Introduction: Medieval Children's Literature

Abstract

Introduction:Medieval Children's Literature Susan S. Morrison (bio) As a medievalist specializing in gender studies, I first became interested in children in the Middle Ages in the early '90s. When I attended the annual Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, the largest international medieval conference, I realized that scholars in this field were then paying little interest to children. While individual papers might allude to or address children and childhood, no single panel specifically focused on them. A colleague and I proposed a session for the 1993 conference entitled "Children in the Middle Ages: Literary and Historical Perspectives." As this session was very successful, we followed up the panel in 1994, adding "Art Historical Perspectives" to the title and hoping to attract scholars from various disciplines to have a genuinely interdisciplinary panel. Again, the panel was well attended, indicating a great deal of interest in the topic and the desire for more scholarly work to be undertaken. After 1994, my work took a different turn. I have just finished an interdisciplinary book on gender and pilgrimage, focusing on women pilgrims in late medieval England.1 This research has unexpectedly brought me full circle back to children, since pilgrimage was frequently undertaken for familial reasons, especially on behalf of children. Moreover, children are often the focus of medieval miracle stories. To understand pilgrimage properly in its historical and social context, then, we need to understand medieval family dynamics. Hence my interest in guest-editing this special issue of the Quarterly. While this special issue cannot be expected to examine all the appropriate literature from the Middle Ages, I hope that these essays will provoke scholars to seek out other works that could qualify as children's literature or that open a new window into medieval childhood. In an article published in the New Yorker on 14 April 1997 and entitled "Making the Grade," James Atlas writes: "The era of the child," as sociologists refer to our offspring-centered age, is fairly new. For centuries, no one paid much attention to children. Too many died, for one thing. American frontier parents, knowing that maybe two-thirds of their children weren't going to make it, developed a prophylactic indifference. In Europe, neglect was a given. As Philippe Aries documents in his classic "Centuries of Childhood," children in the Middle Ages were relegated to the lowly status of beggars. (36) As Atlas's comments illustrate, the work of Philippe Ariès has entered popular culture as irrevocably true. Ariès contended that childhood and adolescence as distinct categories did not exist in the Middle Ages and that the small child was not valued, noticed, or known. But literary and historical texts abundantly disprove Ariès' influential work. The work of medieval historians has for some time challenged his view, arguing that children and adolescents were thought to have particular roles in medieval culture that were distinct from those of adults. Additionally, much material exists that argues for the intense love and affection of parents for children and infants, despite a mortality rate higher than that in our own century (see, for example, Holmes; McLaughlin; Forsyth; S. Wilson; Boswell; Atkinson; Parsons and Wheeler; Medieval Feminist Newsletter special issue; Shahar; and Hanawalt, London and Ties). Take Shulamith Shahar's book Childhood in the Middle Ages, which argues that parent-child relationships are culturally constructed and that the medieval period is no exception. Children were seen as distinctly different from adults. While some medieval writers, such as Augustine, emphasized that children were born in a state of sin, others, such as Bartholomaeus Anglicus, argued for the purity of children (Shahar, ch. 1 ). Typically childhood was further divided into three stages: infantia, birth to seven years; pueritia, seven to twelve for girls and seven to fourteen for boys; adolescentia, twelve or fourteen to adulthood (22). While Shahar's evidence mainly comes from the later Middle Ages, as early as the eighth century Hugeberc of Hildesheim, a Saxon abbess, delineates differences between childhood and youth. In the first travel book written by an Anglo-Saxon, The Hodoeporicon of St. Willibald, she tells of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land of her kinsman Bishop Willibald. Describing...