Childhood as Cultural Keyword: 250 Years of Children's Works

This volume is a collection of essays based on papers delivered at the 2002 conference, "Seen and Heard: The Place of Children in Early Modern Europe 1550–1800." The fourteen essays in the collection cover topics as varied as the street-life play of children in eighteenth-century Germany to the cultural power of the child actor in Renaissance England. These essays have retained the virtue of a conference paper in that each is written with a clear direction and focus; at the same time, each piece contains a wealth of historical discussion that locates "childhood" within class, gender, socio-political, religious, and literary matrices of meaning. Although the essays in this collection do not introduce new approaches to children's literature and culture, they do introduce new texts and little-known documents and show how to fit these works into ongoing considerations of literary and social history. Because almost two thirds of the collection covers eighteenth-century works, Childhood and Children's Books is of particular value to scholars interested in the Enlightenment.

Few of these essays are about literature in the traditional sense. Rather, they see "childhood" as a Raymond Williams–style cultural keyword, as a term whose history is a record of "a shared body of words and meanings, in our most general discussions . . . of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society" (Williams 13). Fittingly, Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore's introduction overviews changing scholarly conceptions of children's literature and history. As the editors note, scholars now see "the boundary between subcultures and the wider social environment as fluid," and are compelled to move beyond "simple oppositions between childhood and adolescence or childhood and adulthood" into more nuanced and historically situated inquiries (4). Children are "liminal beings" who, when recognized as a special category of humanity, have "the potential to reveal deeper truths about the social structure" (5). For purposes of discussion, I will group the essays, which cover 250 years of socio-cultural history, into four categories: essays about specific children, children's books, pedagogy, and childhood.

Three essays focus on actual children and their texts. These essays use a specific child as the jumping-off point for cultural analyses. Michael Witmore examines a late fifteenth-century witch trial in which several children accused neighbors of being witches. Witmore shows how the child status of the accusers gave the use of bodily evidence a special kind of validity. Michael Mascuch's presentation of the spiritual awakening and ministry of a seventeenth-century adolescent, Sarah Wight, challenges assumptions that Protestantism is a story of reading and writing. In Wight's childlike body and religious ministry, "embodiment and gesture" are more important than text (104). In "Otto's Watch," by Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, a German boy's day book initiates a larger discussion about late eighteenth-century conceptions of time.

Only three essays in Childhood and Children's Books cover what is traditionally considered children's literature, i.e., books written for child readers. This fact is a good indication of the collection's orientation toward historical and cultural rather than literary work. Cynthia J. Koepp's delightful essay on Abbè Pluche's children's encyclopedia, Spectacle de la nature (1732–51), demonstrates how this fascinating book of dialogues, experiments, illustrations, and other genres champions Enlightenment thinking in that it emphasizes experiential learning. As an example of such hands-on learning, Koepp quotes a vivid if gruesome experiment in which a young reader is encouraged to take the "eye of a sheep or ox freshly killed," trim off its outer covering "down to the final membrane that contains the liquid," and hold a piece of parchment paper behind it. The child will be able to see inverted images through the sheep's eye on the paper; thus, the experiment demonstrates that the human eye sees images inverted (169). The other two essays on children's literature cover the same text, The History of Little...