Children and War in Early Modern Europe: An Introduction

The history of early modern children and youth is an expanding field, but their experience of and relation to war is relatively under-studied. This special issue addresses this lacuna in the literature with a focus on the European experience, highlighting the important role of children and young people as actors within the context of war, and the significance of representations of childhood and youth to how the meanings of war were conveyed for audiences. This introduction to the special issue situates these articles within a wider historiography of childhood and war, particularly attending to how categories of childhood and youth shaped the early modern experience of war; the value of approaches from the history of emotions to elucidating this topic; and the ways that accounts of children and war played a significant role in the production of the memory of war in subsequent generations.