Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative (review)

It is impossible to write on medieval childhood without taking some kind of position in relation to Philippe Ariès's influential, if now largely discredited, 1960 study L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime. Phyllis Gaffney does not avoid this challenge, but meets it by surveying a wide range of northern French literary texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a diachronic approach that seeks to understand differences and changes brought about in the two major narrative genres of the period, the chanson de geste and the romance. In so doing she nuances evidence both for and against Ariès, as well as providing a valuable overarching framework within which to read individual texts. Gaffney takes a broad view, adducing evidence not only from narrative texts, but from history, theology, and philosophy, to understand the cultural construction of medieval childhood. Starting from an overview of background sources — age categories, their attributes, both positive and negative — from classical to medieval periods, the study moves on to survey stock characters and motifs of childhood. This sets out the landscape within which detailed commentary follows, showing it to be one of diversity and ubiquity in the portrayal of childhood. The substantive discussion follows in three chapters dedicated respectively to epic, romance, and enfances. The generic differences found are unsurprising: the broad distinction between epic, which focuses on certainty and is therefore less concerned with the subjective life of an individual, and romance, which is driven by uncertainty and processes of becoming, is confirmed by the ways in which these two genres tend to portray childhood and children. This is also discernible in enfances, which proves less a separate genre and more a form susceptible to the respective influence of epic and/or romance. What is more interesting is an appreciation of the narrative effects that can be obtained from portraying children. The comedic possibilities in the incongruity of the famous oxymoron puer senex, seen in the figure of Gui in different versions of the Chanson de Guillaume, are well drawn out; so too is the narrative dynamism achieved in romance by the interweaving themes of learning, identity, and gender. Gaffney's conclusions, which she entitles 'a slow conversion of sensibility' (p. 179), are again unsurprising, but nonetheless worthwhile in providing new perspectives on the gradual influence of romance on the later twelfth-century epics, and the ways in which this mirrors a developing sensibility to childhood, derived from the evolution of the courtly nobility and an emerging urban patriciate. There are minor quibbles about matters of detail: the winning of the hand of the beloved in both Partonopeu de Blois and Ipomedon is much more problematic than is suggested (p. 106 n. 5); and recent work on the dating of Floire et Blancheflor would place this two to three decades later than Leclanche's dating of 1150 (p. 118 n. 39). But these do not detract from the fact that this is an enlightening and satisfying study of a significant thread of cultural history.