Seen and Sometimes Heard: Piteous and Pert Children in Medieval English Literature

Abstract

Seen and Sometimes Heard:Piteous and Pert Children in Medieval English Literature Brian S. Lee (bio) Philippe Ariès' influential notion that medieval people, having no concept of childhood, took little if any interest in their children has been frequently criticized, notably by Linda Pollock and Barbara Hanawalt. As long ago as 1977, Jerome Kroll offered "evidence from monastic writings, legal attitudes, and medical treatises that children were viewed and treated differently than adults, and that this reflected a conceptual difference, an awareness of a specialness of childhood" (391). But the value of Ariès' largely discredited thesis is that he established the importance of historical difference in concepts of childhood, and, as James Kincaid points out, is "aiming at de-naturing 'the child,' exposing our own constructing apparatus," which is apparently so radically different from medieval constructions that it fails to recognize those constructions as relating to childhood at all (62). This is because the prevailing modern conception of childhood, as summed up (and criticized) by Chris Jenks in his recent book Childhood, takes for granted that the child is not adult, that the child is not guilty, and that the child is not capable (123, 131).1 The modern concept of childhood is supposed to have developed after what Edward Shorter calls "a surge of sentiment" (15) and Lawrence Stone "a rise of affective individualism" (222 ff.) encouraged parents to take a much more intense interest than formerly in their children's moral and social development.2 Before the later eighteenth century, says Peter Coveney, the child did not exist "as an important and continuous theme in English literature" (29). I will argue, however, on the basis of evidence drawn mainly from late-medieval poems and plays, that children are a significant and continuing presence in English literature from as early as the Middle Ages and that they function not merely as "piteous" victims but often as "pert" participants in the narratives concerning them. Children in medieval English literature are noticed often enough to bear out the conclusions of historians such as Hanawalt that they were the objects of considerable care and interest in the Middle Ages. If they are usually victims, like Shakespeare's Arthur or Mamillius, that is because the pathos they evoke is frequently portrayed in literature.3 The feelings of parents who found their children drowned in a well, pond, or ditch, necessary hazards for children in and around a medieval village, are tellingly implied in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, where a mother finds her murdered son's body in a cesspit: With moodres pitee in hir brest enclosed,She gooth, as she were half out of hir mynde,To every place where she hath supposedBy liklihede hir litel child to fynde;And evere on Cristes mooder meeke and kyndeShe cride. (VII, 593-98) Children are sufficiently rare in Chaucer's poetry to be worth remarking when they do appear.4 In The Legend of Good Women the suppression of the well-known ending of the tale of Jason's perfidy makes the allusion to Medea's two young children in a single line (1657), startling in its brevity because it says nothing of what informed readers will know she is about to do to them. The version in The Monk's Tale of Dante's horrifying story of Ugolino is similarly restrained; in the interests of pathos, the children touchingly express their willingness to be eaten by their starving father and die quietly in his lap, but Chaucer does not spoil the pathos by the disgusting addition of cannibalism that Dante includes (VII, 2447-54). The best known of Biblical child victims is doubtless Isaac, who is saved by a divinely provided substitute just as his father is about to sacrifice him. The author of the Brome mystery play of Abraham and Isaac makes as much capital as possible out of the child's meek obedience and mounting fear in order to appeal to the emotions of the mothers in his audience, especially those who may have lost young children; see lines 449-55. Isaac and the Prioress's "litel clergeoun" (VII, 503) are adult idealizations of childhood innocence quite...