Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800

Andrea Immel, Michael Witmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135473396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This volume of 14 original essays by historians and literary scholars explores childhood and children's books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800. The collection aims to reposition childhood as a compelling presence in early modern imagination--a ready emblem of innocence, mischief, and playfulness. The essays offer a wide-ranging basis for reconceptualizing the development of a separate literature for children as central to evolving early modern concepts of human development and socialization. Among the topics covered are constructs of literacy as revealed by the figure of Goody Two Shoes, notions of pedagogy and academic standards, a reception study of children's reading based on book purchases made by Rugby school boys in the late eighteenth-century, an analysis of the first international best-seller for children, the abbe Pluche's Spectacle de la nature, and the commodification of child performers in Jacobean comedies.

1

INTRODUCTION

Little Differences: Children, Their Books, and Culture in the Study of Early Modern Europe

ANDREA IMMEL MICHAEL WITMORE

There has been no shortage of writing about children and childhood since Philippe Ariès advanced the controversial hypothesis in L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime (1960) that the idea of childhood did not exist until the early modern period.¹ Since then, the substance of Ariès's argument has been refuted: clearly there was something like a distinct phase of life called childhood (l'enfance, das Kindheit, pueritas) in the European Middle Ages that was recognized and accommodated in various regions of medieval culture.² But even if some of Ariès's claims no longer stand, his underlying assumption—that childhood and its subculture are always, in some sense, made and not found—has become more compelling over the years.³ Indeed, the notion that different constructs of childhood emerge in multiple spheres of social and cultural activity has spurred a great deal of scholarship in the last half century.⁴ Ariès's legacy can be traced across disciplinary lines in the work of historians, literary critics and art historians who, regardless of their position on Ariès's specific historical claims, have put his methodological assumption of “historical constraint” to a new, broader use.

Indeed, the next chapter in the “history of the history of childhood” reads something like a romance tale. The itinerary here is not quite a wandering one, but it has a certain expansiveness that has come to mark scholarship within children's studies over the last twenty years. As Ariès's findings continue to be debated among revisionists in different fields, the study of children and their culture has moved out of the relatively enclosed spaces of the nursery and the school onto more public stages where children had substantially more than walk-on parts to play. In the case of Reformation studies, scholars have documented the manifold ways in which the domains of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood overlapped in the lives of individuals. The 1522–1532 correspondence of the Nuremburg apprentice Michael Behaim, for example, reveals how this teenaged boy struggled to insure his future livelihood as a merchant, clashing with an obstructive master and a mother whose remarriage he feared would jeopardize his paternal inheritance.⁵ A more surprising convergence of child and adult roles has been documented in studies of several female prophets who were active in England during the mid-seventeenth century. A godly Puritan girl such as eleven-year-old Martha Hatfield, the subject of James Fisher's The Wise Virgin, acquired real spiritual authority when her wondrous utterances and extraordinary physical sufferings engaged debates about the afterlife and the ideal relationship between church and community.⁶ In eighteenth-century studies, moreover, we find representations of children in portraits, conversation pieces and genre paintings being discussed as sites for the articulation of ideas about the family, moral education, and socialization.⁷ Analyses of the circulation and reception of children's books, whether their focus is a massive picture encyclopedia, the materials for young readers available at circulating libraries, or the earliest attempts to write critical histories of children's books, try to cast new light on the dissemination of cultural values within the public sphere.⁸ And the study of early modern children's books—which has traditionally focused on the emergence of children's books as an autonomous literary genre and distinctive publishing market—has been integrated into major national book history projects such as the Histoire de l'édition française and Cambridge History of the Book in Britain.⁹

Drawn from an expanding, multidisciplinary field, this new scholarly work is exemplary in its holistic treatment of children and their relationship to the broader culture, an approach mirroring approaches to the study of children in modern society, such as the one proposed by Gertrud Lenzer, founder of the interdisciplinary Children's Studies Program at Brooklyn College. In addition to highlighting the role children play in the maintenance of class structures, Lenzer contends that the experiences of individual children can help us understand broader contemporary social dynamics.¹⁰ We would argue that a similar intellectual agenda is appropriate for the investigation of children in the past. Although much of recent historical work has thrived on isolating the culture of childhood's unique qualities at a given time, it is just as important to connect those issues of particular relevance to a child's situation to those circulating in the wider culture. Children's studies cannot be an island, although it may have sometimes seemed so during the years following the publication of Centuries of Childhood, as revisionist critics worked to establish the distinctness of children as a sociohistoric group.

It is thus significant that many of the writers in this collection go out of their way to link early modern representations of children and their experiences to broader intellectual, economic, and social trends. Claire Busse, for example, presents a nuanced view of the boy actor's economic circumstances within the early-seventeenth-century theater company, correlating his status as his employer's “property” with the dramaturgical function of the roles he played. A different type of early modern child actor emerges in the essays by Michael Mascuch and Michael Witmore, who investigate the ways in which the extraordinary behavior of children possessed either by the Holy Spirit or demonic forces was made intelligible within broader evidentiary schemes of value. In such seemingly disparate situations, the actions of children—whether subject to a divine or diabolical force—are shown to have been convincing or self-authenticating precisely to the degree that they seemed spontaneous or uncontrolled, an unexpected twist on the old idea that children lack credibility and authority because they are not entirely in control of their own behavior.

Such “lateral moves” within children's studies have been enabled by recent methodological shifts in the humanities and social sciences. Perhaps the most important of these has been the impulse to “historicize” within literary and cultural studies (not to mention historiography), an impulse that leads scholars to situate particular elements of a given culture within broader networks of symbolic and material practices. Within this historicist perspective, developments in one part of a culture are rarely seen as isolated, but instead linked to other cultural domains, which in turn form a broader network of influences. Thus, in this volume, Kristina Straub argues that the tendency in eighteenth-century England to consider household servants as children regardless of their chronological ages can best be explained by appealing to ideas about the proper relationships between parent and child, master and servant, household and market, and household and state. The synthetic nature of Straub's work demonstrates that there is usually a public aspect to dealings with children within the private sphere (however constructed), and, thus, that it is also reasonable to look for the ways those dealings may resonate in other discursive contexts.

This tendency to see the boundary between children's subculture and the wider social environment as fluid has, moreover, compelled scholars to move beyond simple oppositions between childhood and adolescence or childhood and adulthood that were so important in the early stages of research in the social history of childhood. A broader range of categories must be introduced, since it is usually a bundled set of associations—childishness with, say, servitude or femininity—that structures action and perception at any given time. For example, Erica Fudge demonstrates how early modern discussions of a child's laughter helped shape crucial early modern philosophical distinctions about “human-ness” at a time when adult faculties were systematically opposed to those of animals and children. From those distinctions, Fudge then shows how teaching a child to regulate his outbursts of laughter was an essential part of the educational process. In doing so, she provides an important new context for thinking about the role of pleasure in Reformation theories of education. Similarly, William McCarthy shows how the pedagogical strategies adopted by three late Enlightenment teachers for individual pupils reflect a key distinction between the teachable and the unteachable, one that continues to inform contemporary pedagogical debates.

This type of work owes an obvious debt to Michel Foucault, who advocated broad analysis of discourses and institutions on the assumption that they were elements in some larger “episteme” or reservoir of knowledge that could itself be identified and studied. (Ironically, Foucault himself did not write about children, even in a work such as Discipline and Punishment, in which some extended consideration of their situation would have been relevant.) Equally applicable is Pierre Bourdieu's work on the forms of social authority and privilege that attach to particular symbolic and institutional practices, as are sociological approaches that question the universality of categories like “childhood” and so look for its distinctiveness in more local webs of social interaction.¹¹ Although not all the contributors to this volume would characterize themselves as exponents of these writers’ ideas, the assumption of mutual interaction among the cultural domains (and so, different academic disciplines) is a near constant in the work on offer here.

Indeed, among scholars who have favored an integrative approach to the study of early modern Europe, the child's amphibious nature has become an engaging source of interest. Whether considered as individuals or as members of groups, children almost by definition straddle important early modern social, economic, and philosophical categories. As young people gradually relinquish the prerogatives of childhood (the license that comes from freedom from adult responsibilities) to assume more adult privileges (those powers granted at a designated age or when deliberation and self-restraint can be exercised rationally), the process of maturation inevitably raises basic questions about the nature of agency, reason, and knowledge in societies that want to prescribe, cultivate, and regulate all three. If cultural historians and critics since Francis Bacon have increasingly assumed that certain kinds of truth can only be found in unusual situations or cases, then the child or the stages of childhood become obvious “places” to look for knowledge of the broader culture.¹² As liminal beings, children are per force among those “special cases” of humanity with the potential to reveal deeper truths about the social structure. Thus, Marianne Novy's comparison of children's treatment by their birth-parents and foster-parents in Shakespeare's late plays offers unexpected insights into Renaissance views of the roles of nature and nurture. Her essay also demonstrates how fictional representations of adults who turn over their children to surrogates may have resonated in a society where such separations were more routine than in our own.

Alongside this tendency to see deeper social truths at the margins (in extremis veritas) we find increased interest in reconstructing the experiences of people traditionally ignored as historical subjects—the so-called silent populations, whether those of workers, of women, of the subaltern, or, most recently, the disabled.¹³ Work on silent populations has been motivated, in part, by the desire to bring a historically informed perspective to bear on the contemporary situations of such groups. Children too have often qualified as another silent population by virtue of their necessary subjection to adult authority. But it may not be as simple to “retrieve” the place and experiences of children as a marginal group as it has been for other groups like workers, subalterns, or women because, unlike these other groups, children have always suffered from being too intelligible to those who wish to understand their condition. It is assumed that since everyone was once a child, therefore anyone can intuitively grasp the nature of childhood experience. Along with this persistent presumption of transparency we must recognize another set of methodological challenges posed by recent attempts to write history “from below.” The concept of “below” has been defined largely in Marxist historical terms and so this subspecies of history has concentrated almost exclusively on subjects that are not directly relevant to young children, such as labor history or the documentation of the working class's sociopolitical activities. Likewise, it has proven difficult to adapt the Marxist model and its key categories in the study of the preindustrial world.¹⁴ Although early modern children may have been marginalized because of their subordination to parents, teachers, or masters, it does not necessarily follow that their situation is so similar to those of workers or slaves that the same models will serve for all.

Alternative models of social subordination would surely facilitate more subtle analyses of children's relationships to authority figures (to mention but one of many important topics); such models may emerge through methodological reflection, but are perhaps most likely to follow from our ongoing attempts to synthesize large bodies of new information. Like any socially marginal group, children may not command those resources of a culture's symbolic power that are most readily documented in the historical record. But children can leave traces in a variety of other sources that have yet to be explored. Thus, we agree with Hugh Cunningham that new work in the field should put a high priority on finding raw data about as many aspects of childhood as possible, data that must then be carefully weighed and imaginatively contextualized.¹⁵ New evidence can alter our current perspectives on what we know, affording us greater opportunities to hear other voices from the past and to situate children over the longue durée. Jill Shefrin's chapter in this volume about aristocratic mothers is exemplary in this respect. Lawrence Stone characterized the relationship between the well-born mother and her children during the eighteenth century as one in which the woman could exercise the prerogative to delegate (or abdicate) maternal responsibilities to subordinates due to the obligations and pressures of social life.¹⁶ Shefrin's extensive archival research about a group of prominent English aristocratic mothers who carefully supervised their daughters’ educations suggests why Stone's view of upper-class mothers must be qualified. What emerges from her analysis of these women's correspondence is not just a richly detailed and fascinating portrait of a network of real women that included the influential teacher Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (better known as the creator of Beauty and the Beast). This essay might also serve as an outline for a new chapter in the development of child-centered education, an important concept whose history is still imperfectly understood in spite of its centrality to modern pedagogy.

Other contributors to this volume have discovered unpublished library sources about young people that have similarly challenged key assumptions about early modern children, their experiences, and their responses to their surroundings. Jürgen Schlumbohm, for example, has combed through German autobiographical writings for descriptions of those skills that the authors born into peasant families recalled having mastered in the “school of life.” In the process he uncovers a vital form of learning distinct from the book-centered instruction that took place within the model classroom or in the sheltered confines of the bourgeois family circle—the usual focus of discussions about late Enlightenment education. Two other chapters examine sources in which children speak for themselves, as opposed to reflecting on the significance of their childhood experiences long after the fact as adults. Jan Fergus's analysis of a provincial bookseller's account books establishes that the boys at Rugby School were willing to spend their own money on the slickly packaged children's books of John Newbery, which runs contrary to the prevailing view in that eighteenth-century children did not choose to read such books but had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor's Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Learning to Laugh
• 3 “Oh that I Had Her!”
• 4 Adopted Children and Constructions of Heredity, Nurture, and Parenthood in Shakespeare's Romances
• 5 “Petty Fictions” and “Little Stories”
• 6 The Godly Child's “Power and Evidence” in the Word
• 7 “In the Posture of Children”
• 8 Curiosity, Science, and Experiential Learning in the Eighteenth Century
• 9 “Governesses to Their Children”
• 10 Spectral Literacy
• 11 Solace in Books
• 12 Performance, Pedagogy, and Politics
• 13 Otto's Watch
• 14 The School of Life
• Contributors List
• Index