Medieval Children's Literature: Its Possibility and Actuality

Years ago, while taking a graduate course in medieval Latin, I was struck by the wide disparity in the difficulty of the works that were assigned, a disparity that often did not coincide with other variables such as the historical period or the author's social class, profession, or region. In that course it was assumed that all the texts we addressed, whatever their degree of difficulty, were written for adults. I concluded at the time that there must have been a substantial number of adult readers with literacy skills below the third-grade level. I have since become convinced that some of the works we were looking at were written not only or even initially for semiliterate adults, a group often equated with children in the earlier periods, but for children.¹ In order to support my claim that such works should be considered children's literature I draw on evidence provided by cultural and literary historians to dispute two widely held convictions that have hampered previous critical and theoretical studies. The first is the nonspecialist belief that there can be no medieval children's literature because a conception of childhood as we know it did not exist in the Middle Ages. The second is the specialist assertion, typified by the medievalist Bennett Brockman, that "the Middle Ages made no provision for a separate literature for children, apart from pedagogical texts designed to teach them to read, to write, to cipher, and to behave civilly" ("Juvenile" 18). Finally, I discuss the ways in which some medieval works and their contexts indicate a child audience and why such works warrant further exploration as children's literature.

I

First it is necessary to dispose of the myths about medieval children that have prevented scholars from seriously considering that a literature for them might exist. There are three initial barriers, primarily hypothetical, to recognizing medieval children's literature. To begin with, there is the still-widespread belief in the "Ariès thesis," in brief that childhood was "discovered" in the seventeenth century (according to Philippe Ariès) or the eighteenth century (according to some other researchers). Ariès, as he admits in his introduction to Centuries of Childhood, was not a specialist in the periods for which he claims that "the idea of [sentiment, a separate feeling about] childhood did not exist" (128), and in fact, if his book is deconstructed, it is evident that there was a cognizance of childhood throughout those earlier periods. What his thesis amounts to is that previous centuries thought quite differently about children than did seventeenth-century France. A statement of this nature is true for any time and for any region even today: for example, the conception of childhood is different for the first half of the twentieth century and the second; for the rich, the urban poor, and the comfortable, usually suburban, middle class; and most notably for Americans and those who live in countries where poor children go to work in factories at six or seven and parents sell children into prostitution and even slavery.² Nevertheless, Ariès's insistence on the social construction of childhood and on not naively reading the past in terms of the present is an essential contribution to the study of past children's literatures. His work has informed many subsequent critical and historical studies and has given rise to the examination of specific works within a wide-ranging sociohistorical context that includes nonliterary texts.

It was not long after the Ariès book appeared (in 1960 in France and in 1962 in English translation) that specialists in the medieval and early modern periods began to point out what was wrong with its ideas and with the data used to support them. As early as 1975 Meradith McMunn wrote in Children's Literature, on the basis of her examination of the description of children in French medieval literature, that Ariès's claims are "not supported by a close look at medieval literature" ("Children" 54). She was followed by C. H. Talbot, who asserted in Children's Literature in 1977...