Essays on Medieval Childhood: Responses to Recent Debates (review)

Since the 1960s, medievalists have researched and written about medieval childhood to counter the views that Ariès expressed in his book on childhood.¹ Ariès argued that childhood was not viewed in the Middle Ages as a distinct phase of life that required special attention and that people in the Middle Ages did not have the sentimental attitude toward children and childhood that those in the modernWestern world have. A number of excellent books, articles, and essays have attacked his use of evidence and his conclusions. The current collection of essays adds little new information to the old debate.

The groundbreaking essay is Francine Michaud's "Apprentice to Waged-Earner: Child Labour before and after the Black Death." Michaud investigates a particularly long run of service and apprenticeship contracts from the medieval notarial records of Marseilles covering the late thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth century, a large portion of which involves children and adolescents. She finds that in the period prior to 1348, most young people did not directly enter the labor market but served first as apprentices to their masters. Contracts for girls were rare. But following the plague, the pattern changed. Children were contracted at a younger age than previously (girls for room and board but not wages), and they were not apprenticed as frequently to learn a craft. The evidence is dramatic. It points to economic problems that forced parents to place daughters in domestic service positions and sons into maritime positions at a young age. The demand for labor following the depopulation of the plague years did not open up new opportunities for most children. Michaud's argument runs counter to one that posits a "golden age" for women during the period after the plague, which suggests that women could enter into more prestigious jobs left vacant by men. Southern France suffered extreme economic contraction because of war as well as plague, and children had to enter the labor market to survive.

Other essays deal with the effect that partisan battles in thirteenth-century England had on the lives of combatants' children and the games that they played (Claire Valente), a discussion of rape and patriarchal honor in an interpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century Physician's Tale (Daniel T. Klein), and the representations of infants and toddlers in the late medieval Danse Macabre (Sophie Oosterwijk). Oosterwijk's essay is illustrated with pictures from English, German, and French sources. The methodologies employed in the essays range from quantitative and art-historical analysis to textual interpretation. Although the essays add to the knowledge of medieval childhood, they also underscore the basic point that the modern sentimental glorification of childhood is different from the love and concern for children in the Middle Ages.