Beat Them When They Deserve It—Raising Children

Abstract

For many years, people believed the contention set forth by scholar Phillipe Ariès in his influential 1960 book, Centuries of Childhood: that no concept of childhood existed in the Middle Ages.1 Not until the seventeenth century, Ariès said, did the idea of childhood as a stage of life develop, and Lawrence Stone, another influential scholar, said it didn’t happen until the mid-eighteenth century.2 Other historians built on Ariès’s views, telling us that medieval parents didn’t love their young children because with such a high infant mortality rate, they couldn’t invest themselves emotionally in such a lowrisk proposition as a child, that child abandonment was widespread, that parents didn’t work very hard to keep their children alive, and that they didn’t mourn them if they died. No wonder people call them the Dark Ages! Fortunately, scholars such as Barbara Hanawalt, author of Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History, and Shulamith Shahar, who wrote Childhood in the Middle Ages, came along. By examining a wide variety of medieval sources, including court records and coroners’ reports with their fascinating details, they’ve given us a much more accurate picture of medieval family life.KeywordsCorporal PunishmentGrammar SchoolGood WomanMedieval LiteratureRaising ChildThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.