The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World ed. by Judith Evans Grubbs and Tim Parkin with Roslynne Bell (review)

As its title suggests, The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World covers an expansive range of topical, temporal, and geographical ground. When I was presented with an opportunity to review this book, I took the “and” in the title in the Boolean sense and expected a compendium of entries that simultaneously addressed childhood and education. This is not the case, and the topical breadth of the volume is much greater than my reading of the title suggested. Authors address a variety of childhood stages and types of childhood, including the embryonic stage, early childhood, and transitions to adulthood. Childhood is explored through an array of lenses such as medicine, disability, the law, the state, the family, religion, commemoration, class, gender, and of course, education. The temporal scope of the handbook is vast, beginning in the Greek Archaic period (600–480 BCE) and ending in early Christianity (seventh century CE).

A volume that encapsulates so much diversity in time, place, and topic could lack cohesion and feel unfocused, but that is hardly the case. The volume is well organized to present the content in meaningful and useful ways to the reader. The work of any handbook is a challenge, because as the editors of this volume note, the compilation is supposed to simultaneously provide a useful overview of a topic for the novice scholar while also presenting a collection of works that reflect current approaches and perspectives that help to move the field forward. The cohesive feel of this volume comes from the editorial emphasis on the latter, and the volume’s contents are very relevant at this moment to studies of childhood in the past. This was clearly purposeful on the part of the editors as they noted:

We should emphasize that our aim in this handbook is not to provide a summation of the work done to date, though the debt of the last four decades of scholarship will be evident throughout. Rather, what we seek to achieve is the presentation of a range of approaches to build on and to help guide the future study of childhood in antiquity (5).

The breadth of this volume has scholarly advantages as well. First, the diversity of childhood experiences, roles, and definitions presented in this work challenges sweeping claims often made about the nature of childhood, children, and education. Second, it allows for cross-cultural, historical comparisons that may not necessarily lead to causal understandings of historical change, but can certainly illuminate trends and influences across a broad region and long spans of time.

This work also highlights the diversity of source material that is available to study the classical world. Various contributors have mined the rich textual record ranging from literature and poetry to scientific and legal documents in unique and stimulating ways that challenge scholars of childhood in the past to broaden their scope of inquiry. A chapter by Lesley Dean-Jones revisits the Corpus Hippocraticum to explore early ideas of pediatric medicine. Christian Laes carefully applies contemporary notions of “handicap” and “disability” to children in antiquity to investigate how families and societies reacted to “disabled” children. Similarly, Sabine Huebner offers a cross-cultural study on adoption and fosterage in the ancient eastern Mediterranean, thoughtfully applying modern concepts to ancient lives. Other scholars turn to the material record and intersect their work with scholarship on childhood that originates outside classical studies, particularly in anthropological archaeology, anthropology, and bioarchaeology. Notable contributions in this vein are Susan Langdon’s work on children as learners and producers in early Greece, which uses evidence from ceramics, figurines, and loom weights, and Lesley Beaumont’s study on gender, age, and social status in ancient Athens, which skillfully combines textual and material evidence.

As a scholar from outside classical studies, I found the Envoi by Keith Bradley to be...