Chaucer's Children and the Medieval Idea of Childhood

Abstract

edged; that their parents did not treat them as individuals and erected emotional barriers against attachment because chances of survival were slim. As late as 1979, this view persisted in some quarters: we find Barbara Tuchman, for example, sug- gesting that maternal love may atrophy under certain unfavor- able conditions—frequent childbearing puts less value on the product, she claims (50). According to Aries, the family was not a vital social unit; the essential units were the community of lower-class workers on the one hand and the well-to-do households on the other. Life was conducted in public, the focus being the communal street often seen in late medieval art. After infancy there was no distinction of child or adolescent from adults, no awareness of any essential differences between such age groups. Aries further maintained that after the insensitivity of the Middle Ages there came toward the end of the fifteenth century an awareness of the child as droll, a source of amusement, and that this is the first time that we can speak of a concept of childhood. Against the background of the findings of Aries and others concerning the medieval idea of childhood, I shall argue that in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer may be found clear evidence of the poet's acknowledgment of both the vulnerability and the resilience of children. When, in Chaucer, children are featured as part of a narrative—in the five tales of the Prioress, the Physician, the Man of Law, the Clerk, and the Monk, for example—they are associated with suffering and the working of evil in the world. We look in vain for a detailed picture of childhood in the sense of family events and routine, the various stages of education or children's games. Instead, the presence of children almost always intensifies the reader's or listener's experience of cruelty, isolation, and pain. In contrast, however, to the well-documented presenta- and offers a tantalizing glimpse of Chaucer's own experience of fatherhood. The most obvious difference between these examples of interest in the child's view of the world and the presentation of children in the five tales mentioned above is the marked change in tone. Pessimism is replaced by a sense of energy and buoyancy. The very fact of writing for his son argues an awareness of a child's possible enjoyment of reading, as does the evidence that Sir Thopas and Melibee might also have been meant, at least in part, for young readers. With the benefit of later studies and at a distance of over