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  • 4. Children and Literature in Medieval France
  • Meradith Tilbury McMunn (bio)

In France, as elsewhere in Europe in the Middle Ages, it is difficult to distinguish a separate body of literature which was intended primarily for the use of children. Most of the literature which can be shown to have been created especially for medieval children was didactic, although there is some evidence of an oral rhyming-literature composed by children at play. The didactic works are of two main types. Children's primers contained the alphabet, excerpts from Scripture, and edifying catalogues of deadly sins, principal virtues, and the like, but they contained little that could be called entertaining. Besides the primers, a second type of didactic literature specifically designed for children seems to have been the courtesy books. Such works generally consisted of anecdotes with explicit morals and lists of maxims concerning the rules of etiquette. They were intended for boys approximately ten to fifteen years of age, many of whom served as waiters and valets in the homes of wealthy patrons. The advice would be particularly useful to those who aspired to advantageous marriages or positions of social importance. Young girls' courtesy books were similarly instructive, warning them of the folly of being too generous with their affections and the wisdom of obeying parents and guardians. A realistic if somewhat cynical attitude toward them is reflected in the following excerpt from a thirteenth-century [End Page 51] fabliau: "Still, she is our child; so we must take care that we marry her and make her an honest woman."1

Besides these two types of didactic books, there exists a subgroup of didactic pieces for children—those written for the instruction of medieval children by their own parents, for example the letters from Queen Dhuoda to her son, the Enseignements of St. Louis to his children, and the book of the Knight of La Tour Landry for his daughters.2 These works are significant for the history of children in medieval French literature and culture since they are proof that in France parents from as early as the ninth century were concerned to provide written guidance for their own children.

Moreover, some evidence exists that there was in the Middle Ages a type of poetry created by children at play, similar to the rhymes children invent when jumping rope. Children's rhyming of this type is infrequently preserved in medieval literature, but a rare example has been incorporated in a thirteenth-century fabliau. Children running down the street are depicted chanting: "Gardez le fol, gardez le fol / Qui tient la maçue en son col."3 These verses have, it is obvious, the rhythm of the comptine, and it has been argued that this four-stress rhythm is common to all children's "nursery rhymes."4 This children's rhyming is, however, necessarily a literature of limited scope, and it is still accurate to say, with the other panelists here today, that there seems to have been no secular literature written or redacted primarily for the entertainment of children. It is probable that the "children's literature" of medieval France was simply the literature of the entire culture.

Medieval literature itself provides evidence concerning the kinds of literature medieval French children enjoyed and their means of access to it. They were a part of the audience who heard the minstrels sing the chansons-de-geste, as the twelfth-century author Wace attests.5 Children, moreover, knew these songs and legends and were able to sing them for themselves like the boy in Le Garçon et l'aveugle.6 Children could also read, as we have heard from previous panelists, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries some of their reading matter included the popular vernacular romances. In Yvain Chrétien de Troyes narrates a charming scene in which the hero enters a garden where a young girl is reading such a romance to her parents; the young girl in Li Chevaliers as deus espees reads a romance to knights and maidens.7 Evidence of the specific reading preferences of children in their leisure time, though of a later date, is given indirectly by Montaigne, who writes in...

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