They are us. - 'Medieval Children' - book review

Medieval Children
Nicholas Orme
Yale University Press, $39.95, 387 pp.

Happily, the history of medieval childhood has grown beyond its infancy. Nicholas Orme's book offers a social and cultural history of children in England from Anglo-Saxon times to the sixteenth century that is both sweeping and detailed, carefully documented and yet accessible to the general reader. The text is enriched by 125 well-chosen illustrations, most of them in color. The author, a professor of history at Exeter University in England, already known to specialists for his work on medieval education, has synthesized a great deal of evidence that reveals about as much as we are able to know about children's lives in medieval England.

The result differs greatly from the provocative picture presented by the French historian Philippe Aries some forty years ago in his book Centuries of Childhood. The gist of Aries's view has now percolated into general awareness: in premodern Europe, high infant mortality left parents emotionally detached from their children; adults regarded children as miniature adults, and both inhabited a culture without much sense of childhood as a distinct period of life. Orme overturns this view in a straightforward and somewhat understated manner, showing instead that despite a host of obvious differences, in many respects medieval children were "ourselves, five hundred or a thousand years ago."

All of us were once children, so there is inherent interest in learning about medieval children and comparing our experiences now to theirs then. Orme skillfully employs this comparative approach, at times explicitly but more often implicitly, in the book's thematic arrangement. An introduction surveys different ways in which childhood was conceptualized in the Middle Ages--then as now, it was defined differently depending on the context. But regardless of the setting, infants were obviously not small children, small children were obviously not adolescents, and medieval adults knew it and acted accordingly.

Logically enough, the first chapter is called "Arriving." It addresses birth and related phenomena such as theories of fetal development and the practice of midwifery, plus baptism, godparents and their connection to the choice of children's names, and the celebration of birthdays (or the relative lack thereof). A chapter on "Family Life" reveals that childhood mortality left most families with only two or three children who reached adulthood, and that parents could be tender and loving as well as cruel and callous. Much more than in the modern West, medieval children were exposed to "danger and death": from unattended cradles attacked by pigs to injuries from hearth fires, abuse by adults, diseases such as plague, and an infant mortality rate--even in the royal family--of over 35 percent. It was a hazardous world for the young.

From this discussion largely about the social realities of children's lives, Orme moves on to concentrate more on culture. Chapter 4, "Words, Rhymes, and Songs," shows that medieval parents and nursemaids used baby talk and sang lullabies to infants, and that surviving verses point to a rich tradition of what would later be called nursery rhymes. A charming chapter on "Play" makes clear that life for medieval children was not all drudgery and discipline, especially when they were young; babies had rattles, small children had windmills, dolls, tops, and puppets, and boys had toy soldiers and played at war games as they grew older; so too, older children played cherry-stones (tossing or flipping cherry pits into a hole or at a target), marbles, and a host of ball games (including tennis, from the fifteenth century). Orme discusses "Church" in a chapter that amounts to a children-oriented synthesis of much recent scholarship on the social and cultural history of medieval Christianity. He considers children and aspects of the faith at home, in church itself, in the sacraments that marked rites of passage (including the erratically conferred confirmation), and in boys' entrance into clerical life.

As might be expected from a specialist in the history of medieval education, a chapter on "Learning to Read" contains a lucid discussion of alphabet acquisition, the religious significance of learning the alphabet (it was a prayer), and of pedagogical approaches to the teaching of syllables, words, and texts. Despite the impossibility of statistical measurement, one senses that at least some literacy was more common among late medieval children than we are accustomed to believe. The discussion of education is extended with a look at children's stories, prescriptive literature aimed at older children (in the form of works on etiquette or hunting, for example), stories about children, and the impact of printing, once William Caxton brought the craft to England in 1476.

The final chapter, "Growing Up," returns again more to social than cultural history, and considers children's transition into work, whether as agricultural laborers, apprentices, servants, or in the church; their varied status, liabilities, and rights under secular law; and their emergent sexuality in adolescence as well as the institution of marriage (contrary to popular belief, weddings were not always arranged, even among the privileged). The lack of a conclusion is somewhat regrettable: by reviewing some principal motifs in his tapestry, Orme could have reinforced by way of summary how much our knowledge of medieval children has grown.

Besides its overarching scholarly argument, Orme peoples his book with flesh-and-blood individuals and specific anecdotes, which lend the work concreteness--this is fitting in a study devoted more to children as people than to childhood as a concept. The book is so packed with stories and facts that virtually every reader is sure to come away with a greater appreciation for the ways in which we are and aren't like our medieval forebears. Indeed, sometimes the cavalcade of boys, girls, storytellers, and commentators, coupled with all manner of geographical names, can be almost too much, threatening to overwhelm the forest with the trees. Other minor shortcomings might be noted as well. The book's thematic organization, for example, means that change over time is sometimes downplayed in favor of marshaling particular kinds of evidence across half a millenium or more, which might unintentionally reinforce popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages as a largely static, monolithic era. And as an observation more than a criticism, most of Orme's evidence is necessarily drawn from the late fourteenth through the mid-sixteenth century, and from the higher rather than the humbler end of medieval society, which in both cases simply reflects the quantity and quality of the surviving sources. Yet these are quibbles. Medieval Children is a well-written, mature study that general readers will admire as much as a looking glass into a lost world as a mirror inviting comparison to children and childhood today.

Brad S. Gregory, the author of Salvation at Stake (Harvard), teaches history at Stanford.

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