Medieval Children's Literature.pdf

Articles

Medieval Children's Literature: Its Possibility

and Actuality

Gillian Adams

Years ago, while taking a graduate course in medieval Latin, I was

struck by the wide disparity in the difficulty of the works that were

assigned, a disparity that often did not coincide with other variables

such as the historical period or the author's social class, profession,

or region. In that course it was assumed that all the texts we ad-

dressed, whatever their degree of difficulty, were written for adults. I

concluded at the time that there must have been a substantial num-

ber of adult readers with literacy skills below the third-grade level. I

have since become convinced that some of the works we were look-

ing at were written not only or even initially for semiliterate adults,

a group often equated with children in the earlier periods, but for

children.1 In order to support my claim that such works should be

considered children's literature I draw on evidence provided by cul-

tural and literary historians to dispute two widely held convictions

that have hampered previous critical and theoretical studies. The first

is the nonspecialist belief that there can be no medieval children's lit-

erature because a conception of childhood as we know it did not exist

in the Middle Ages. The second is the specialist assertion, typified

by the medievalist Bennett Brockman, that "the Middle Ages made

no provision for a separate literature for children, apart from peda-

gogical texts designed to teach them to read, to write, to cipher, and

An earlier version of this essay was read at the Second Biennial Conference on Mod-

ern Critical Approaches to Children's Literature, Nashville, Tennessee, April 10-12,

1997. I wish to thank Claudia Nelson and Marilynn Olson for their ideas for clarifi-

cations, transitions, and rephrasings; Ruth Bottigheimer and Elizabeth Scala for their

bibliographical suggestions; and my two anonymous readers for further assistance. All

translations in this essay are my own.

Hollins College).

2 Gillian Adams

to behave civilly" ("Juvenile" 18). Finally, I discuss the ways in which

some medieval works and their contexts indicate a child audience and

why such works warrant further exploration as children's literature.

First it is necessary to dispose of the myths about medieval children

that have prevented scholars from seriously considering that a litera-

ture for them might exist. There are three initial barriers, primarily

hypothetical, to recognizing medieval children's literature. To begin

with, there is the still-widespread belief in the "Aries thesis," in brief

that childhood was "discovered" in the seventeenth century (accord-

ing to Philippe Aries) or the eighteenth century (according to some

other researchers). Aries, as he admits in his introduction to Cen-

turies of Childhood, was not a specialist in the periods for which he

claims that "the idea of [sentiment, a separate feeling about] child-

hood did not exist" (128), and in fact, if his book is deconstructed,

it is evident that there was a cognizance of childhood throughout

those earlier periods. What his thesis amounts to is that previous cen-

turies thought quite differently about children than did seventeenth-

century France. A statement of this nature is true for any time and

for any region even today: for example, the conception of childhood

is different for the first half of the twentieth century and the second;

for the rich, the urban poor, and the comfortable, usually suburban,

middle class; and most notably for Americans and those who live in

countries where poor children go to work in factories at six or seven

and parents sell children into prostitution and even slavery.2 Never-

theless, Aries's insistence on the social construction of childhood and

on not naively reading the past in terms of the present is an essen-

tial contribution to the study of past children's literatures. His work

has informed many subsequent critical and historical studies and has

given rise to the examination of specific works within a wide-ranging

sociohistorical context that includes nonliterary texts.

It was not long after the Aries book appeared (in 1960 in France

and in 1962 in English translation) that specialists in the medieval

and early modern periods began to point out what was wrong with

its ideas and with the data used to support them. As early as 1975

Meradith McMunn wrote in Children's Literature, on the basis of her

examination of the description of children in French medieval litera-

ture, that Aries's claims are "not supported by a close look at medi-

Medieval Children's Literature 3

eval literature" ("Children" 54). She was followed by C. H. Talbot,

who asserted in Children's Literature in 1977 that "anyone who is at all

conversant with the biographies of the saints; with the lives of abbots,

monks, and nuns; or with the chronicles of monasteries and cathe-

dral churches written between the eighth and the twelfth century will

realize that such a theory [as Aries's] is untenable" (17). Books criti-

cizing Aries soon followed: recent works accessible to nonspecialists

and available in paperback are John Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers

(1988, see particularly 36-38), Shulamith Shahar's Childhood in the

Middle Ages (1990), and Barbara A. Hanawalt s Growing up in Medieval

London (1993).3 By 1995, Hugh Cunningham can comment in Chil-

dren and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 that disproving Aries

is "an easy goal" and that what is needed is greater attention to "the

contradictions and changes over time and place in medieval thought

and practice" (40). In short, medieval and early modern scholars are

unanimous in discarding the Aries thesis, in spite of the interest of

many of his observations; it is time for children's literature scholars

to do the same.

Aries's claim that childhood as we now think of it did not exist be-

fore the seventeenth or the eighteenth century as well as his chapters

on the ages of life, the discovery of childhood (in art), and children's

dress have resulted in two additional barriers to locating medieval

children's literature. The first is the idea that parents did not love (or

were afraid to love) their children because infant and child mortality

was so high. One finds this claim made, in spite of ample evidence

to the contrary, for periods ranging from antiquity through the eigh-

teenth century. Such a claim is logically absurd; for the greater part

of human existence, life for most has been nasty, brutish, and short.

Death rates have often been almost as high for adults as for chil-

dren, particularly in the case of childbearing women and warriors,

yet there is no lack of early literature about love. In fact, a high value

was placed on children and on parental love (see Boswell, Hanawalt,

Shahar, and Talbot passim), although often on a sliding scale: some

childrenÂ—for example, male heirs of the wealthy and powerfulÂ—

were more valuable than others, and a separate literature for them

was more likely to develop and to survive.

The second and more damaging idea, as far as children's litera-

ture studies is concerned, is based primarily on Aries's discussion of

medieval dress and art and his claim that children were viewed as

"miniature adults." Aries was not an art historian, and his interpreta-

4 Gillian Adams

tion of the evidence he presents is flawed, given that for the period

he discusses artists were not interested in realism as we conceive of it.

There is other medieval art, notably sculpture and manuscript illus-

tration, that better represents the child as distinct from the adult. In

Aries's day, in contrast to the present, European children and some-

times adolescents were strongly differentiated by their clothing (for

example, short pants and school smocks), so it would be natural for

him to be struck by the similarity of adults' and children's clothing in

medieval art. Moreover, Aries's claim that childhood was not viewed

as a separate stage of life is not supported by the ample evidence

of the interest shown during the Middle Ages in discussing and de-

fining the ages and characteristics of infantia (birth to six or seven

years), pueritia (seven to twelve for girls, to fourteen for boys), ado-

lescentia (the period between biological and social puberty and legal

and social majority), and Juventus (see, for example, Shahar 22 and

notes; Hanawalt, passim).

Nevertheless, these myths about medieval children persist. For ex-

ample, in the most recent edition of The Pleasures of Children's Lit-

erature (1996), although Perry Nodelman cites Pollock's and Shahar's

studies, he continues to assert that in the earlier periods "a different

conception of childhood operated, [and] that conception required

no special literature for children" (70, emphasis in original).4 If we

contend that a society whose conception of childhood is alien to our

own is incapable of developing children's literature, we should also

argue that there could have been no children's literature in the eigh-

teenth and nineteenth centuries in England and the United States

either, since the ideas operative then about the "innocent" child and

about family structure, clothing, age- and gender-appropriate activi-

ties, and social status are not identical to today's. In fact, there is no

logical reason why societies with constructions of childhood that dif-

fer widely from our own (for example, China) should not develop

literature for children, whether or not they actually do. To assert that

only owr conception of childhood can result in children's literature, a

literature that only we are able to judge as literature in terms of its

literary value (which for some reason must include "entertainment"),

is the kind of cultural imperialism and ideological colonialism that

modern critics, Nodelman among them, often seek to avoid (see

Nodelman's often-cited essay "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism,

and Children's Literature").

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