Looks at the lives of children, from birth to adolescence, in medieval England.

This volume will be a critical anthology of primary texts whose main audience was children and/or adolescents in the medieval period. Texts will include theoretical and interpretative introductions and commentary.

This book presents a synthetic history of the family--the most basic building block of medieval Jewish communities--in Germany and northern France during the High Middle Ages. Concentrating on the special roles of mothers and children, it also advances recent efforts to write a comparative Jewish-Christian social history. Elisheva Baumgarten draws on a rich trove of primary sources to give a full portrait of medieval Jewish family life during the period of childhood from birth to the beginning of formal education at age seven. Illustrating the importance of understanding Jewish practice in the context of Christian society and recognizing the shared foundations in both societies, Baumgarten's examination of Jewish and Christian practices and attitudes is explicitly comparative. Her analysis is also wideranging, covering nearly every aspect of home life and childrearing, including pregnancy, midwifery, birth and initiation rituals, nursing, sterility, infanticide, remarriage, attitudes toward mothers and fathers, gender hierarchies, divorce, widowhood, early education, and the place of children in the home, synagogue, and community. A richly detailed and deeply researched contribution to our understanding of the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, Mothers and Children provides a key analysis of the history of Jewish families in medieval Ashkenaz.

Kids Those Days is a collection of interdisciplinary research into medieval childhood. Contributors investigate abandonment and abuse, fosterage and guardianship, criminal behavior and child-rearing, child bishops and sainthood, disabilities and miracles, and a wide variety of other subjects related to medieval children.

Inquiring into childhood is one of the most appropriate ways to address the perennial and essential question of what it is that makes human beings – each of us – human. In Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, Aasgaard, Horn, and Cojocaru bring together the groundbreaking work of nineteen leading scholars in order to advance interdisciplinary historical research into ideas about children and childhood in the premodern history of European civilization. The volume gathers rich insights from fields as varied as pedagogy and medicine, and literature and history. Drawing on a range of sources in genres that extend from philosophical, theological, and educational treatises to law, art, and poetry, from hagiography and autobiography to school lessons and sagas, these studies aim to bring together these diverse fields and source materials, and to allow the development of new conversations. This book will have fulfilled its unifying and explicit goal if it provides an impetus to further research in social and intellectual history, and if it prompts both researchers and the interested wider public to ask new questions about the experiences of children, and to listen to their voices.

In this lively and accessible book, Colin Heywood explores the changing experiences and perceptions of childhood from the early Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century. Heywood examines the different ways in which people have thought about childhood as a stage of life, the relationships of children with their families and peers, and the experiences of young people at work, in school and at the hands of various welfare institutions. The aim is to place the history of children and childhood firmly in its social and cultural context, without losing sight of the many individual experiences that have come down to us in diaries, autobiographies and oral testimonies. Heywood argues that there is a cruel paradox at the heart of childhood in the past. On the one hand, material conditions for children have generally improved in the West, however belatedly and unevenly, and they are now more valued than in the past. On the other hand, the business of preparing for adulthood has become more complicated in urban and industrial societies, as the young face a bewildering array of choices and expectations. A History of Childhood will be an essential introduction to the subject for students of history, the social sciences and cultural studies.

Both Western and Chinese intellectuals have long derided filial piety tales as an absurd and grotesque variety of children’s literature. Selfless Offspring offers a fresh perspective on the genre, revealing the rich historical worth of these stories by examining them in their original context: the tumultuous and politically fragmented early medieval era (A.D. 100–600). At a time when no Confucian virtue was more prized than filial piety, adults were moved and inspired by tales of filial children. The emotional impact of even the most outlandish actions portrayed in the stories was profound, a measure of the directness with which they spoke to major concerns of the early medieval Chinese elite. In a period of weak central government and powerful local clans, the key to preserving a household’s privileged status was maintaining a cohesive extended family. Keith Knapp begins this far-ranging and persuasive study by describing two related historical trends that account for the narrative’s popularity: the growth of extended families and the rapid incursion of Confucianism among China’s learned elite. Extended families were better at maintaining their status and power, so patriarchs found it expedient to embrace Confucianism to keep their large, fragile households intact. Knapp then focuses on the filial piety stories themselves—their structure, historicity, origin, function, and transmission—and argues that most stem from the oral culture of these elite extended families. After examining collections of filial piety tales, known as Accounts of Filial Children, he shifts from text to motif, exploring the most common theme: the "reverent care" and mourning of parents. In the final chapter, Knapp looks at the relative burden that filiality placed on men and women and concludes that, although women largely performed the same filial acts as men, they had to go to greater extremes to prove their sincerity.