Nurture and Neglect: Childhood in Sixteenth-Century Northern England by Loretta A. Dolan (review)

Loretta Dolan’s project is structured by two correctives to research into pre-industrial childhood, outlined in her introduction. In the more straightforward of the two, she addresses the bias towards southern sources in claims for ‘national trends’ by working with records from the dioceses of Chester, Durham, and York. In the other, she contends that Philippe Ariès’s claim that the Middle Ages lacked a concept of ‘childhood’ does not equate to a lack of care or affection for the young; consequently, the presence or absence of affection in primary texts should not be conflated anachronistically with practices expressing nurture, or, in its absence, neglect.

The first chapter describes her sources and details the challenges of interpreting the rich incidental information about children that they contain. The second surveys notions of nurture and neglect gleaned from conduct literature, Church teachings, and community practices, as well as evidence of their audiences. In the next four chapters, Dolan works through child marriage; opportunities for education according to social status and gender; apprenticeship; and parental deprivation. The cases she discusses and the patterns that they reveal are compelling. Her analysis of child marriages in particular addresses an absence in existing scholarship and illuminates the intersections between economic concerns, community dynamics, social conventions, and family life. This is also true of her chapter on parental deprivation, in which she determinedly expands on existing compartmentalized treatments of parentless children, rewarding the reader with an evocative sense of the diverse situations in which such children found themselves.

Dolan’s analysis sketches a world where even very young children could be found in many contexts outside the nuclear family, from better-known situations such as apprenticeship, wardship, service, and formal education through to child marriages, informal learning spaces, impoverished children lodged with socially marginalized adults, or begging and drifting in the company of non-related adults. The lack of choice children had in these arrangements emerges as a prominent theme—physical discipline was routinely implemented; married children knew that their value to adult family members took precedence over their own wishes; children without family or community connections could be compelled into criminal activity by opportunistic adults; failure to achieve in education or comply with the demands of a master could result in immediate suffering and impede future prosperity. Dolan recognizes the pervasive authoritarian subordination of children, but her interpretation of individual cases sits awkwardly with her stated desire to connect with lived experience and promote children’s voices (pp. 14–15).

When Dolan describes the violence inflicted on apprentice Thomas Lincolne with a variety of hard objects, she claims that if his master ‘had used reasonable weapons like the rod, then, it is likely that the boy would have accepted his punishment as being justified even if he probably did not like it’ (p. 55). The processes through which a child internalizes a belief that he or she deserves to be hurt are, presumably, the same now as then. Current thinking about child development does not support Dolan’s assertion. She states that students who were compelled to take part in ritualized humiliation ‘participated in the government of the school by playing a part in the disciplinary procedures’ (p. 132), without accounting for the punitive alternatives they might have faced for refusing. Her caution when interpreting references to emotions leads her to conjecture that a girl who may have shaped testimony to emancipate herself from a forced marriage perhaps engages in a ‘ploy’ (p. 101). This term seems unnecessarily judgemental, given Dolan’s insistence that in cases of child marriage, ‘almost without exception, all people appearing in the court for annulment […] did not consent and were forced or intimidated into saying their marriage vows by parents or kin’ (p. 99). Similarly problematic is her euphemistic description of sexual relations between young female servants and men including the master as ‘unwanted attention’ or ‘attention foisted upon female servants’ (p. 162). In...