The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150-1650 (review)

Konrad Eisenbichler knows that many would object to the colloquial and modern term 'teenager' applied to a premodern young person. Of all the possible comparable terms that could be used to name the age cohort between infancy and adulthood - adolescence, youth, etc - 'teenager' is the one least likely to travel, whether in time or even across space, in part because it is an ideological concept. Just think, for example, how strange it would sound to talk about teenage pregnancy in premodern Europe. Early on the comparison is made with another supposed anachronism, 'homosexuality.' Eisenbichler writes, 'a concept need not have been articulated quite the same way as we do today in order for it to have existed and for us to study it.' One could dispute the assumption that agreement exists today on the meaning of a concept such as homosexuality, but this statement also implies a question about nominalist versus realist notions of identity: does the thing exist in its self-sameness regardless of its conceptualization, or is the conceptualization what creates the thing? This constructivist/essentialist debate, as it is also called, has been raging around issues such as gender and sexuality for a long time now. It does not figure prominently as a topic in most of the studies in this collection, but the approaches here - cautious, eclectic, descriptive rather than prescriptive - might well contribute productively to furthering premodern (and transnational) discussions of identity categories and their temporal and cultural specificities.

As the first essay explicitly argues, and as the many other excellent essays in the volume suggest, there is an array of more and less expansive and flexible terms to designate what seems, nevertheless, to have been a specific and distinct stage of life in premodern Europe. The articles in the volume are by an international group of scholars and focus on medieval and early modern Italy, England, and France. They are historical and literary and of delightfully varying length, allowing for a greater number of essays - seventeen - than one might otherwise expect to find in such a volume. Each treats seriously the question of what constitutes adolescence, demonstrating the degree to which 'youth' as a concept sometimes stretches all the way to the age of forty, varies by class or caste, and, finally, becomes deeply fraught when applied to girls, who seem more often than not in premodern Europe to move rapidly from childhood to maternity.

It is as novel and refreshing an exercise to contemplate the prominent political and social roles played by aristocrats in their teens and twenties as it is to examine and describe a particular social demographic in premodernity. What emerges, perhaps surprisingly given the impression we have, along with Eisenbichler, that premodern Europe was largely ruled by a gerontocracy, is a Europe governed by a far younger group of men than govern it now, although discourses of apprenticeship and respect for elders are also more prominent than they seem to be today. Some of the essays focus on issues and attributes that clearly interest present-day society about youth: fashion and dress; race; love and violence; education; sex; and work. Some focus more on aspects of youth culture that emerge from rituals of induction, manuals and treatises on the training of adolescents, and the literature that features persons of a particular age either as protagonists or as target audience.

One of the more interesting and provocative conclusions one might draw from the work represented here is that the co-articulation of gender and youth could be deployed strategically in a variety of ways: adult male aristocratic homosocial competition comes into its own through the rhetoric of adolescent male display before the feminine gaze; young aristocratic women exploit their youthful and pre-maternal married state to advocate for their husbands and for their own future as mothers. The suggestion is that the liminality of this condition of 'youth' - determined by different, not always strictly age-related criteria depending on...