Introduction

To celebrate the theory that Philippe Aries advanced exactly fifty years ago and that helped produce the field of the history of childhood, Colin Heywood has written a rich and fascinating appreciation of Aries' achievements that, at the same time, urges scholars once and for all to retire Aries' long-disproved ideas. Colin Heywood bids us to say goodbye Aries' claim that only in the early modern period did a warm and distinct appreciation of childhood emerge. While Heywood, of course, values Aries' singular contribution in pointing out the value of seeing childhood as a historical construct that varies from place to place and era to era, he shows how scholars have progressed beyond his research and superseded his conclusions, arguing that even as a straw man Aries is no longer particularly valuable. It is fitting and intriguing that Stephanie Tarbin's essay below, ("Caring for Poor and Fatherless Children in London, c 1350-1550"), suggests that late medieval parents and authorities seem to have held children as dear—if not more so- than those who were born later.

One way or another, all the essays in Volume 3, Number Three of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth deal with children and loss, and/or trauma. Aries' claim that in the early modern era, parents started to treat children as precious can only remind us in these dangerous days of the immense vulnerability of so many of the world's children. The case of our Object Lesson by Katherine Dalsimer, the loss of his wife motivated the Rev. Patrick Brontë to give their grieving children gifts including a set of 12" wooden soldiers to their son. These soldiers became the focus for his and his sisters' stunning imaginative productions—numerous tiny volumes in miniscule writing narrating the history of their invented worlds and their inhabitants. Dr. Dalsimer's intimate essay relates the creative-imaginative process in the Brontë children, particularly Charlotte, to their healing from loss and grief first of their mother, and then two sisters. The Brontë children transformed their bewilderment and suffering by imagining a miniature world alive with dramatic intrigue, conniving, forgiveness, and artistic production. Charlotte's comments as a beginning teacher on how much she disliked her work, and how passionately she wanted to be immersed in this fantasy world give us a glimpse of the extraordinarily seductive pull of the imaginary over the real. Dr. Dalsimer's work is a tribute to the many and varied powers of the imaginative life.

In a complex and original essay, Cecilia A. Green looks at flogging that so many boys endured in Barbados and asks why this form of horrific punishment continued in the Caribbean colony into the twentieth century when other island colonies and the mother country were starting to renounce it. In a linked phenomenon, Barbados jailed a very high proportion of women compared with other colonies. Barbadian authorities tried futilely to fine black men for leaving their wives, but ended up punishing the women and the boys even though they were cast as victims in these apparently broken families. Professor Green delineates the complex post-slavery world of Barbados in which the British authorities would belatedly try to establish a way to rehabilitate young "delinquents" without corporal punishment and shows that this new system would, nevertheless, perpetuate gender inequities even as it tried to reform itself.

Stephanie Tarbin's scholarship concerns interventions in the lives of late medieval orphans, and how these were in many ways continuous with those of the early modern period in England. Tarbin's meticulous research shows that the fifteenth century care for orphaned children was a mixture of formal institutions and a wide array of informal arrangements created by kin and others. These safety nets developed out of practical considerations that included helping the child to learn skills or perform activities that would help him or her to self-support, but they also show that help was readily available and that late medieval men and women seem to have regarded children as precious, not simply worth investment because of the potential labor of children. The sixteenth century that most scholars regard...