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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.2 (2002) 301-302



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Book Review

Beloved Children:
History of Aristocratic Childhood in Hungary in the Early Modern Age


Beloved Children: History of Aristocratic Childhood in Hungary in the Early Modern Age. Edited by Katalin Pe'ter (New York, CEU Press, 2001) 271 pp. N.P.

Aristocratic Hungarian childhood is a welcome addition to the rapidly expanding international field of children's history. This collection of Hungarian articles translated into English beckons the English-speaking reader into a little-known, but fascinating world. Diaries, memoirs, personal letters, and wills of such magnate families as Esterhazy and Batthya'ny' provide the bulk of the material. The book is divided into four chapters: "The First Ten Years of Life" (by Pe'ter); "Orphans of Noble Birth" (by Ildiko Horn); "Count A'dam Batthya'ny and his Children" (by Istvan Fazekas); and "The Marriage Policy of the Esterhazy Family after the Death of Palatine Miclos" (by Judit Fejes).

The richness of the sources is somewhat marred by lack of clarity about the ultimate purpose of the book, and this ambiguity makes it difficult to grasp the logic of the book's organizational structure and the reasoning behind the choices of material in the individual essays. In her introduction, Pe'ters declares her firm desire to avoid the polemics that have tended to polarize the current field of childrens' history: "Beloved Children has been written in the knowledge that parental care and social responsibility, like the responsibility of parents for the well-being of their offspring in this world and the next, are among the most ancient attitudes" (8). This unquestioning belief in the munificence of the Hungarian vision of childhood as a social construct is coupled with a refusal, in principle, to compare Hungarian childhood with its European counterparts: "As to the discourse on Europe, we preferred to leave that out of consideration. There seemed to be no sense in entering a debate that has become, as it were, a conversation among the deaf" (9). While comparative childhood studies is, indeed, a field of investigation in its own right, the lack of some comparative perspective impoverishes these essays, [End Page 301] and deprives the reader unfamiliar with Hungarian history of any points of reference.

The book offers no substantive attempt at a hermeneutical interpretation of the sources and no attempt to understand either their completeness or their efficacy in reflecting the realities of Hungarian childhood. Such statements as, "It is very difficult to establish people's real feelings from the conventional letters that were written at that time. It was rare for people to describe pain and emotion," indicate an awareness of this problem, but one never directly addressed in the essays (221). Methodologically, a "cut and paste" approach dominates the book. For example, Chapter 1 "cuts" certain thematically related moments or incidents out of various sources, and "pastes" them together under various headings ("Expecting a Child," "The Birth," "Boys and Girls," etc.). Consequently, the correspondence of one family is broken up and intermixed with that of another; time and place are shuffled about indiscriminately; and individual character development or the motivations behind the separate incidents remain obscure.

The last two chapters are case studies. The first is an investigation of the education of two sons of Count Adam Batthyani I—who were not particularly comfortable in the groves of academe. The second is a study of the marriage strategies of the Esterhazy, which included a slew of child brides and bridegrooms. However, Fejes attention is focused throughout not on the children but on the marriage alliances of the adults involved.

Beloved Children is a fascinating book, though flawed by a lack of methodological rigor. The individual children, unique and irreplaceable, who stand at the heart of European conceptions of childhood, appear in this collection, but their voices are often muffled.

 



Elizabeth Zelensky
Georgetown University

Olga Kosheleva
Russian Academy of Education

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