally understood Abraham and Isaac as the typological prefiguration of Jesus' sacrificial death and thus warranted—even though Isaac is not sacrificed in Genesis. Kierkegaard's analysis in Fear and Trembling (in the voice of the pseudonymous Johannes de Silencio) extends that line of thought by arguing that Abraham ascended to an "absolute relation to the absolute" through "the teleological suspension of the ethical," an argument that still retains currency in contemporary ethical and theological thought. However, such arguments are sacrificial in that they justify the violence against Isaac because it benefits Abraham. In contrast, Emmanuel Levinas, a French phenomenologist and student of Husserl and Heidegger whose importance is only just beginning to be understood in the US, counters that Abraham's greatness is to be found not in his willingness to offer up his son but in his ability to withhold the blade: It is Abraham's return to "the ethical" that makes him the father of faith, not his willingness to become a monster as in Kierkegaard. The six extant medieval episodes present a range of understandings of this ultimately enigmatic text, but the Brome Play of Abraham and Isaac presents the most compelling rereading of Genesis 22 because it openly questions in the voice of the child Isaac the efficacy of Abraham's sacrificial violence. At the key moment when Abraham stays the blade and tells Isaac he has been spared, Isaac does not believe him! The boy asks his father incredulously, "Are you sure you're not going to kill me when I turn my back?" and even after being repeatedly assured that he has been saved, Isaac remains unconvinced. The point is this: Once a father has shown that he is willing to kill his son, the blade can never be put back into the scabbard. And the Brome Play of Abraham and Isaac demonstrates the human cost of sacrificial ideology by giving voice to the victim of sacrificial violence, the child Isaac.

In my own view, then, studying medieval children and childhood involves a dual focus, both the historical understanding of premodern children and the contemporary critique of those representations in ME literature. The theories informing contemporary literary studies are often implicitly or explicitly touch upon issues related to children and childhood though the ideas may be couched in vocabulary relating to "filiation" and "relationship" or "temporality" and "teleology," ideas which in their contemporary forms would be unfamiliar to medieval thinkers.

This dual focus is not everyone's cup of tea, for many would argue that medieval scholarship should endeavor to state as accurately as possible the facts of the past without the influence of the present. Rather than reject the charge of "presentism," I embrace it as an unavoidable condition of scholarship that allows me to confront the alterity of the past to question more fully the seemingly "natural" state of modern culture. The study of medieval children and childhood has led me squarely into the consideration of one of the most pressing questions of our own time, and that is, How is it possible to be truly ethical in a culture riven by so many forms of violence?

Note:

[1] Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). So acceptable is Ariés to Stone that Aries is mentioned only once in The Family, Sex, and Marriage, and that reference is to Ariés work on the culture of death and dying (p. 247).

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