Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern Childhoods

Naomi J. Miller, Diane Purkiss, Naomi J. Miller, Diane Purkiss

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030142117
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Building on recent critical work, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of the nature and forms of medieval and early modern childhoods, viewed through literary cultures. Its five groups of thematic essays range across a spectrum of disciplines, periods, and locations, from cultural anthropology and folklore to performance studies and the history of science, and from Anglo-Saxon burial sites to colonial America. Contributors include several renowned writers for children. The opening group of essays, Educating Children, explores what is perhaps the most powerful social engine for the shaping of a child. Performing Childhood addresses children at work and the role of play in the development of social imitation and learning. Literatures of Childhood examines texts written for children that reveal alternative conceptions of parent/child relations. In Legacies of Childhood, expressions of grief at the loss of a child offer a window into the family'sconceptions and values. Finally, Fictionalizing Literary Cultures for Children considers the real, material child versus the fantasy of the child as a subject.

Part IEducating Children

© The Author(s) 2019

Naomi J. Miller and Diane Purkiss (eds.)Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern ChildhoodsLiterary Cultures and Childhoodshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14211-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Adult Ideologies in Late-Medieval Advisory Writing

Anna Caughey¹

(1)

Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Anna Caughey

End Abstract

On his return to England from the Boer War in the early years of the twentieth century, Robert Baden-Powell expressed serious concerns about the morals and behaviour of young British men. In a letter published in 1904, he attributed Japan’s military power to “the upper classes learning, as boys, the chivalry of their forefathers the Samurai,” and argued that:

We in England have equally good ancestors to look back to in the Knights of the Middle Ages, but we do not imitate them as we ought to.

If we, while we were boys, learnt their patriotism and put into practice their ideas of honour, self-sacrifice, and skill at arms, and then taught the same to all our lads throughout the country—we should be as strong as the [Japanese] against invasion by any foreign enemy.¹

Scouting for Boys (1908) goes on to insinuate that the problems that Baden-Powell perceives in his world—juvenile delinquency, poor public health, anxieties surrounding the upkeep of Empire²—can be addressed by focusing on the individual characters of British boys, and specifically by providing them with technical skills, a clear-cut code of moral behaviour and a canon of enjoyable yet morally-improving stories in the form of the “Yarns” presented within Scouting for Boys and other subsequent Scouting texts .

More than four hundred years previously, the publisher and translator William Caxton returned to England from a two-decade spell on the Continent (Blake)—and expressed similar concerns about the morals and behaviour of young English men. In the afterword to The Book of the Ordre of Chyualry (Chyualry) (1484), his translation of the French tradition of Ramon Lull’s Llibre de l’ordre de cavalleria ,³ Caxton writes passionately about the perceived deficiencies of modern-day knights:

O ye knyghtes of Englond where is the custome and vsage of noble chyualry that was vsed in tho dayes / what do ye now / but go to the baynes & playe att dyse… leue this / leue it and rede the noble volumes of saynt graal of lancelot / of galaad / of Trystram / of perse forest / of percyual / of gawayn / & many mo (Byles 122).

Oh knights of England, where is the custom and practice of noble chivalry that was used in those days? What do you do now but go to the baths, and play at dice? … Leave this, leave it and read the noble volumes of the Holy Grail, of Lancelot, of Tristram, of Perceforest, of Percival, of Gawain, and many more.

Like Baden-Powell, Caxton locates the social problems of his day in the characters of individual young men, and argues that the way to resolve them is through literature—namely, the romances and other chivalry-related works published by Caxton’s press in the mid-1480s—and the use of a clearly-defined set of standards of conduct presented in the book that Caxton is currently offering for sale.

Perry Nodelman has famously argued that literature presented to children “offers… both what adults think children will like and what adults want them to need, but it does so always in order to satisfy adults’ needs in regard to children” (242). He situates this need in a figure known as “the hidden adult ”, concealed behind the text offered to the child. This essay adopts the concept of “the hidden adult” to consider the ways in which two fifteenth-century insular translations of the Llibre de l’ordre de cavalleria construct adult prestige and power by presenting the attentive and obedient boy as an ideal “reader” of a text handed down by an adult. Lull’s work, written in Catalan “for the benefit of knights who may not have been conversant in Latin” between 1274 and 1276 (Fallows 1), aimed at “nothing less than total reform of the Order of Chivalry” (3). It circulated in various French-language recensions throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and was translated from French into Older Scots by Sir Gilbert Hay as The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede (Knychthede) in 1456, and again into English by Caxton in 1484. Both translations consist of a manual dealing with the spiritual, moral and symbolic aspects of knighthood—and to this extent, the didactic voice within them is not “hidden” but presented in plain sight: the books’ explicit goal is to instruct the reader in correct behaviour for an adult male of the knightly class. However, as I will argue here, both translations also serve a “hidden” purpose: in addition to their chivalry-related content, they also inform the reader about the prestige and value of aristocratic adult maleness, and persuasively argue that the correct way for a boy to access this prestige is to accept and internalise the guidance of adult men.

The key to this is the important fictional episode which comprises Chap. 1 of both Hay’s and Caxton’s texts, and which is taken from Lull’s original. This episode features an eager young squire who is socialised into ideal patterns of gendered and class behaviour by a wise elderly knight, and it is on this story that I will focus my analysis here. I will begin by briefly discussing the existence of secular adolescent males as a readership group in the mid-to-late fifteenth century, and the extent to which their reading can be considered as part of the study of “children’s literature”. I will then move on to analyse the first chapter of both Caxton and Hay’s translations and their construction of “adult norms” of class- and gender-related power and prestige, and will briefly note the way in which these constructions also recur in Hay’s prose and poetical writings on the life of Alexander the Great.

In undertaking this analysis, the first question that must be asked is, to what extent did fifteenth-century children—and specifically, non-clerical male children of the aristocratic and gentry classes—exist as readers? As the scholar of medieval childhood Nicholas Orme comments, this is an area that can be misunderstood: he notes the popular modern perception that medieval children “were regarded as small adults” (3) and attributes the popularity of this viewpoint to the works of mid-twentieth-century historians such as Philippe Ariès.⁴ Orme goes on to cite a number of researchers whose work has subsequently disputed Ariès’ ideas, including Shulamith Shahar, Pierre Riché and Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, Sally Crawford, Barbara Hanawalt and Ronald Finucane.⁵ He also draws upon substantial literary, legal and documentary evidence to demonstrate that children in the Middle Ages “wore clothes, had toys, chanted rhymes, played games, and read literature invented by themselves or designed especially for them” (10). Seth Lerer has also argued convincingly that “[f]ar from being an age that had no perception of or investment in the child, the European Middle Ages was in many ways an aetas puerorum” (12), intensely concerned with the figure of the child.

With regard to the reading of literature by aristocratic boys and young men in training for knighthood, Shahar notes that “[u]p to the beginning of the twelfth century, the upbringing and training of the future knight included almost no academic study” (209), but that after this time divisions between literate clergy and non-literate knights became more blurred. By the 1380s, Chaucer’s portrait of the Squire in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales tells us that this twenty-year-old knight-in-training can “songes make and wel endite, / Juste and eek daunce, and weel purtreye and write”⁶ (compose music and words for songs / Joust and also dance, and write and draw well), while in the fifteenth century Gilbert Hay’s position as both experienced knight and poet/translator (see below) demonstrate that knightly training and literacy were highly compatible. Similarly, while Caxton’s claims to address “ye knyghtes of Englond” must be approached with caution (see below), his afterword makes it clear that chivalry and book consumption are both potential subjects of interest for his target market.

It is worth acknowledging that there are some difficulties in considering Hay’s and Caxton’s texts under the heading of “children’s literature”. Nodelman argues that “special literature for children seems to have come into existence in Europe somewhere around the end of the sixteenth century at the point at which adults perceived a need for expurgated editions of classics for children” (152), excluding fifteenth-century works from consideration. Certainly, the paucity of surviving textual evidence means that it is impossible to prove that these works were read only, or even primarily, by children. The explicitly didactic and instructional nature of the work may also preclude it from the study of “children’s literature” for some critics: F.J. Harvey Darton, for example, ruled out “[p]rinted works produced…primarily to teach [children]… to make them good [or] to keep them profitably quiet”⁷; as Nodelman surmises, for critics such as Darton “such obviously didactic texts are not children’s literature simply because they are not literature” (153). Yet when dealing with pre-sixteenth-century works, the exclusion of the didactic disqualifies many useful sources of information in an already narrow field of surviving texts: as Lerer’s and Orme’s work (alongside that of other critics and historians) has demonstrated, educational works such as colloquies, courtesy books and abecedaria provide details that vitalise our understanding of pre-modern childhood. While we cannot always come to clear-cut conclusions about the way in which a medieval child may have responded to Hay’s and Caxton’s translations, it seems likely that they were among their consumers, and that these books shaped their experiences both as readers and as maturing human beings.

The life of Sir Gilbert Hay (born c.1397–died after 1465) successfully combined the disparate roles of “soldier and poet” (Edington). Hay was probably educated at the University of St Andrews in 1418–19⁸ and spent a significant proportion of his adult life in France before returning to Scotland (Mapstone 1999, 32). As late as 1459–60 he is described in the exchequer rolls as both “domino” and “militi” (Mapstone 1986, 52), suggesting that he retained his status as a knight even towards the end of his life. Hay is known to have spent some time living at Roslin with the family of William Sinclair, third earl of Orkney and Caithness (b. after 1407–d. 1480) (Crawford). While with the Sinclairs, Hay translated three prose texts from the French: these were a recension of the Secret des Secrets, entitled the Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis by Hay, Honoré Bouvet’s L’Arbre des batailles, and Lull’s work. These translations were completed in 1456, and survive today in National Library of Scotland Acc. 9253. While this manuscript is not scribal (Mapstone 2005, 7) it was placed in an expensive and ornate binding⁹: this suggests that the family held it in high esteem, as does the autograph of William’s son ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Educating Children
• Part II. Performing Childhood
• Part III. Literatures of Childhood
• Part IV. Legacies of Childhood
• Coda: Fictionalizing Literary Cultures for Children
• Back Matter