Goldberg and Riddy Review

This volume of essays, emerging out of a series of seminars and a conference on the subject of medieval Youth, contributes to a field of study which has had a brief but controversial history. Half a century ago, Philippe Ariès depicted the later middle ages as a time when children were thought of as miniature adults; since then, scholars such as Shulamith Shahar, Nicholas Orme and Barbara Hanawalt have done much to change this perception, depicting a past much more like our present. Despite their work, however, much still remains unclear about ideas on childhood in later medieval Western Europe, and even more so in other places and times during the Middle Ages. The introduction to the volume gives a useful and succinct summary of critical thought since Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood was published, helping to situate the book’s essays in a larger scholarly context.

One of the most interesting ideas raised in this introduction is the problematic tension between public and private life raised in Ariès’ study of childhood, and furthered in the series of volumes comprising A History of Private Life he co-edited with Georges Duby. Some of the most intriguing essays here explore the idea of childhood in public discourse, as in Rosalynn Voaden’s contribution, which reads chronicle accounts from Richard II’s reign alongside Pearl. Voaden explores how the figure of a child in a position of power such as the young Richard II is a potential source of anxiety, since the natural principle of deferring to one’s elders has been overturned; but at the same time, such a reversal embodies the Christian teaching that the first shall be last, and the last first. Edward James, analysing Gregory of Tours’ depictions of childhood and youth, also considers how his society might have understood childhood, elucidating the resemblances between childhood innocence and sainthood. Simha Goldin provides a very useful article outlining key elements in medieval Jewish attitudes to childhood, particularly how to care for children and how to guide them into adulthood. Despite modern hostility to anti-semitic accounts of Jewish child-murder, students of the Middle Ages are still much more likely to encounter such narratives than scholarship which actually looks at the medieval Jewish community.

The wide geographical and temporal range of the essays is one of the most laudable features of this volume. Judith Jesch looks at the celebration of youthful kings in Icelandic sagas, which concentrated on their military achievements, even when to do so required some poetic licence. Frances Andrews describes how the religious order of the Humiliati in Northern Italy apparently allowed children to live with parents who had joined a religious order, without becoming full members of the order themselves.

There is, however, an emphasis on late medieval England in the volume. P.J.P. Goldberg studies the mobility of its young people, and identifies how unmarried migrant women were singled out as potentially troublesome. Kim M. Phillips explores the ‘parasexuality’ of virgin saints in its culture, as the control they exercised over their sexuality made them an object of desire for young women who wanted control over their own lives. Helen Cooper contributes an article examining advice given to youths in medieval romances, mainly English, concluding that this was included not for pedagogic, but for dramatic, purposes: the romances go on to demonstrate that a true hero does not need good advice.

Each of the articles succeeds in providing new insights into its own territory. However, not all essays provide a detailed introduction explaining the context of their discussion, and, after the introduction, there is little conversation between the different contributions. This makes the volume as a whole less accessible to a scholarly reader interested in the broad concept of ‘youth’ but not familiar with the details of the debates in all these subject areas. Nevertheless, the great variety of topics covered is still this volume’s great strength. It suggests a wide range of areas which would merit further investigation: a survey of attitudes to childhood and youth across these fields would be a highly desirable next step.

John Spence, U. of Cambridge