There are two claims in this article which are blurred together and that Ariès himself did as well, only in reverse.
One is affective (psychological): did medieval parents love and grieve their children? Orme and other later scholarship have settled that decisively, indeed.
The other is institutional: was childhood constituted as a distinct, protected, economically useless life stage? That's a different question entirely, and demolishing the first doesn't affect the second.
Timeframes are important and also the Hajnal-pattern Northwest Europe - the article clearly focuses on medieval England, so that is clarified. This is important because the industrial factory child will then become the historical anomaly in an opposite direction: a period where child labour was more economically extractive than what preceded it. And the more recent historic memory of the exploitative childhood is arguably one element that made Ariès's claims plausible.
The end of the article is arguably the most problematic as it overreaches: "They were ourselves" is true of grief and play and affection, but it slides from continuity of sentiment to continuity of childhood as a category, which is exactly the conflation that made Ariès's weaker claims plausible in the first place. The reconstruction of medieval life in the media (film/TV and easy reading literature) also frames medieval Europe as a place of plague, revolt and arbitrary lordly violence - which lends itself better to an image of traumatised childhood than one of middle class styled one, where parents played with kids and sent them away to apprenticeships.
Also, Orme's examples are taken from the urban, gentry, or clerical milieus and used to generalize about a population that was around 80-90 percent rural and engaged in subsistence agriculture. And who's children kept working the same strips of land their fathers worked, often the same land their grandfathers worked, because there was nowhere else to go and no craft to be apprenticed into.
I've seem similar dropped in passing regarding Roman children (think it was Cambridge History of Private Life). I think it comes from a politically-held Blank Slate point of view, with a side order of "everything is a social construct".
It's a pity because, though these were alien times, they were populated by humans like us, with the same underlying wiring and instincts... just different rules about what was and was not appropriate to express.
See e.g. Blind King John of Bohemia getting his followers killed at Crecy. Same pride and sentimentality at work, just expressed in ways we presumably would no longer approve of.
A great window into the amount of love and adoration parents had for their children, read The Pearl, a 14th century poem of grief suffered by a father for his dead daughter. I believe it’s anonymous. Deep stuff.
In spite of being very much a devotee of the enlightenment myself, the myriad ways in which its scholars have maligned and libeled their own forebears strikes me as deeply shameful and probably related to our nasty treatment of other "primitive" peoples. A kind of colonization of our own past through the dehumanization of its denizens.
When one considers that even animals and crows mourn their deceased and care for their young, it’s preposterous that medieval parents didn’t love their children and don’t mourn their deaths.
There are two claims in this article which are blurred together and that Ariès himself did as well, only in reverse.
One is affective (psychological): did medieval parents love and grieve their children? Orme and other later scholarship have settled that decisively, indeed.
The other is institutional: was childhood constituted as a distinct, protected, economically useless life stage? That's a different question entirely, and demolishing the first doesn't affect the second.
Timeframes are important and also the Hajnal-pattern Northwest Europe - the article clearly focuses on medieval England, so that is clarified. This is important because the industrial factory child will then become the historical anomaly in an opposite direction: a period where child labour was more economically extractive than what preceded it. And the more recent historic memory of the exploitative childhood is arguably one element that made Ariès's claims plausible.
The end of the article is arguably the most problematic as it overreaches: "They were ourselves" is true of grief and play and affection, but it slides from continuity of sentiment to continuity of childhood as a category, which is exactly the conflation that made Ariès's weaker claims plausible in the first place. The reconstruction of medieval life in the media (film/TV and easy reading literature) also frames medieval Europe as a place of plague, revolt and arbitrary lordly violence - which lends itself better to an image of traumatised childhood than one of middle class styled one, where parents played with kids and sent them away to apprenticeships.
Also, Orme's examples are taken from the urban, gentry, or clerical milieus and used to generalize about a population that was around 80-90 percent rural and engaged in subsistence agriculture. And who's children kept working the same strips of land their fathers worked, often the same land their grandfathers worked, because there was nowhere else to go and no craft to be apprenticed into.
I've seem similar dropped in passing regarding Roman children (think it was Cambridge History of Private Life). I think it comes from a politically-held Blank Slate point of view, with a side order of "everything is a social construct".
It's a pity because, though these were alien times, they were populated by humans like us, with the same underlying wiring and instincts... just different rules about what was and was not appropriate to express.
See e.g. Blind King John of Bohemia getting his followers killed at Crecy. Same pride and sentimentality at work, just expressed in ways we presumably would no longer approve of.
A great window into the amount of love and adoration parents had for their children, read The Pearl, a 14th century poem of grief suffered by a father for his dead daughter. I believe it’s anonymous. Deep stuff.
Can't do it. Can't even declaim Gray's Elegy without my throat catching, and unless very careful eyes welling
In spite of being very much a devotee of the enlightenment myself, the myriad ways in which its scholars have maligned and libeled their own forebears strikes me as deeply shameful and probably related to our nasty treatment of other "primitive" peoples. A kind of colonization of our own past through the dehumanization of its denizens.
When one considers that even animals and crows mourn their deceased and care for their young, it’s preposterous that medieval parents didn’t love their children and don’t mourn their deaths.
Pretty sure "three or four" was the number of children surviving to adolescence
Fascinating… I’d love to know your source for the medieval view of abortion