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Family and Childhood (Renaissance and Reformation)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Scholars largely neglected the history of the family until after World War II, when they began to employ theoretical perspectives imported from the social sciences. In the 1960s, two principal figures triggered its study: Philippe Ariès, associated with the French Annales school, and Peter Laslett, co-founder at Cambridge University, England, of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Since that period, studies have proliferated on the history of family and household in Europe and its subregions and on the related topics of childhood and youth.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
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  7. Important themes of these single- or dual-authored works are the patrilineal organization of European families; the impact of high mortality rates; the variety and changeability of household structures; and the differences between urban and rural, and poor and wealthy families. Gies and Gies 1987 and Gottlieb 1993 constitute attempts to construct a unified model of the traditional family, drawing on more specialized studies. Although premature and not entirely satisfactory, they may serve as a starting point for deeper research. Casey 1989, Goody 2000, Mitterauer and Sieder 1982, and Ozment 2001 make more striking interpretive claims based on their previous considerable work. Casey 1989 traces the shift from a complex to a nuclear family; Goody 2000 links European family patterns to those of other regions of Eurasia; Mitterauer and Sieder 1982 provides a sociological model for family change; and Ozment 2001 argues for the continuity of European family forms long characterized by affective ties.
  8.  
  9. Casey, James. The History of the Family. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
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  11. Traces the evolution throughout Europe from large interpersonal groups integrated by kinship and patronage in the late medieval and Renaissance periods to the smaller, more private domestic groups of modern times, not always agreeing with those historians (e.g., Herlihy or Macfarlane) who see the earlier emergence of nuclear units.
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  13. Gies, Frances, and Joseph Gies. Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
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  15. A popular history grounded in recent research and refreshingly clear in delineating major issues in the history of the family, anchored to illuminating narratives drawn primarily from English, French, and Italian settings.
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  17. Goody, Jack. The European Family: An Historico-Anthropological Essay. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
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  19. Essays by Goody based on earlier work but tracing in a continual thread the history of the family from antiquity to recent times. Stresses the relationship of European family forms to those of Eurasia generally—in contrast to Africa—centered on the involvement of women in the transfer of inheritance between generations.
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  21. Gottlieb, Beatrice. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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  23. Outlines basic features of the European family across the early modern era, including household structure, marriage and parenting, and economic activity.
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  25. Mitterauer, Michael, and Reinhard Sieder. The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present. Translated by Karla Oosterveen and Manfred Hörzinger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
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  27. From the perspective of historical sociology, traces the progressive casting off of political, economic, and social functions by the family, considering the impact, especially on peasant families of central Europe, of parental mortality and retirement, the circulation of children, and the presence of resident servants and kin. English translation of Vom Patriarchat zur Partnerschaft: zum Strukturwandel der Familie (Munich: Beck, 1977).
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  29. Ozment, Steven E. Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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  31. Drawing from mostly qualitative sources used in his own earlier work on German families as well as broader studies, Ozment argues that the European family, even in remote centuries, was an entity tightly gathered by ties of responsibility and affection.
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  33. Reference Works
  34.  
  35. These reference works do not look at the Renaissance and Reformation periods specifically, but they can help the specialist in that era understand the family in the context of social science and global approaches. Stearns 2001 considers the family and related topics as part of the broader study of European social history, while Fass 2004 focuses on the issue of childhood as viewed from the perspectives of history and the social sciences in Western and non-Western regions. Hawes and Hiner 1991 presents essays that survey the history of childhood from antiquity to modern times and around the globe.
  36.  
  37. Fass, Paula S. Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: In History and Society. 3 vols. New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004.
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  39. Comprehensive and up-to-date reference work tracking the intersection between history and social sciences on topics related to children and youth, focused on America and western Europe but also dealing with non-Western regions and civilizations.
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  41. Hawes, Joseph M., and N. Ray Hiner. Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective: An International Handbook and Research Guide. New York: Greenwood, 1991.
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  43. A one-volume series of essays providing an overview and bibliography for topics arranged historically and geographically. Those on medieval and early modern Europe, by prominent scholars David Nicholas and Sherrin Marshall, respectively, are especially relevant here; those on antiquity (Valerie French) and premodern China (John Dardess) are also of interest.
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  45. Stearns, Peter N. Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350 to 2000. 6 vols. New York: Scribner, 2001.
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  47. A reference work for the field for which general editor Stearns has been a conspicuous advocate and practitioner. Vol. 4 covers the pertinent topics of “Gender,” “Family and Age Groups,” and “Sexuality.”
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  49. Bibliographies
  50.  
  51. Milden 1977 and Soliday 1980, bibliographies of materials in the whole course of family history worldwide, will update the scholar to the point, about a generation ago, when the impact of post–World War II social historical approaches had been felt but not yet thoroughly digested. The essays in Bowman 2007, in contrast, explore disciplinary approaches to childhood studies in the present, which are nonetheless applicable to the investigation of historical cases.
  52.  
  53. Bowman, Vibiana. Scholarly Resources for Children and Childhood Studies: A Research Guide and Annotated Bibliography. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2007.
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  55. Organized by disciplines, with chapters by experts on “Anthropology,” “Art,” “Business and Economics,” “Education,” “Psychology,” and the like, with an emphasis on research methodology.
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  57. Milden, James Wallace. The Family in Past Time: A Guide to the Literature. New York: Garland, 1977.
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  59. A useful resource of more than 1,300 well-indexed, annotated entries with sections on European (one of five), American, and non-Western family forms.
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  61. Soliday, Gerald Lyman. History of the Family and Kinship: A Select International Bibliography. Millwood, NY: Kraus International, 1980.
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  63. An initiative of the Journal of Family History, lists more than six thousand titles, providing extensive coverage of works on the history of the family worldwide from prehistory to the present, organized by region or nation.
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  65. Journals
  66.  
  67. These four journals—the oldest launched as recently as 1973, the youngest as recently as 2008 (Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth)—engage the new fields of history of family and history of childhood and provide useful context for Renaissance and Reformation scholars. History of Childhood Quarterly is committed to psychohistorical theoretical framework. History of the Family: An International Quarterly takes a global and interdisciplinary perspective, and Journal of Family History offers mostly recent and often American topics.
  68.  
  69. History of Childhood Quarterly. 1973–1976.
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  71. Launched by Lloyd DeMause; committed to a psychohistorical theoretical framework. Its first three years of publication, especially, yielded several bold and stimulating studies at the outset of the investigation of the history of childhood; continued as Journal of Psychohistory since 1977.
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  73. History of the Family: An International Quarterly. 1996–.
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  75. Published by Elsevier (based in Amsterdam), takes a global and interdisciplinary perspective on all issues related to the family, including household structure, life stages, familial relations, and Childrearing. Tends to recent (20th- and 21st-century) topics, but includes important articles looking back to the 16th and 17th centuries.
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  77. Journal of Family History. 1976–.
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  79. Issued by Sage Publications, with a long career of academic publication especially in the area of the social sciences; offers mostly recent and often American topics, but articles also range back to antiquity and around the globe.
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  81. Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. 2008–.
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  83. A recently launched journal, global in scope and attending to all historical periods, whose first issues suggest a particular interest in theory.
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  85. Collections of Papers
  86.  
  87. The difficulty of constructing a synthesis, even after the productive work of several decades, is reflected in the presence of a large group of collective volumes by multiple authors—three of them emerging from the group of scholars known as the “Annales school,” whose method resists easy amalgamation. Although these collections may each pursue a specialized problem, the essays in sum can serve as an introduction to the study of the family—and perhaps introduce fewer distortions than syntheses that impose one author’s interpretative framework. Turning first to the three products of the Annalistes: Ariès and Duby 1987–1991 offers in five volumes essays on “private life” that often touch on the family but also on the individual’s private existence; Burguière, et al. 1996 looks at the history of the family worldwide in two volumes, with only minimal attention to the premodern West; while Duby and Le Goff 1977 gathers papers from a colloquium on family and kinship in medieval Europe. A similarly bold three-volume collection is offered in Kertzer and Barbagli 2001–2003, considering the European family since 1500. The essays in Goody, et al. 1976 focus specifically on the impact of considerations of inheritance on the development of the family, while those in Herlihy 1985 are specialized studies across the period from antiquity through the 15th century, demonstrating Herlihy’s characteristic utilization of both quantitative and text-based approaches. Finally, Fass 2013, with contributions on the history of childhood from earliest times to the present day, includes fine studies on the early modern centuries, while Classen 2005 and Miller and Yavneh 2011 offer an array of studies on a great variety of topics concerning children, motherhood, household structure, etc., from the 14th through 17th centuries.
  88.  
  89. Ariès, Philippe, and Georges Duby. A History of Private Life. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987–1991.
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  91. Offers studies of “private life” that often center on the family but also include explorations of personal space, reading habits, and the like. The third volume, Passions of the Renaissance, edited by Roger Chartier, addresses topics spanning from the Renaissance to the 18th century and highlighting an increased sense of personal and familial privacy. English translation of Histoire de la vie privée (Paris: Seuil, 1985–1987).
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  93. Burguière, André, et al., eds. A History of the Family. 2 vols. Translated by Sarah Hanbury-Tenison, Rosemary Morris, and Andrew Wilson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996.
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  95. An ambitious collection of thirty-three essays constitutes as a whole a history of the family worldwide, embracing anthropological and historical approaches. Articles by Robert Fossier in the first volume and by the team of Burguière and François Lebrun in the second deal with western Europe in the late Middle Ages to Renaissance periods. English translation of Histoire de la famille (Paris: A. Colin, 1986).
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  97. Classen, Albrecht, ed. Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005.
  98. DOI: 10.1515/9783110895445Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  99. Nineteen essays, beginning with the editor’s historiographical overview, mostly medieval, but ranging into later centuries, as do those looking at the maternal practice of Isabeau of Bavaria; Margery Kempe’s son; fatherhood in Leon Battista Alberti’s Della famiglia; converso children in the 17th century; and the education of girls in Europe and America.
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  101. Duby, Georges, and Jacques Le Goff, eds. Famille et parenté dans l’Occident médiéval: Actes du Colloque De Paris (6–8 Juin 1974): organisé par l’École Pratique des Hautes Études (VIe Section) en collaboration avec le Collège de France et l’École Française de Rome: communication et débats. Rome: École française de Rome, 1977.
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  103. Edited by two leading French specialists in the medieval family, gathers the results of a colloquium between historians and ethnologists held in Paris in 1974 on family forms in France, Italy, and central Europe.
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  105. Fass, Paula S., ed. The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World. London: Routledge, 2013.
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  107. Twenty-seven essays preceded by the editor’s thoughtful roundup trace the experience of childhood from antiquity to the present day, with valuable contributions of interest here on “Childhood in Medieval and Early Modern Times” by Joanne Ferraro (pp. 61–78) and “Childhood and the Enlightenment: The Complications of Innocence” by Larry Wolff (pp. 78–101).
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  109. Goody, Jack, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, eds. Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
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  111. Essays focusing on mechanisms of inheritance in multiple European settings, and exploring the sociocultural effects of inheritance patterns.
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  113. Herlihy, David. Medieval Households. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
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  115. Employing both quantitative and literary evidence, these essays all by Herlihy and selected by him from a much larger corpus offer in their sum an overview of the development of families across Europe from late antiquity to the Renaissance.
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  117. Kertzer, David I., and Marzio Barbagli, eds. The History of the European Family. 3 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001–2003.
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  119. The first volume, spanning from 1500 to the French Revolution, is pertinent here, offering essays on household structure, fertility and mortality, laws and customs, family relationships, the impact of the Reformation, and east-west differences, among other topics.
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  121. Miller, Naomi J., and Naomi Yavneh, eds. Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.
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  123. Fifteen essays, including the editors’ introductory essay on childhood and gender, loosely grouped by theme and dealing with a variety of subjects such as the funerary commemoration of children, girl performers, literary representations of French pediatrics, Huguenot children, children allegorized in Cervantes, children in Marvell and, of course, Shakespeare.
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  125. Household Structures
  126.  
  127. The household structures of premodern times differed markedly from our own, and also from one another, varying with class, region, economic function, and population shifts. These are the findings of Laslett 1965, conspicuous among his many works, based on the local population studies of the English Cambridge Group, which capture the experience of populations below the elite. Although Laslett and his associates looked most closely at England, they also considered other regions and developed a “northwest European” family model that features small households and late marriage, in contrast to the usual view of the traditional family. Laslett’s friends and students, in Bonfield, et al. 1986, offer further studies along the path that their mentor had opened. Anderson 1980, looking back at Laslett’s work and other recent studies, provides a useful synthesis of historians’ models of traditional households. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1985, the groundbreaking work on the Florentine catasto (1427 tax census), provides a minute anatomy of Tuscan households of rich and poor in city and country, while Goldthwaite 1968 and Kent 1977 direct questions about the structure of Florentine noble households on Laslett’s model. In two highly original endeavors, Klapisch-Zuber 2000 explores the metaphor of the tree as the scaffolding for the mental construct of family, especially in France, and Goody 1983 views the European family from an anthropological perspective, relating it to other Old World family systems in Asia, the Islamic regions, and Africa.
  128.  
  129. Anderson, Michael. Approaches to the History of the Western Family, 1500–1914. London: Macmillan, 1980.
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  131. Brief but comprehensive presentation of the major findings of the previous generation of family historians, especially with regard to household structure.
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  133. Bonfield, Lloyd, Richard Michael Smith, and Keith Wrightson. The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure: Essays Presented to Peter Laslett on his Seventieth Birthday. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
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  135. Studies by Laslett’s students extending the approaches their mentor, with the Cambridge group, had pioneered, looking at household structures, marriage and inheritance, illegitimacy, and fertility and mortality, especially in England.
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  137. Goldthwaite, Richard A. Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.
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  139. An analysis based on family account books shows how the families of the Capponi, Gondi, Guicciardini, and Strozzi coalesced as nuclear units from the 14th to the 16th century.
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  141. Goody, Jack. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
  142. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511607752Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  143. Locates as the distinctive features in European marriage patterns an insistence on exogamy and the formation of marriage by mutual consent, both promoted by the church.
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  145. Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
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  147. Pathbreaking quantitative analysis of the 1427 census of taxpayers in the Florentine contado, providing profiles of family structures that differed between rich and poor, young and old, urban and rural dwellers, and even between strata of agricultural laborers. Abridged version of Toscans et leurs familles (Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1978), translated by the authors.
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  149. Kent, F. W. Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
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  151. Challenging Goldthwaite 1968, in an analysis that encompasses some two hundred units of three great families, argues that their nature was clanlike, with households clustering near each other geographically and interacting tightly for social, political, and ritual purposes.
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  153. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. L’Ombre des ancêtres: Essai sur l’imaginaire médiéval de la parenté. Paris: Fayard, 2000.
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  155. A history of a metaphor, that of the genealogical “tree,” that tracks the development of a sense of family and kinship in Europe from the Middle Ages into the 17th century.
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  157. Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost. London: Methuen, 1965.
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  159. Groundbreaking work in which Laslett, with researchers of the Cambridge group, rewrites the history of social structure in early modern England, pointing especially to patterns of self-contained families and late marriage. Original in the questions asked and in the use of parish registers, the work was initially controversial but is now widely respected. The third revised edition (New York: Scribner, 1984) updates the original in light of recent scholarship.
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  161. The Childhood Debate
  162.  
  163. In 1962 there burst on the scene a work that would transform perceptions of familial relations in premodern times: Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life by Philippe Ariès (Ariès 1962), a member of the French Annales school, who brought the methods of the social sciences to the study of history. Not only was Ariès 1962 transformative, but it set off a debate that unfolded over the next three decades. Ariès 1962 described the absence of age-sorting among children in the past, which affected not only families but also Schooling; the absence of age-specific games, stories, or costume for young people, occasioning their early admission to adult circles and consequent exposure to information moderns would deem inappropriate; and the gradual change in domestic arrangements over the 17th and 18th centuries fundamental to a transition to modern times. In addition to these points, which did not arouse much comment, was the one that caused a firestorm: that, in part because of the enormous mortality of children, early modern people lacked a “concept of childhood,” an understanding of children as a distinct class of humanity, inherently innocent and thus particularly vulnerable and malleable. In subsequent years, many historians followed the lead of Ariès 1962 on this issue, as did deMause 1973 and Stone 1977, contending that children inhabited families that were generally indifferent to their needs if not actually abusive. In response, a chorus of others argued (among them Atkinson 1991, Hanawalt 1993, Ozment 2001, Pollock 1983, Shahar 1989, and Woods 2003) that premodern parents, like those of our own day, formed profound attachments to their children and energetically sought their welfare.
  164.  
  165. Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Translated by Robert Baldick. New York: Knopf, 1962.
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  167. Groundbreaking study of attitudes toward children, displayed in visual representations and literary texts pertinent mainly to France and England, finding that the close-knit modern family and its sentimental concept of childhood developed only in the 17th and 18th centuries. English translation of L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Plon, 1960) and frequently translated and reprinted.
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  169. Atkinson, Clarissa W. The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
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  171. A broad and deeply informed exploration of motherhood, drawing especially on saints’ lives and related texts to show that maternal feeling was intense and the maternal role well regarded across the centuries from late antiquity into the 15th century.
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  173. deMause, Lloyd. “The Evolution of Childhood.” History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (1973): 503–606.
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  175. Interpretative framework for the history of childhood proposed by an author committed to psychoanalytical approaches to history. Finds improvements in parenting across five stages of history, fueling optimism about prospects for the humane rearing of the next generation. Reprinted in deMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory, 1974, pp. 1–73.
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  177. Hanawalt, Barbara. Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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  179. Using court records and literary sources, illuminates the life course of children and youth, both male and female, living in England’s preeminent city during the 14th and 15th centuries. Supports a largely positive picture of the childhood experience.
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  181. Ozment, Steven E. Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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  183. Drawing from mostly qualitative sources used in his own earlier work on German families as well as broader studies, Ozment disputes the Arièsan thesis, arguing that the European family was close-knit and bound by affection even in premodern times.
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  185. Pollock, Linda A. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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  187. A systematic response to the Ariès thesis, wielding the evidence of nearly five hundred American and English diaries to demonstrate high levels of parental concern for their children and remarkable continuity over time.
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  189. Shahar, Shulamith. Childhood in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 1989.
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  191. Synthesizing the specialized work of others but also incorporating the results of her wide study of medical treatises, prescriptive texts, saints’ lives, and court and coroners’ records, provides an ample account that counters the negative Arièsan model.
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  193. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
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  195. Looking mainly at aristocratic families, sees a transition from the neglectful or indifferent treatment of children in the 15th century to smaller and more emotionally generous families by the 18th. Abridged edition published in 1979.
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  197. Woods, Robert. “Did Montaigne Love His Children? Demography and the Hypothesis of Parental Indifference.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.3 (2003): 421–442.
  198. DOI: 10.1162/002219502320815181Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  199. Employs both quantitative analysis of infant mortality rates in France and other regions, and literary analysis of the relevant essays of Montaigne, to disprove the contention of Ariès that the essayist was representative of the indifference parents felt for their children.
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  201. Review Essays
  202.  
  203. One measure of the importance of Ariès 1962 (cited under The Childhood Debate) and the discussion he triggered is the number of review essays written over the next forty years reflecting on the ever-increasing literature on the history of childhood. A few are presented here, with the earliest reviewing, necessarily, the fewest responses to Ariès: Stone 1974, Wilson 1980, Vann 1982, Cunningham 1998, Hanawalt 2002, and King 2007.
  204.  
  205. Cunningham, Hugh. “Histories of Childhood.” American Historical Review 103.4 (1998): 1195–1208.
  206. DOI: 10.2307/2651207Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  207. Masterful review of the history of childhood literature by an author who had recently completed his own synthesis (see Cunningham 1995, cited under Syntheses). Disentangles the different questions that historians have in mind when approaching the issue of childhood.
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  209. Hanawalt, Barbara A. “Medievalists and the Study of Childhood.” Speculum 77.2 (2002): 440–460.
  210. DOI: 10.2307/3301328Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  211. Sober and clear-headed review of the historiographical pathways opened by Ariès, focusing on three main topics: the existence of a distinctive period of childhood in premodern families; the issue of infant and child mortality; and the emotional attachment of premodern parents to their children.
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  213. King, Margaret L. “Concepts of Childhood: What We Know and Where We Might Go.” Renaissance Quarterly 60.2 (2007): 371–407.
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  215. Nearly fifty years after Ariès 1962, turns away from the controversy about parental indifference or affection to map out the main lines of historical inquiry over time, stressing regional differences and the new availability of primary texts.
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  217. Stone, Lawrence. “The Massacre of the Innocents.” New York Review of Books 21.18 (14 November 1974): 25–31.
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  219. An early response to Ariès 1962 and its first successors by a historian who would soon publish his own vast study of English household structures from the 16th to the 18th century (see Stone 1977, cited under The Childhood Debate).
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  221. Vann, Richard T. “The Youth of Centuries of Childhood.” History and Theory 21.2 (1982): 279–297.
  222. DOI: 10.2307/2505249Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  223. Traces the fortunes of Ariès 1962, initially ignored by reviewers but then vaulted to fame, showing that its enthusiastic and indiscriminate reception was not matched by a clear understanding of its message.
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  225. Wilson, Adrian. “The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Ariès.” History and Theory 19.2 (1980): 132–153.
  226. DOI: 10.2307/2504795Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  227. An extended reading and critique of Ariès 1962, concluding that the latter’s conclusions are “not only false but falsely conceived” (p. 152)—that author’s naiveté matched thereafter by the naiveté of those who came after and accepted him uncritically.
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  229. Syntheses
  230.  
  231. Two useful syntheses, written after the firestorm of the childhood debate had subsided and interest had shifted from pre-modern to modern times, reflect the authors’ specialist interests: Cunningham’s in child poverty and the representation of children (Cunningham 1995), and Heywood’s in children’s work (Heywood 2001). Arnold 1980, an earlier synthesis, offers both a concise review of the history of childhood over more than a thousand years and a useful collection of texts.
  232.  
  233. Arnold, Klaus. Kind und Gesellschaft in Mittelalter und Renaissance: Beiträge und Texte zur Geschichte der Kindheit. Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh, 1980.
  234. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  235. Brief but excellent overview of the historiography and history of childhood, focusing on the status of the child from antiquity into the Renaissance, accompanied by some one hundred pages of relevant contemporary texts.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Cunningham, Hugh. Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500. London: Longman, 1995.
  238. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  239. Prefaced by an overview of childhood in antiquity and the Middle Ages, posits the development of a “middle-class ideology” of childhood over the period 1500–1900, then explores the two main destinations of children with the coming of modern times: school and work.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Heywood, Colin. A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001.
  242. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  243. Organized according to stages of life, Heywood’s book explores the experience of children and their relations to adults through three successive phases until their exit from the family and entry into the world of work.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Italy
  246.  
  247. Italy was a disunited land of city-states and principalities, with family patterns varying according to local law and conditions, only some of which have been closely studied by scholars. Barbagli 2000 offers an overview of the history of the Italian family from the 15th to the 20th century, while the articles assembled in Kertzer and Saller 1991 deal with the history of the family in Italy from antiquity to modern times, and Alfani 2009 looks at the institution of godparenthood in various Italian centuries beginning with the 15th century. Florence and Venice and their wider regions are considered separately.
  248.  
  249. Alfani, Guido. Fathers and Godfathers: Spiritual Kinship in Early-Modern Italy. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009.
  250. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  251. Analyzes godparenthood in Italy as a form of “spiritual kinship” and a strong factor in interfamily social alliances during the 15th and 16th centuries, considering the impact on godparenthood of Tridentine reform, and tracing the decline of the institution from the 17th century forward.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Barbagli, Marzio. Sotto lo stesso tetto: mutamenti della famiglia in Italia dal XV al XX secolo. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 2000.
  254. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  255. Overview focused on the Italian family from the high Renaissance to modern times, as it evolved from an overriding concern with lineage toward the nuclear, conjugal household.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Kertzer, David I., and Richard P. Saller, eds. The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
  258. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  259. Eighteen essays by historians, anthropologists, and classicists, examining discrete moments in the transition of the Italian family from antiquity through the Christian era to modern times. Those by Julius Kirshner on non-dotal property and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber on kinship and power are specifically relevant for the period of the Renaissance and Reformation.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. Florence and Tuscany
  262.  
  263. For Florence, the main target of scholarly inquiry into the history of the Italian family, Kuehn 1991 and Kuehn 2002 offer magisterial studies of the law constraining the lives of family members, especially women and children, while Haas 1998 presents an optimistic picture of familial relations and Musacchio 2008 details how art objects installed in the Florentine palace portray family events. Jacks and Caferro 2001 examines how the Spinelli family managed its wealth, and Padgett 2010 uses quantitative tools to trace changes in family structure and status over the 14th and 15th centuries. Outside of Florence, Benadusi 1996 looks at the social strategies of the provincial elite in the small town of Poppi.
  264.  
  265. Benadusi, Giovanna. A Provincial Elite in Early Modern Tuscany: Family and Power in the Creation of the State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
  266. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  267. Examines the activities of thirty-one “surname groups” of office holders, prominent merchants, and landed proprietors in the Tuscan town of Poppi.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Haas, Louis. The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300–1600. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
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  271. An optimistic view of emotional relations within the Florentine family, countering some more cautious assessments (see Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1985, cited under Household Structures and Klapisch-Zuber 1985, cited under Childbirth and Nursing), based on a close reading of a wide selection of ricordanze (male-authored family memoirs). Harshly critiqued by some reviewers.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Jacks, Philip Joshua, and William Caferro. The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.
  274. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  275. Based on recently opened archival materials, studies the acquisition of wealth by the 15th-century Spinelli family and its spending on lavish building and artistic projects.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Kuehn, Thomas J. Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
  278. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226457659.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  279. Examines how the law interacted with social customs and culture—thus presenting a “legal anthropology” rendering the actual condition of women and other family members more variable than a plain reading of law would suggest.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Kuehn, Thomas J. Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
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  283. The third of a series of Kuehn’s studies of the Florentine family considers the ambiguous status of illegitimate offspring, who were cut off from patrimonial inheritance but not necessarily from family wealth and patronage.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie. Art, Marriage, & Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
  286. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  287. Shows how the works of art and furnishings accumulated in Florentine palaces document familial relations and critical events, such as marriage and childbirth.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Padgett, John F. “Open Elite? Social Mobility, Marriage, and Family in Florence, 1282–1494.” Renaissance Quarterly 63.2 (2010): 357–411.
  290. DOI: 10.1086/655230Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  291. Important and extensive quantitative study of shifts in marriage patterns, family structure, and rates of social mobility from 1282 to 1494, showing how elite families intermarried to protect social status, yet did not prevent “new men” from aggressively claiming a place in the upper ranks of the social hierarchy.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Venice and the Veneto
  294.  
  295. King 1994 exploits a rich trove of humanist texts to explore childhood death and paternal grief in mid-15th-century Venice, while Wolff 2012 deconstructs the records of a trial for child abuse in the age of Casanova and Goldoni. Ferraro 1993, meanwhile, examines how the patrician families of Brescia, under the Venetian thumb, developed marriage and patronage strategies to maximize power. See also Ferraro 2008, cited under Infanticide and Abortion.
  296.  
  297. Ferraro, Joanne M. Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580–1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  298. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  299. Studies the marital, political, and patronage strategies by which the leading families of Brescia, having defined themselves as a hereditary class, consolidated power.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. King, Margaret L. The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
  302. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226436272.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  303. Reconstructs the life of a 15th-century child and his father, a prominent nobleman, whose disconsolate response to his son’s death at age eight was to construct a massive set of consolatory works by the leading humanists of Venice and the Veneto.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Wolff, Larry. Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
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  307. Parses the testimony in a 1785 trial before the Venetian tribunal of blasphemy in a case of the sexual abuse of an eight-year-old child by an elderly patrician in an age that had not yet construed that phenomenon as a crime.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Sources
  310.  
  311. Two works on marriage and family by 15th-century humanists offer valuable insight into domestic relations in Florence (Alberti 1969) and Venice (Barbaro 1978), while the letters in Macinghi Strozzi 1997 display a Florentine widow working tirelessly for the success of her children, and the memoirs published in Grubb and Bellavitis 2009 provide insight into the lives of citizen families of Venice.
  312.  
  313. Alberti, Leon Battista. The Family in Renaissance Florence. Translated and edited by Renée Neu Watkins. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969.
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  315. Indispensable 15th-century humanist treatise on manifold aspects of family management and relationships, to be read alongside modern studies of the Renaissance household and family.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Barbaro, Francesco. “On Wifely Duties.” In The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society. Edited by Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, 189–228. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.
  318. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  319. Translation of the second part of Barbaro’s widely circulated treatise De re uxoria (On Marriage), an early-15th-century humanist work advocating the choice of a wife for personal qualities rather than beauty or wealth, and modeling harmonious family life.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Grubb, James S., and Anna Bellavitis, eds. Family Memoirs from Venice (15th–17th Centuries). Rome: Viella, 2009.
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  323. Publishes five family memoirs, a genre that was rare in Venice although profuse in Florence and some other cities, even more remarkable in that the families documented are not noble, but rather of the “original citizen” rank. Texts are in Latin and Italian, with invaluable introductions and annotations in English and Italian by the editors.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Macinghi Strozzi, Alessandra. Selected Letters of Alessandra Strozzi. Edited and translated by Heather Gregory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
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  327. Bilingual edition (Italian and English on facing pages) of a selection from the famous letters of the 15th-century patrician widow Macinghi Strozzi, whose correspondence shows how she counseled her exiled sons, victims of Medici ascendancy in Florence, and managed the marriages of her daughters.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. England
  330.  
  331. Stone 1977, a monumental work, launches the recent study of the English family, focusing especially on the evolution of family structure among the aristocracy in the long three-century trajectory from Tudor to Hanoverian times. Modifying his conclusions are Houlbrooke 1984, Houlbrooke 1998, Macfarlane 1979, and Macfarlane 1986, which look at a broader range of households and find a closer and affection-bound family taking form in earlier centuries—as early as the 13th, in the case of Macfarlane 1979. Rosenthal 1991 and Harris 2002, the former focusing on patrilineal goals and the latter on women’s lives, consider aristocratic families during the 15th and 16th centuries. Orme 2001, synthesizing the author’s earlier studies, presents a comprehensive view of English childhood among the elite from birth into adolescence, while Hanawalt 1993 (cited under The Childhood Debate), focusing on London in the 14th and 15th centuries, describes the lives of children in an urban setting, and Levene 2012 examines the lives of children in that same city three centuries later. See also Bailey 2012 cited under Schooling for the socialization of children in 15th- and 16th-century England.
  332.  
  333. Harris, Barbara J. English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  334. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  335. Structured according to the roles played by women in the family—as daughters, wives, mothers, and widows—this monograph is an excellent resource for the history of family in 15th- and 16th-century England. See especially the first chapter on “Structures of Patriarchy” and the sixth on “Motherhood: Bearing and Promoting the Next Generation.”
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Houlbrooke, Ralph A. The English Family, 1450–1700. London: Longman, 1984.
  338. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. Countering Ariès 1962 (cited under The Childhood Debate) and Stone 1977, argues, with ample support from primary texts, that the sentimentally bound nuclear family was the dominant form in England from as early as 1450.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Houlbrooke, Ralph A. Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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  343. Richly supported by the contemporary evidence of wills, family papers, and diaries, traces the transition from Catholic belief to Protestant practice in England, as the process of death becomes a largely private matter enacted within the family.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Levene, Alysa. The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-Century London. Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
  346. DOI: 10.1057/9781137009517Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. Studies the assistance given to poor children—mostly children of laborers—in 18th-century London, finding that while considerable money and energy were expended for their care, doubts also surfaced about the long-term prospects of socializing pauper children.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Macfarlane, Alan. The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
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  351. Locates the birth of the intensely connected, emotion-rich family much earlier than historians in the Arièsian tradition (see Ariès 1962, cited under The Childhood Debate), perhaps as early as the 13th century.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Macfarlane, Alan. Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
  354. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  355. Traces the “Malthusian marriage pattern,” which the author believes to characterize the five key centuries he surveys, typified by late marriage, high rates of celibacy, low fertility, and close family relations.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Orme, Nicholas. Medieval Children. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
  358. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  359. Synthesizing Orme’s earlier studies of the rearing and schooling of mainly noble children in England, offers a full picture of the childhood experience of at least the elite in at least one European setting.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Rosenthal, Joel T. Patriarchy and Families of Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
  362. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  363. Profiles the patrilineal strategies of aristocratic families hoping to maintain their families in the male line beyond the limit of three generations that natural mortality seemed to set.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
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  367. Blockbuster analysis of the family’s evolution through three stages—from large weblike structures devoid of emotional warmth to small enclaves of intense feeling—that tracks the trajectory of family relationships across three centuries from the Tudors to the Hanoverians. Abridged edition published in 1979.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Particular Families
  370.  
  371. Blessed with rich lodes of family papers published in the 19th and 20th centuries, Hanham 1985, Gies and Gies 1998, Richmond 1990, Richmond 1996, Richmond 2000, and Slater 1984 present close studies of the Cely, Paston, and Verney families, respectively. Coss 2010 draws on a manuscript lode of account books preserved in an Oxford college to portray the economic, social, and cultural life of a 14th-century gentry family, while Macfarlane 1970 analyzes the diary of a more humble personage, the clergyman Ralph Josselin, whose minute record of daily events provides much material for the historian of family relations.
  372.  
  373. Coss, Peter R. The Foundations of Gentry Life: The Multons of Frampton and their World, 1270–1370. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
  374. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199560004.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  375. Utilizing a rich archive of materials at Magdalene College, Oxford, finds in the Multons of Lincolnshire a representative example of the gentry class in formation, describing how the household functioned as a center of consumption and production, but also of social interaction—not only with other gentry families but also with those of tenants—and religious and cultural activity.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Gies, Frances, and Joseph Gies. A Medieval Family: The Pastons of Fifteenth-Century England. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
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  379. Vivid narrative of the Paston saga by two expert storytellers, grounded in the letters exchanged among family members that detail the acquisition and management of their landed property, their involvement in war and conflict, their marriages high and low, and provide memorable portraits of individuals, notably of the matriarch Margaret, who held the clan together.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Hanham, Alison. The Celys and Their World: An English Merchant Family of the Fifteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
  382. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511522420Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  383. Based on the author’s own 1975 edition of the texts, analysis of letters from the 1470s and 1480s of the Cely family, wool merchants of London, revealing wide networks not only of commercial relationships but also of family and friends.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Macfarlane, Alan. The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
  386. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  387. Close analysis of the Josselin diary, which the author subsequently edited (Josselin 1976, cited under England: Sources).
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Richmond, Colin. The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: The First Phase. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  390. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511560309Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  391. Unconventional reading of the Paston letters (based on 19th-century editions), nonetheless thoroughly grounded in the texts, which often illuminates the individual family members and their interrelations. This first of three separately published volumes studies the family to 1459, when it rises from common to gentry rank.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Richmond, Colin. The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Fastolf’s Will. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  394. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511582165Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  395. This second of the author’s three-volume study of the Paston family focuses on the disposition of the will of Sir John Fastolf, who died in 1459, for whom John I Paston served as steward, and the acquisition of a portion of his estate by the Pastons.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Richmond, Colin. The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Endings. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.
  398. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  399. This third and final volume of Richmond’s analysis of the Paston family papers traces the careers of the widow and descendants of John I Paston.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Slater, Miriam. Family Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Verneys of Claydon House. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
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  403. Based on a 19th-century edition of the family papers, a close study of two generations of the gentry-rank Verney family, showing the preponderance of economic considerations in family decisions and the exploitation of women to advance collective strategies.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Sources
  406.  
  407. Two major letter collections chronicling the lives of two gentry families—the Pastons in the 15th century, the Lisles in the 16th—are available in the massive collections Byrne 1981 and Davis 2004–2005. The experience of families not so grand is documented in Houlbrooke 1989, which offers an anthology from diaries spanning a long 17th century, and Josselin 1976, presenting the 17th-century diary of the clergyman Ralph Josselin.
  408.  
  409. Byrne, M. St Clare, ed. The Lisle Letters. 6 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
  410. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  411. The correspondence of members of the Lisle family (totaling some 2000 letters) offers an unmatched view of Tudor culture and society, especially informative about estate finance, legal entanglements, and the education of the next generation. A selection by Bridget Boland of the letters in Byrne’s edition was published in 1983.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Davis, Norman, ed. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 2004–2005.
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  415. The life of the Paston family of East Anglia over several generations as recorded in their correspondence. The first two volumes first appeared in 1971 and 1976, edited by Davis; the third, with related texts and indexes, was completed after his death by Richard Beadle and Colin Richmond. A useful selection from the letters edited by Davis was published in 1963, also by Oxford.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Houlbrooke, Ralph A. English Family Life, 1576–1716: An Anthology from Diaries. New York: Blackwell, 1989.
  418. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. A full array of excerpts from the diaries and family papers that inform his monographs, ordered according to life-cycle stages, from courtship and marriage, to childbirth and Childrearing, to the exits of adolescence and death.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Josselin, Ralph. The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683. Edited by Alan Macfarlane. London: Oxford University Press, 1976.
  422. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. Fortuitously long diary of a clergyman whose eye noted the smallest details of family and village life, providing a unique record of domestic experience in the 17th century; preceded by Macfarlane’s previous monograph based on a close reading of the text (see Macfarlane 1970, cited under Particular Families).
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Maternal Writing
  426.  
  427. In England, women authors from the late 16th to late 17th centuries, often writing from profound religious conviction both Protestant and Catholic, left to their children informal or formal diaries, poems, and memoirs, often entitled “legacies” or gathered under that rubric, containing reflections on motherhood and moral advice. Travitsky 1980, in a classic essay, called attention to the genre, twenty exemplars of which are examined by Heller 2011, while Klein 2001 examines the specific case of Lady Anne Clifford.
  428.  
  429. Heller, Jennifer L. The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern England. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.
  430. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  431. Examines twenty English maternal legacies—texts by mothers to or about their children—written between 1575 and 1673, by women, both Protestant and Catholic, from different social ranks, often composed on a deathbed, providing emotional support and moral instruction.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Klein, Lisa M. “Lady Anne Clifford as Mother and Matriarch: Domestic and Dynastic Issues in Her Life and Writings.” Journal of Family History 26.1 (2001): 18–38.
  434. DOI: 10.1177/036319900102600102Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  435. Although Clifford did not write a work bearing the title “a mother’s legacy,” her diary, as emerges from Klein’s analysis, is replete with reflections on motherhood, demonstrating how central a factor maternity was to the identity of a 17th-century Englishwoman.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Travitsky, Betty. “The New Mother of the English Renaissance: Her Writings on Motherhood.” In The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. Edited by Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner, 33–43. New York: F. Ungar, 1980.
  438. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439. A classic essay that identified the maternal advice book as a new literary genre adopted by 17th-century Englishwomen: a text providing moral or practical advice and assurances of love, and giving expression to the powerful emotional bond between mothers and children, both male and female.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Sources
  442.  
  443. Following Betty Travitsky’s recovery of the maternal legacy tradition, texts originally published in the 17th century began to be reproduced with critical modern apparatus or in updated editions. Brown 1999 offers the works of Joscelin, Richardson, and Leigh, while Travitsky 2000, reproducing facsimile versions, offers those of Leigh and Joscelin again, in addition to Clinton’s, and Jean LeDrew Metcalfe’s edition of Joscelin’s Legacy (Joscelin 2000) presents a modernized version of the text facing the original, all with critical discussion and apparatus.
  444.  
  445. Brown, Sylvia, ed. Women’s Writing in Stuart England: The Mother’s Legacies of Elizabeth Joscelin, Elizabeth Richardson, and Dorothy Leigh. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999.
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  447. Includes three maternal advice-books—those by Dorothy Leigh (Mothers Blessing), Elizabeth Joscelin (Legacie to her Unborn Child; for which see also Joscelin 2000 and Travitsky 2000), and Elizabeth Richardson (A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters)—based on 17th-century texts, not modernized, with critical introductions.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Joscelin, Elizabeth. The Mothers Legacy to Her Unborn Childe. Edited by Jean LeDrew Metcalfe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
  450. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. A facing-page edition with modernized and original texts presents the compelling work written by Joscelin in advance of childbirth, anticipating her own death (in 1622)—as indeed transpired. Her “legacy” is advice to the child: to her daughter, if she were to be female, cautions about virginity, and to her son, if he were male, encouragement to seek the career of a clergyman.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Travitsky, Betty, ed. Mother’s Advice Books. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000.
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  455. Facsimile reproductions of three maternal advice books—those by Dorothy Leigh (The Mother’s Blessing), Elizabeth Clinton (The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie), and Elizabeth Joscelin (The Mothers Legacie; for which see also Joscelin 2000 and Brown 1999)—with critical introductions by Travitsky.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. France
  458.  
  459. The dominance of the monarchy and nobility in France shapes the writing of the history of the family, as seen in Marvick 1986, studying the childhood of Louis XIII, and Crawford 2004, examining the role of regent in the royal family. Considering a broader range of families, Fairchilds 1984 and Gager 1996 look at the relation of the family to outsiders who become insiders—servants and adoptees, respectively—while the essays in Desan and Merrick 2009 look at family relations as regulated by law and government. Flandrin 1979 studies the impact upon the traditional family of the repressive sexual agenda of the Counter-Reformation, while the articles collected in Wheaton and Hareven 1980 explore limits placed on sexuality by the family and other social institutions.
  460.  
  461. Crawford, Katherine. Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
  462. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. Studies the mechanisms by which three female and one male regent sustained royal authority during the minorities of legitimate heirs.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Desan, Suzanne, and Jeffrey Merrick, eds. Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.
  466. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467. Seven essays considering the impact of law and regulation on families during the 17th and 18th centuries, attending in various regional settings to such matters as marriage formation and dissolution, the power of wives as consumers, maternal guardianship of children, and royal legitimation of out-of-wedlock children.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Fairchilds, Cissie C. Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
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  471. Given that the premodern household was a system of kin and non-kin members, mostly servants, explores the relationships between the latter and the masters of the household
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Flandrin, Jean Louis. Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and Sexuality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
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  475. Examines the proliferation of household types among French families, and the repressive messages of Tridentine Catholicism that triggered increased levels of emotional engagement among family members.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Gager, Kristin Elizabeth. Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
  478. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. Countering the view that adoption, widely practiced in antiquity, had faded in European family life, finds multiple forms of “fictive” kinship that permitted outsiders to be incorporated especially within families of artisanal rank.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Marvick, Elizabeth Wirth. Louis XIII: The Making of a King. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.
  482. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. Based on the diary of Jean Héroard, physician to King Henry IV, examines the upbringing from infancy of the future King Louis XIII.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Wheaton, Robert, and Tamara K. Hareven, eds. Family and Sexuality in French History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980.
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. Explores ways that the family limited sexual expression, or was shaped by external prescriptions for sexual behavior imposed by church, state, or community.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Spain
  490.  
  491. Nader 1979, a monograph, and Nader 2004, a collection of essays, explore multiple dimensions of the Mendoza family, a representative of the nobility that dominated Spanish society. Casey 2007, in contrast, looks at a network of elite families in Granada, not long reconquered from Moorish domination and thus offering a different social context from that of Old Spain.
  492.  
  493. Casey, James. Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada, 1570–1739. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
  494. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511496707Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  495. Studies the ascension of a new elite in Granada (acquired by arms in 1492) made up of families seeking to consolidate power through links of kinship and patronage.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Nader, Helen. The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350 to 1550. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979.
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  499. Examines the cultural activity of a family of the warrior nobility, arguing that it was part of a literary Renaissance similar to that forming in contemporary Italy.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Nader, Helen, ed. Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450–1650. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
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  503. Continuing her work on the Mendoza family (see Nader 1979), Nader here gathers essays on eight matriarchs of a powerful noble family, showing the great degree to which women could act as agents and not just subjects even within a patriarchal system.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. The Low Countries
  506.  
  507. A constellation of city-states and principalities (situated in modern Belgium and the Netherlands) whose leading families were deeply involved in commercial enterprises, the Low Countries offer a contrast to nearby England and France. Nicholas 1985 and Marshall 1986 find that family clans in this region are somewhat less dominated by lineage concerns (although very alert to property concerns) than those in neighboring lands, while Adams 2005 shows how the strategies of elite families are intertwined with political and commercial aims. Broomhall and van Gent 2009, finally, reveals the complexities of the notion and reality of paterfamilias in the aristocratic family of Wiliam the Silent.
  508.  
  509. Adams, Julia. The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.
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  511. Studies the relationship among elite families, merchant companies, and the state in the Netherlands, comparing its structures to those in contemporary England and France.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Broomhall, Susan, and Jacqueline van Gent. “In the Name of the Father: Conceptualizing Pater Familias in the Letters of William the Silent’s Children.” Renaissance Quarterly 62.4 (2009): 1130–1166.
  514. DOI: 10.1086/650025Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  515. Drawing on an abundant store of correspondence, including letters to the biological father and others, traces the relations of the twelve surviving children of William the Silent to their actual father and the various father figures who cared for them in different linguistic and geographic domains.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Marshall, Sherrin. The Dutch Gentry, 1500–1650: Family, Faith, and Fortune. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986.
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  519. Studies wills and contracts pertaining to 1,085 families of the Utrecht region, finding their relationships characterized by reciprocity, and family life less restricted by patriarchy than in other contemporary settings.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Nicholas, David. The Domestic Life of a Medieval City: Women, Children, and the Family in Fourteenth-Century Ghent. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
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  523. Finds in this important Flemish city a pattern of family clans exhibiting considerable flexibility with regard to the property of women, marriage norms, and illegitimacy.
  524. Find this resource:
  525. The German Lands, Poland, and Hungary
  526.  
  527. Steven E. Ozment returns to his twin concerns of the Protestant Reformation and the traditional European family in two studies among several: Ozment 1983 and Ozment 1999. In both, he draws on literary sources, including diaries, letters, and moral treatises, to provide an account of the family life of patricians in 15th- to 16th-century German cities. Schultz 1995 extracts from a large sample of identified children a profile of how contemporaries viewed the young, while Buchholz 2000, looking at Pomerania as an exemplary case, focuses on the formation of the social and intellectual character of youth during the centuries of proto-industrialization, and Spinks 2009 explores the multiple cultural contexts for the representation of monstrous births in the 16th century. Turning to the peripheries of Renaissance Europe, Péter 2001 looks at the children of noble families in Hungary, and Łabno 2011 examines the unique manner of the commemoration of dead children in Poland.
  528.  
  529. Buchholz, Werner, ed. Kindheit und Jugend in der Neuzeit 1500–1900: Interdisziplinäre Annäherungen an die Instanzen sozialer und mentaler Prägung in der Agrargesellschaft und während der Industrialisierung; das Herzogtum Pommern (seit 1815 preussische Provinz) als Beispiel. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000.
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  531. Twenty studies of the mental and social formation of youth in agricultural and industrializing communities, focusing on the duchy (later Prussian province) of Pomerania.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Łabno, Jeannie. Commemorating the Polish Renaissance Child: Funeral Monuments and their European Context. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.
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  535. Comprehensive analysis of the visual representation of the dead child, both male and female, featuring an idealized infant putto—a sculptural motif recruited from Italy—reclining next to a skull, which is omnipresent in Poland from the 15th to 17th centuries and without equivalent in western Europe.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Ozment, Steven E. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
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  539. Argues against the general view of an authoritarian Reformation family; utilizes diaries and other personal papers to demonstrate the widespread existence of shared authority between husbands and wives and loving relationships with children.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Ozment, Steven E. Flesh and Spirit: Private Life in Early Modern Germany. New York: Viking, 1999.
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  543. Ozment’s contention that the premodern family was close and characterized by strong emotional bonds is sustained in this set of five narratives about the lives of Nürnberg families across the 16th and 17th centuries.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Péter, Katalin. Beloved Children: History of Aristocratic Childhood in Hungary in the Early Modern Age. Translated by Rachel and János Hideg. Budapest, Hungary and New York: Central European University Press, 2001.
  546. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  547. This portrait of parent-child relations in Hungary shows resemblances to those of better-known regions of western Europe, both by underscoring the existence of parental affection and care, and by showing the limits placed on children’s lives by the property and status concerns of their aristocratic families.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Schultz, James A. The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100–1350. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
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  551. Invaluable study identifying a set of 375 children from historical and literary documents as an evidentiary basis for defining characteristics of childhood, and attitudes toward children, from the high Middle Ages into the early Renaissance era.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Spinks, Jennifer. Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009.
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  555. Explores the representation of monstrous births—a phenomenon that fascinated early modern people for reasons that art historians and historians of science and medicine alike have explored—in relation to intellectual currents, and especially their use by both Protestants and Catholics to vilify their religious opponents.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Children and the Reformations
  558.  
  559. Like their elders, children were inevitably caught up in the struggles over religious reform in its Protestant, Catholic, and other sectarian versions. Strauss 1978 and Watt 2002 analyze the ways new Lutheran and Catholic communities sought to educate all children to enable their growth as Christians, while Bottigheimer 1993 takes a close look at the availability of Bibles to German children, both Calvinist and Lutheran, and Strohl 2001 discusses Luther’s views of parental responsibility for the child. Counter-Reformation France, meanwhile, draws the attention of Mentzer 1994, which studies the minority Huguenots, Calvinist adherents, by following one family’s career over two centuries, and Diefendorf 1996, which presents the contrary issue of the limits the family attempted to place on the free expression of religious commitment. Covington 2006 and Kobelt-Groch 1999, finally, examine the impact on children of parental commitment to faith.
  560.  
  561. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. “Bible Reading, ‘Bibles,’ and the Bible for Children in Early Modern Germany.” Past and Present 139 (1993): 66–89.
  562. DOI: 10.1093/past/139.1.66Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  563. Revising previous understandings, shows that Reformed and Lutheran children in 16th- and 17th-century German lands were provided, if not with the complete Bible in Luther’s translation, at least with children’s Bibles, Bible excerpts, and Bible stories.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Covington, Sarah. “‘Spared Not from Tribulation’: Children in Early Modern Martyrologies.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 97 (2006): 165–183.
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  567. Examines the representation of children, especially in Anabaptist martyrologies, as the victims of rage, mirroring the Herodian slaughter of the Innocents (Matthew 2:16–18), or the martyrdom of Hannah’s seven sons (2 Maccabees 7), for all of whom mothers wept, like Rachel for the victims of the Babylonian deportation (Jeremiah 31:15).
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Diefendorf, Barbara B. “Give Us Back Our Children: Patriarchal Authority and Parental Consent to Religious Vocations in Early Counter-Reformation France.” Journal of Modern History 68.2 (1996): 265–307.
  570. DOI: 10.1086/600767Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  571. Examines the tension between the rights of fathers to direct their children’s choice of vocation and the impulse of their offspring to find purpose and meaning in the church, updating a conflict between familial and religious ties that goes back to biblical times.
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Kobelt-Groch, Marion. “‘Hear My Son the Instructions of Your Mother’: Children and Anabaptism.” Journal of Mennonite Studies 17 (1999): 22–33.
  574. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  575. Records the fate of the children of persecuted Anabaptists, who were often forcibly baptized in violation of parental beliefs, and removed from their mothers and placed in foster care, to be reared in the faith of the dominant religious group.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. Mentzer, Raymond A. Blood and Belief: Family Survival and Confessional Identity among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1994.
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  579. Utilizes a rich trove of archival documents to show how a Huguenot family survived in a hostile environment from the age of the religious wars to the brink of the Revolution by tightening the family circle.
  580. Find this resource:
  581. Strauss, Gerald. Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
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  583. Classic study, pointing out the failures rather than celebrating the successes of the attempt of the new Lutheran establishment to establish a universal educational system to build Christian faith in a new generation and train future members of the clergy.
  584. Find this resource:
  585. Strohl, Jane E. “The Child in Luther’s Theology: ‘For What Purpose Do We Older Folks Exist, Other than to Care for . . . the Young?’” In The Child in Christian Thought. Edited by Marcia J. Bunge, 134–159. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001.
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  587. Explores how Luther understands the responsibility of parents to serve as “apostles, bishops, and priests” (p. 140) in fostering the growth of Christian awareness in their children, and views the tedious tasks of parental care for the young as holy acts of divine service.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Watt, Jeffrey R. “Calvinism, Childhood, and Education: The Evidence from the Genevan Consistory.” Sixteenth Century Journal 33.2 (2002): 439–456.
  590. DOI: 10.2307/4143916Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  591. Traces the transition in Childrearing practices as displayed in the records of the Consistory, the governing body of the Genevan church and community, which exhorted parents to shed “Papist” customs associated with baptism and saint worship, but to dedicate themselves to the education of their children in Reformed Christian principles.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. Jewish Childhoods
  594.  
  595. Renaissance historians have recently turned their attention to the family culture of European Jews. Ashkenazic Jewish communities had become rooted in France and the German lands by the end of the first millennium and later, with expulsions from many western regions from the 13th through 15th centuries, migrated eastward into Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian territories. The Sephardic Jews of Iberia, increasingly pressured by expanding Christian kingdoms from the 13th century, and expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1496 respectively, subsequently dispersed into Islamic lands under Ottoman rule for the most part, but also into nonhostile northern European locations, especially the Netherlands. Baumgarten 2004 and Marcus 1996 consider Jewish patterns of childrearing in Ashkenazik lands, while Kanarfogel 1992 looks specifically at educational mechanisms, including the education of very young children. The essays in Lieberman 2011, meanwhile, consider family and childhood in post-expulsion Sephardic communities, both Ottoman and western European. Hsia 1992 and Kuefler 2009, finally, offer studies of two different cases of alleged ritual murder of Christian children by Jewish perpetrators, and Hsia 1988 surveys the career of the ritual murder accusation in Germany from the 15th to 17th centuries.
  596.  
  597. Baumgarten, Elisheva. Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
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  599. Considers the centrality of birth and motherhood for Jewish women, giving particular attention to Jewish birth rituals—especially that of circumcision vis-à-vis the Christian one of baptism—and the preference for maternal breastfeeding, while noting that the frequent presence of Christian midwives, wetnurses, and servants impacted Jewish maternal behavior.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Hsia, R. Po-chia. The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
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  603. Studies the career of ritual murder trials against the Jews from their surge in the 15th century to their subsiding in the early 17th, exploring the sources in child sacrifice traditions of these imaginary crimes, the mass hysteria that they occasioned, and the political and judicial circumstances affecting the official response.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Hsia, R. Po-chia. Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in cooperation with Yeshiva University Library, 1992.
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  607. Hsia’s analysis of contemporary manuscript sources uncovers the story of how, in 1475, in the heart of the Italian Renaissance, a charge of ritual murder ignited mass outrage and led to the torture, trial, and execution of the alleged perpetrators.
  608. Find this resource:
  609. Kanarfogel, Ephraim. Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.
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  611. Examines the structures of Jewish education in Ashkenaz, where literacy was exceptionally high compared to neighboring Christian communities and Schooling universal for males. The first two chapters (pp. 15–41) describe the informal process by which tutors were hired by one or several fathers for young sons, and intimate parental involvement with the lives of even very young children.
  612. Find this resource:
  613. Kuefler, Mathew. “Anderl of Rinn, the Accusation of Jewish Ritual Murder, and the Historical Memory of Childhood.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2.1 (2009): 9–36.
  614. DOI: 10.1353/hcy.0.0038Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  615. The imagined or remembered murder and martyrdom of a three-year-old German child, thought to have occurred in the 15th century, becomes the basis of a 17th-century anti-Semitic cult that endured into the 1990s, when it was officially prohibited.
  616. Find this resource:
  617. Lieberman, Julia Rebollo, ed. Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011.
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  619. Essays reconstructing the family life of Sephardi Jews both in the Ottoman and the western European zones of the post-expulsion era include studies of childhood in such settings as Livorno and Pisa in Italy and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and consider the impact on families of the reassimilation of New Christians to Jewish communities.
  620. Find this resource:
  621. Marcus, Ivan G. Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
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  623. Focuses on the school initiation ritual practiced by Ashkenazi Jews, performed on the holiday of Shavuot, which marked the transition at age five or six from early education in the home under the mother’s nurturing care to schooling by a male tutor, himself portrayed as a nurturing mother.
  624. Find this resource:
  625. Abandonment
  626.  
  627. The argument some scholars propose that children in premodern times suffered from want of love has some support in the record of abandonment, a primary mechanism throughout European history for the regulation of family size and for cultural purposes. In Italy especially, but also elsewhere in Europe, the foundling home emerged by the 15th century as a refuge for abandoned children, the survivors among whom would be readied for apprenticeship or service positions. Pullan 1989 surveys foundling homes and orphanages on a European scale, while Gavitt 2011 considers the Florentine abandonment crisis of the 16th century, and Gavitt 1990, Bianchi 2005, Terpstra 2005, and Terpstra 2010 look at individual Italian institutions. Harrington 2009 studies the “unwanted children” of the German Nuremberg, Safley 2005 the orphans of Augsburg, and McCants 1997 those of Amsterdam, where the orphanage, unlike a foundling home, cared for the offspring of affluent citizens.
  628.  
  629. Bianchi, Francesco. La Ca’ di Dio di Padova nel Quattrocento: Riforma e governo di un ospedale per l’infanzia abbandonata. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2005.
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  631. Studies the “House of God,” the foundling home in Padua, whose records of “entrances and exits” permit a reconstruction for the period 1400–1484 of an institution that cared for more than 1,500 children and utilized the services of more than 2,000 wet nurses.
  632. Find this resource:
  633. Gavitt, Philip. Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale Degli Innocenti, 1410–1536. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
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  635. The splendid Ospedale degli Innocenti, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, housed the abandoned children of Florence and its countryside, whose lives knew little splendor. Based on extensive hospital records, Gavitt traces the lives of those children, patterns of donation, and the management of this flagship among foundling homes.
  636. Find this resource:
  637. Gavitt, Philip. Gender, Honor, and Charity in Late Renaissance Florence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
  638. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511976797Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  639. The culmination of his many studies—including Gavitt 1990 (also cited here)—this new volume considers as a whole the astonishing phenomenon of infant abandonment—mostly of girls, mostly by poor urban and rural workers—in 16th-century Florence, when 600 to 800 per year were deposited at the principal civic orphanage, for reasons for which Gavitt seeks an explanation.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Harrington, Joel F. The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
  642. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226317298.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  643. Considers six cases drawn from the annals of 16th- to 17th-century Nuremberg of children abandoned, neglected, abused, or lured into criminal activity, identifying as prominent themes the trauma of war and the experience of lone motherhood.
  644. Find this resource:
  645. McCants, Anne E. C. Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
  646. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  647. Studies how the Municipal Orphanage of Amsterdam supported middle-rank families, where the death of parents often spelled downward mobility for their respectable children and necessitated an institutional remedy.
  648. Find this resource:
  649. Pullan, Brian S. Orphans and Foundlings in Early Modern Europe. Berkshire, UK: University of Reading, 1989.
  650. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  651. Series of lectures by a master historian, providing an overview of European charitable institutions for children.
  652. Find this resource:
  653. Safley, Thomas M. Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
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  655. Not poor waifs but the children of mainly artisan households, both Catholic and Protestant, inhabited the orphanages of Augsburg, which managed their inheritances and their education until they could rejoin mainstream society in appropriate roles.
  656. Find this resource:
  657. Terpstra, Nicholas. Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
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  659. Compares the systems of foundling homes in two Renaissance cities, noting the diversity of institutions that emerged to deal with demographic crises and the need they provoked for the care of the vulnerable children of rich and poor alike.
  660. Find this resource:
  661. Terpstra, Nicholas. Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
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  663. Continuing his pursuit of Tuscan charitable institutions for abandoned children, Terpstra here analyzes the Ospedale di S. Maria dell’ Umiltà, founded by Savonarolans in the 1550s, and later renamed the Pietà delle Abbandonate, which housed the “lost girls” named in his title: true unfortunates, a shocking sixty percent of whom died while in residence of disease and other unexplained causes.
  664. Find this resource:
  665. Infanticide and Abortion
  666.  
  667. In Christian Europe, Abandonment was preferred to infanticide as a means for shedding unwanted children, but infanticide nonetheless persisted. Although the medieval treatment of the poor mothers who were the most frequent perpetrators was minimally punitive, prosecution of infanticide intensified in the 15th through 17th centuries. Trexler 1993 tracks the evidence for Florence, while Hoffer and Hull 1981 and Jackson 2002 do so for England, the former treating also colonial New England, which provides an illuminating comparative reference. Gowing 1997 and Ferraro 2008 consider, for England and Venice respectively, the isolation of the parturient mother of illegitimate offspring, which often culminated in abortion, abandonment, or infanticide, while Staub 2004 and Symonds 1997 explore the literary expression of the infanticide theme in England and Scotland, possibly reflecting contemporary practice. Though viewed as infanticidal, contraceptive practices and abortion were both common, according to Riddle 1992 and Riddle 1997, although these were perhaps not so widely used or effective as he suggests.
  668.  
  669. Ferraro, Joanne Marie. Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice: Illicit Sex and Infanticide in the Republic of Venice, 1557–1789. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
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  671. Studies the records of fifteen trials over 250 years concerning unmarried women who had been impregnated illicitly—often by fathers or clerics—and who sometimes brought on abortions or abandoned or destroyed their infants when the courts provided no remedies for their misfortunes.
  672. Find this resource:
  673. Gowing, Laura. “Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past and Present 156 (1997): 87–115.
  674. DOI: 10.1093/past/156.1.87Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  675. Recovers the experience of women who hid their pregnancies and secretly gave birth to illegitimates, who in turn were often born dead, allowed to die, or killed by their disoriented and uncomprehending mothers.
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Hoffer, Peter, and N. E. H. Hull. Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558–1803. New York: New York University Press, 1981.
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  679. For the two related Anglophone regions of England and colonial New England, describes the effects of sharpened legal strictures against infanticide, and explores the relationship of infanticide to such factors as legitimacy, the child’s age, and the mother’s economic and marital status.
  680. Find this resource:
  681. Jackson, Mark, ed. Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002.
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  683. Thirteen essays exploring episodes of infanticide and its prosecution from early modern to modern contexts, often touching on the salient themes of the accused mother’s character and condition.
  684. Find this resource:
  685. Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
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  687. Argues that contraceptive and abortifacient herbs and drugs and other methods were well known since ancient times, and assisted premodern people in limiting unwanted births. Received with some skepticism by professional historians.
  688. Find this resource:
  689. Riddle, John M. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
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  691. A sequel to Riddle’s earlier work on contraception and abortion (Riddle 1992), also cautiously received, argues that circles of women were the main vehicle for the transmission of knowledge about contraceptive and abortifacient herbs and drugs, and that their orally transmitted knowledge became suppressed with the development of a modern and male-dominated medical culture.
  692. Find this resource:
  693. Staub, Susan C. Nature’s Cruel Stepdames: Murderous Women in the Street Literature of Seventeenth Century England. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2004.
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  695. Explores the cheap pamphlets popular with a mass readership that purveyed tales of violence perpetrated by women mainly upon their kin, including their infants and children.
  696. Find this resource:
  697. Symonds, Deborah A. Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
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  699. Explores popular attitudes toward infanticide and their reflection in contemporary ballads, a widely shared literary genre.
  700. Find this resource:
  701. Trexler, Richard C. Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence. 3 vols. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993.
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  703. The first volume contains Trexler’s classic article on infanticide, also reprinted in his Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994).
  704. Find this resource:
  705. Midwifery
  706.  
  707. The considerable skills and high status of the midwife are explored in Evenden 2000 and Marland 1993, while Perkins 1996 and Gelbart 1998 chronicle the careers of two successful French midwives, and Wilson 1995, McTavish 2005, and Green 2008 track the process by which men took over the practice of midwifery.
  708.  
  709. Evenden, Doreen. The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  711. Rejecting the stereotype of ignorant, untrained midwives, shows that licensed midwives underwent a serious training program and were highly respected by the community at large. Appendix lists nearly 1,200 practicing midwives.
  712. Find this resource:
  713. Gelbart, Nina Rattner. The King’s Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame Du Coudray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
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  715. An account of the life of a certified midwife commissioned and pensioned by King Louis XV, who traveled throughout France for twenty-five years instructing, with the aid of her assistants, some 10,0000 novice practitioners.
  716. Find this resource:
  717. Green, Monica Helen. Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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  719. Traces the long, steady progress of male influence in gynecology from the 12th century to the 16th, finding that the masculine appropriation of gynecological knowledge occurs earlier than has generally been thought, thereby revising the assumption of female autonomy in this domain prior to the 17th or 18th centuries.
  720. Find this resource:
  721. Marland, Hilary, ed. The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe. London: Routledge, 1993.
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  723. Essays on diverse aspects of midwife practice in 17th- to 18th-century England, the Netherlands, the German lands, Spain, and France.
  724. Find this resource:
  725. McTavish, Lianne. Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
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  727. Analyzing visual representations of childbirth scenes, studies the contest waged from the 16th to 18th centuries between midwives, heretofore deemed authoritative in matters of childbirth, and male obstetrical practitioners, claiming and ultimately seizing the upper hand.
  728. Find this resource:
  729. Perkins, Wendy. Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France: Louise Bourgeois. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1996.
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  731. Little-noted monograph profiling one of the first women to professionalize the practice of midwifery: Louise Boursier or Bourgeois (b. 1563–d. 1636), midwife to French queen consort Marie de’ Medici and a circle of aristocratic women.
  732. Find this resource:
  733. Wilson, Adrian. The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660–1770. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
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  735. Studies the process by which male midwives, generally called in for the most difficult births—for which traditional midwives had neither the experience nor the instruments, notably the forceps—came to dominate obstetrical practice.
  736. Find this resource:
  737. Sources
  738.  
  739. The practice of Midwifery triggered a significant production of manuals intended to instruct practitioners. The early obstetrical works of Savonarola 1952 and Rösslin 1994 inspired midwives themselves to write guides to their craft and memoirs of their experiences, as in these works composed between 1617 and 1740: Boursier 2000, Sharp 1999, Siegemund 2005, and Schrader 1987. Male physicians as well continued to offer expert advice, as seen in Worth-Stylianou 2013, publishing five important French obstetrical treatises.
  740.  
  741. Boursier, Louise Bourgeois. Recit veritable de la naissance de messeigneurs et dames les enfans de France, etc. Geneva: Droz, 2000.
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  743. Midwife to queen consort of France Marie de Médicis and other court ladies, and widely renowned for her skill in managing delivery and relieving pain, Boursier wrote the several works on the craft of midwifery that are gathered in this volume, beginning with the Recit veritable of 1617, in which she portrays herself as an exemplary practitioner.
  744. Find this resource:
  745. Rösslin, Eucharius. When Midwifery Became the Male Physician’s Province: The Sixteenth-Century Handbook “The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives.” Edited and translated by Wendy Arons. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994.
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  747. Valuable translation of a treatise raided and retranslated in later midwifery works, published in 1513 by the public physician of Worms for his noble patroness, and intended to instruct the midwives whose ignorance and negligence, he believed, caused the unnecessary death of infants. Reproduces original illustrations.
  748. Find this resource:
  749. Savonarola, Michele. Il trattato ginecologico-pediatrico in volgare; Ad mulieres ferrarienses de regimine pregnantium et noviter natorum usque ad septennium. Edited by Luigi Belloni. Milan: Societa italiana ostetricia e ginecologia, 1952.
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  751. Written before 1460 by the grandfather of the visionary and revolutionary Girolamo Savonarola, this first modern manual of obstetrics, gynecology, and pediatrics is unusual for being written in the vernacular of the populace, not the Latin of the learned, and is addressed explicitly to the women of the author’s city of Ferrara.
  752. Find this resource:
  753. Schrader, C. G. Mother and Child Were Saved: The Memoirs (1693–1740) of the Frisian Midwife Catharina Schrader. Edited and translated by Hilary Marland. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987.
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  755. A late work in the tradition of midwifery treatises, by a practitioner in the Low Countries whose memoirs show a remarkable record of success in the delivery of infants.
  756. Find this resource:
  757. Sharp, Jane. The Midwives Book, Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered. Edited by Elaine Hobby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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  759. Based on Rösslin’s manual, perhaps the first guide by a practicing English midwife (original publication 1671).
  760. Find this resource:
  761. Siegemund, Justina. The Court Midwife. Edited and translated by Lynne Tatlock. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
  762. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226757100.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  763. By a practitioner at the Elector of Brandenberg’s court in Berlin who delivered the babies of some six thousand women; recapitulates now standard midwifery advice in the Rösslin tradition in the novel genre of dialogue between an expert and her apprentice (original publication 1690).
  764. Find this resource:
  765. Worth-Stylianou, Valerie, ed. and trans. Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern France: Treatises by Caring Physicians and Surgeons (1581–1625), François Rousset, Jean Liebault, Jacques Guillemeau, Jacques Duval and Louis De Serres. Toronto: Iter/Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013.
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  767. Written in the vernacular for both learned and popular audiences, these texts demonstrate the vivid interest of male physicians in matters of women’s health, scarcely tainted by the condescension to which a generalized misogyny, often assumed to have existed, would give expression.
  768. Find this resource:
  769. Childbirth and Nursing
  770.  
  771. Men relied on women to bear and nurse children, and women performed these responsibilities in a separate and exclusively female zone: the rooms where they gathered among female friends, kin, and advisers. The studies in Fildes 1990 and Mendelson and Crawford 1998 describe the experiences of women undergoing the processes of pregnancy and birth, also featured in several essays in Miller and Yavneh 2000, while Gélis 1991 reconstructs the sets of attitudes surrounding childbirth. Musacchio 1999 lavishly displays the material accoutrements of birth, while Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1990 explores the representation in art of one particular kind of birth, that by Caesarean section. Although experts medical, moral, and clerical generally agreed on the benefits of maternal nursing, men often sought paid surrogates to perform this vital function. The custom of paid wet nursing was widely practiced among urban elites, gentry, and nobility, in contrast to other cultures and civilizations where, however much breastfeeding was shared, it was rarely purchased as a service. The history of wet nursing is exhaustively presented in Fildes 1988, while the classic Klapisch-Zuber 1985 affords a close-up view of the wet-nursing enterprise in Renaissance Florence.
  772.  
  773. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate. Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
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  775. Impressive for the sheer number of images assembled of Caesarean surgery, performed during the period studied mainly by midwives in an attempt to save the living infant of a dead or dying mother.
  776. Find this resource:
  777. Fildes, Valerie A. Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
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  779. A broader treatment than the author’s dissertation on baby feeding published in 1986, this monumental work is likely to remain the standard on wet nursing.
  780. Find this resource:
  781. Fildes, Valerie A., ed. Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren. London: Routledge, 1990.
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  783. Essays exploring different aspects of maternity, with especially important contributions by Linda A. Pollock on the experience of pregnancy and Adrian Wilson on the ritual of childbirth.
  784. Find this resource:
  785. Gélis, Jacques. History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy, and Birth in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1991.
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  787. Evokes the experience of childbirth from conception to neonatal death, based on a study of contemporary, largely male-authored texts. Originally published as L’Arbre et le fruit: la naissance dans l’Occident moderne (XVIe–XIXe siècles) (Paris: Fayard, 1984).
  788. Find this resource:
  789. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300–1530.” In Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. By Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, 132–164. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
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  791. Deft utilization of sources detailing the nursing of more than three hundred infants by more than four hundred nurses to reconstruct the business of wet nursing, whose transactions were carried out mainly by males, while questioning why it was preferred among elites to maternal breastfeeding.
  792. Find this resource:
  793. Mendelson, Sara Heller, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
  794. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198201243.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  795. A comprehensive study of women’s lives, with extended treatment of marriage, conception, childbirth, nursing, and childrearing.
  796. Find this resource:
  797. Miller, Naomi J., and Naomi Yavneh, eds. Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000.
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  799. Gathers essays devoted to the literary manifestations of the experience of motherhood, including nursing and wet nursing, with cases drawn from Italy, Spain, France, the German lands, and England.
  800. Find this resource:
  801. Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie. The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
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  803. Richly illustrated exploration of the childbirth phenomenon through its material culture, supported by readings of contemporary texts, and stressing the customs and beliefs centered on childbirth in the society of urban Italy.
  804. Find this resource:
  805. Childrearing
  806.  
  807. Cressy 1997 and Demos 1970 describe early childrearing, largely the mother’s province (for which also see chapter 11, on “Childhood,” in Hanawalt 1986), as part of their broader profiles of daily life. The mother’s later role as teacher and promoter of her offspring is explored in Calvi 1994, Chojnacki 2000, and Crabb 2000, and her engagement, based on her own experience of mothering, with the discussion of the theory of childrearing, in Mendelson 2010. Sommerville 1992 explores childrearing practices of one religious minority, the Puritans of England, eager to secure their survival through the profound acculturation of their children.
  808.  
  809. Calvi, Giulia. Il contratto morale: Madri e figli nella Toscana moderna. Rome: Laterza, 1994.
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  811. Follows changes in relations of mothers and children during the transition from Renaissance to modern family patterns.
  812. Find this resource:
  813. Chojnacki, Stanley. Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
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  815. Collecting previously published, now classic articles, illuminates the role especially of mothers in preparing the young for adulthood and promoting their career entry.
  816. Find this resource:
  817. Crabb, Ann. The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
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  819. Based on the close study of the famous letters of Alessandra Strozzi to the exiled male members of her family, in which she discusses the marriages of her daughters and guides her sons into appropriate careers.
  820. Find this resource:
  821. Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
  822. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198201687.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  823. Traces rituals and customs associated with life-cycle events in lives of English villagers, with especially useful discussion of childbirth, baptism, and the postnatal reentrance of mothers to society.
  824. Find this resource:
  825. Demos, John. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
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  827. Classic study of family life among the New England Puritans, including attitudes toward childrearing and discipline.
  828. Find this resource:
  829. Hanawalt, Barbara. The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
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  831. Vivid reconstruction of family relationships in late medieval English village life, with mothers especially shown to be actively engaged in rearing children.
  832. Find this resource:
  833. Mendelson, Sara H. “Child Rearing in Theory and Practice: The Letters of John Locke and Mary Clarke.” In Special Issue: Woman in her Place: Essays on Women In Pre-Industrial Society in Honour of Mary Prior. Edited by Anne Summers and Anne Laurence. Women’s History Review 19.2 (2010): 231–243.
  834. DOI: 10.1080/09612021003633994Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  835. Shows how greatly Locke’s widely-read Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) derived from his epistolary exchanges during the 1680s with Mary Clarke, an actual mother of six offspring, as well as with his friend, her husband, Edward Clarke.
  836. Find this resource:
  837. Sommerville, C. John. The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
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  839. Argues that the Puritans’ self-awareness as a vulnerable minority encouraged a preoccupation with childrearing, expressed in books for adults and children.
  840. Find this resource:
  841. Sources
  842.  
  843. Advice on child care and Childrearing, a genre that numbers but a handful of texts from antiquity through the Middle Ages, flourished in the Renaissance. The advice offered in Dominici 2003 bespeaks the author’s clerical status but is nonetheless notable in its sensitivity to the nature of the child. Concerned with child welfare in an era of high mortality, the learned polymath Thomas Phaer, presented in Bowers 1999, offers the first pediatric manual in English, while Vallambert 2005 publishes the first written in French, by the physician Simon de Vallambert. See also Maternal Writing.
  844.  
  845. Bowers, Rick, ed. Thomas Phaer and the Boke of Chyldren (1544). Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999.
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  847. In this first English-language pediatric manual, widely read throughout the 16th century, Phaer offers practical childcare advice “poised between folk beliefs and a rudimentary empiricism” (ix), covering such topics as sleep problems, bathing, and the treatment of common illnesses.
  848. Find this resource:
  849. Dominici, Giovanni. Regola del governo di cura familiare, parte quarta, on the Education of Children. Edited and translated by Arthur Basil Coté. PhD diss., Catholic University of America at Washington, DC, 2003.
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  851. Written around 1400 for the widowed Florentine patrician Bartolommea degli Alberti to assist her in rearing her four children, a treatise mixing practical advice with moral guidance.
  852. Find this resource:
  853. Vallambert, Simon de. Cinq livres, de la maniere de nourrir et gouverner les enfans dès leur naissance. Edited by Colette H. Winn. Geneva: Droz, 2005.
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  855. In this first French-language pediatric manual first published in 1565, Vallambert instructs mothers and nurses in the everyday bodily care of children—like nearly all experts, he is an advocate of maternal wetnursing, but uncharacteristically advises the frequent bathing of the infant—still reserving the realm of disease for male physicians.
  856. Find this resource:
  857. Schooling
  858.  
  859. The main purpose of schooling in the Middle Ages was to prepare monks and priests for their clerical tasks, but from the 13th century, especially among the high nobility in the north and in the prosperous city-states of Italy, schools developed to prepare boys for secular careers. Black 2001 and Grendler 1989 study the schooling of youth in Italy, while Orme 1984 surveys that of elite youth in England, Bailey 2012 traces the evolution of conduct books intended for non-elite as well as elite children, and Monaghan 2005 explores literacy education in colonial New England, Willemsen 2008 surveys the material remains and visual representations of Renaissance classrooms to evoke the experience undergone by schoolchildren, and while the education of girls has not yet received a full synthesis, it is at least partially addressed by the disparate essays in Whitehead 1999 The new genre of children’s books is explored by Wooden 1986, a theme also addressed by some of the essays in Immel and Witmore 2006.
  860.  
  861. Bailey, Merridee L. Socialising the Child in Late Medieval England, c. 1400–1600. Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 2012.
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  863. This analysis of the literary tools for socializing children of all classes, both boys and girls, examines courtesy poems, didactic guides, household manuals, and schoolbooks, noting a shift over time from a preoccupation with externals of polite behavior to one with moral character.
  864. Find this resource:
  865. Black, Robert. Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
  866. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511496684Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  867. Studies the development especially of the Latin curriculum from the high Middle Ages into the era of humanism, while understating somewhat the changes introduced by the humanists.
  868. Find this resource:
  869. Grendler, Paul F. Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
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  871. Meticulous reconstruction of the public, private, and ecclesiastical schools by which male and female children of the artisan, mercantile, and patrician strata acquired literacy, learning, and the diverse skills necessary to pursue their different occupations.
  872. Find this resource:
  873. Immel, Andrea, and Michael Witmore, eds. Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800. New York: Routledge, 2006.
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  875. Thirteen essays considering childhood experience in relation to books—books that they read, and books in which they were depicted. Of special interest are studies of books written for children such as Little Goody Two-Shoes and Abbé Pluche’s Spectacle de la nature, and the hypothesis, based on German evidence, that children raised in a literate environment experienced a more insular childhood than other children.
  876. Find this resource:
  877. Monaghan, E. Jennifer. Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.
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  879. Comprehensive account of literacy instruction in colonial New England, looking at books children read; methods of instructing children in the two separate processes of reading and writing; schoolmasters and schoolmistresses; literacy in the family setting; and literacy outreach to native and enslaved Americans.
  880. Find this resource:
  881. Orme, Nicholas. From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066–1530. London: Methuen, 1984.
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  883. Highlights the diversity and flexibility of late medieval patterns of schooling, which served as a foundation not repudiated with the innovations of the Renaissance.
  884. Find this resource:
  885. Whitehead, Barbara J., ed. Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe: A History, 1500–1800. New York: Garland, 1999.
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  887. Eight essays presenting quite disparate aspects of women’s “education,” including not only formal schooling but also training for social roles, with especially interesting contributions on convent education in Italy, the literary education of Jewish women, and the education of midwives. Neither a reference work, as it purports to be, nor a synthesis.
  888. Find this resource:
  889. Willemsen, Annamarieke. Back to the Schoolyard: The Daily Practice of Medieval and Renaissance Education. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008.
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  891. Focusing mainly on the Low Countries in the 14th to 16th centuries (where secular, town-based schooling begins in the 13th century), this work studies the material culture of the schoolroom—hornbooks and styluses, inkwells, bookstands, the ever-present paddles and whips, as well as visual representations in manuscripts, painting, and sculpture—to reconstruct the experience of going to school.
  892. Find this resource:
  893. Wooden, Warren W. Children’s Literature of the English Renaissance. Edited by Jeanie Watson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986.
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  895. Describes the arrival, beginning with printer William Caxton’s publication in 1483 of an illustrated Aesop’s Fables, of story-based and illustrated books designed especially for children.
  896. Find this resource:
  897. Sources
  898.  
  899. During the Renaissance, humanist experts developed theoretical justifications for the secular schooling of boys (primarily) in the liberal arts, or “humane studies.” The voices heard in the educational treatises gathered in Kallendorf 2002 are those of the schoolmaster: surprisingly mild (the humanists in general opposed corporal punishment and urged the encouragement of learning through incentives and sound communication), but still tending to moralism and dauntingly high standards. In Erasmus 1985, that great Christian humanist espouses the same ideals for the education of even very young children, the responsibility for which he places on fathers, while Comenius 1956, uniquely, guides women to perform the task of first teacher of their own children, and the catechisms gathered in McQuade 2007 demonstrate that mothers indeed assumed that role.
  900.  
  901. Comenius, Johann Amos. The School of Infancy. Edited and Translated by Ernest M. Eller. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956.
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  903. As a reformer committed to the view that parents were commissioned by God to prepare children for eternity, Comenius here outlines how the earliest education of a child is to proceed under the direction of his mother. Widely influential work composed in Czech and published in German (1533) and several subsequent translations.
  904. Find this resource:
  905. Erasmus, Desiderius. On Education for Children. Edited and translated by Beert C. Verstraete. In Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 26. Edited by J. K. Sowards, 291–346. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
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  907. In this work (originally titled De pueris instituendis) Europe’s foremost intellectual passionately argues that the education of children is a father’s first and most important responsibility, to be undertaken in earliest childhood, given the unique nature of the human being who is, unlike the beasts, shaped not by instinct but by culture.
  908. Find this resource:
  909. Kallendorf, Craig, ed. and trans. Humanist Educational Treatises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
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  911. More than a century after the publication by W. H. Woodward of a series of humanist treatises on education (Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1897]), Kallendorf’s new translation and edition (for I Tatti Renaissance Library, a series of humanists’ texts in translation) offers modern readers an entrée to humanist thinking about the shaping of character through the study of books.
  912. Find this resource:
  913. McQuade, Paula. “Early Modern Catechisms Written for Mothers, Schoolmistresses, and Children, 1575–1750.” In Essential Works for the Study of Early Modern Women, Series 3, Part 3, Vol. 2. Edited by Betty Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
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  915. Publishes six catechisms written and expressly intended for use by mothers in teaching their children the fundamentals of the Christian religion, documenting a reality of which many authors speak in generalities: the role of mothers in early childhood learning.
  916. Find this resource:
  917. Youth and Work
  918.  
  919. Most children in premodern times were sent out early to work, often as servants or apprentices. Eisenbichler 2002, Niccoli 1995, and Taddei 2001 address the culture of Italian youth, while Klapisch-Zuber 1985 explores the complex issues involved in the employment of young Italian girls as servants. Regarding England, Hanawalt 1993 describes the apprenticeship experience of London youth in the 14th and 15th centuries, while Ben-Amos 1994 and Lamb 2009 consider the lives, respectively, of 17th-century child players and apprentices. Mitterauer 1993 traces into modern times the effects on adolescents of the changing nature of work and the progressive cultural diminution of the family. Eisenbichler 1998 and Polizzotto 2004, finally, study youth confraternities, which in Renaissance Florence served interwoven social, religious, and ritual functions.
  920.  
  921. Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman. Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
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  923. Examines seventy-four autobiographies to reconstruct the experience of adolescents from 1500 to 1800, illuminating especially the condition (characteristic perhaps of the majority of this age group) of living and working in non-kin households as servant or apprentice.
  924. Find this resource:
  925. Eisenbichler, Konrad. The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411–1785. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
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  927. Rich sources permit a long history of a single youth confraternity, discussing its rules, physical setting, rituals, and recreational activities designed to guide and channel youthful energies.
  928. Find this resource:
  929. Eisenbichler, Konrad, ed. The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2002.
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  931. Collects essays dealing with youth costume and misbehavior, sexual excess and victimization, and minority (Jewish) or privileged (noble and royal) status, in Italy, France, and England.
  932. Find this resource:
  933. Hanawalt, Barbara. Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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  935. Using court records and literary sources, illuminates the life course of children living in England’s preeminent city during the 14th and 15th centuries. Especially useful for the study of apprenticeship, both male and female.
  936. Find this resource:
  937. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. “Female Celibacy and Service in Florence in the Fifteenth Century.” In Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Edited by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, 165–177. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
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  939. Important essay following a very young girl from a poor natal home to employment in a bourgeois household, where she accepts the limits of celibacy and withheld wages until, presumably, at the end of her service she may recapture her wages as dowry.
  940. Find this resource:
  941. Lamb, Edel. Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
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  943. Studies the particular set of child laborers—young adolescent boys—who worked as “players” in the days of Shakespeare and Jonson, their lives governed by the commercial imperatives of the theatrical managers who traded in children’s services.
  944. Find this resource:
  945. Mitterauer, Michael. A History of Youth. Translated by Graeme Dunphy. Family, Sexuality, and Social Relations in Past Times. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
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  947. Considers shifting markers such as age of marriage, school leaving, service, and apprenticeship; gradual deinstitutionalization and deritualization of adolescence; blurring of gender identities; and the family’s weakening capacity to socialize youth. Originally published as Sozialgeschichte der Jugend (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1986).
  948. Find this resource:
  949. Niccoli, Ottavia. Il seme della violenza: Putti, fanciulli e mammoli nell’Italia tra Cinque e Seicento. Rome: Laterza, 1995.
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  951. Describes the phenomenon of violent bands of homeless male children aged seven to fourteen who engaged in banditry and violence against such symbolic victims as traitors, assassins, hoarders, and adulterers, posing a threat to social harmony and a challenge to civic and religious authorities that attempted to discipline them.
  952. Find this resource:
  953. Polizzotto, Lorenzo. Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence, 1427–1785. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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  955. Follows the long and well-documented history of a confraternity particularly associated with the Savonarolan movement that stressed religious instruction and participation in public rituals.
  956. Find this resource:
  957. Taddei, Ilaria. Fanciulli e giovani: Crescere a Firenze nel Rinascimento. Florence: Olschki, 2001.
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  959. Clarifying the boundaries between age groups, illuminates for the period of adolescence the clustering in sodalities, which in Florence were highly structured, a formalization intended to prevent disorder and ensure conformity to communal norms.
  960. Find this resource:
  961. Sources
  962.  
  963. The voices of children or young people are rarely heard in premodern literature, however much they have become a staple of the modern and postmodern eras. The 16th-century picaresque novella The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (Merwin 2005) may be seen as the first in a literary tradition that would culminate in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist of 1838 and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye of 1951. A trenchant work of social and religious criticism, Lazarillo de Tormes is an anonymous fictional account that depicts the working life and attendant loss of innocence of a small child as he passes from master to master. The letters collected by Ozment in Three Behaim Boys (Ozment 1990) are rare personal statements by youthful writers, a tradition that does not exist before the 16th century.
  964.  
  965. Merwin, W. S., trans. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adversities. Introduction by Juan Goytisolo. New York: New York Review, 2005.
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  967. Considered the first work of the picaresque genre, published in Spanish in 1554 and subsequently in the major European vernaculars; first banned, then censored by the Spanish Inquisition. Staley’s translation, copyrighted in 1997 and 2000, has Spanish and English texts on facing pages is available online. Earlier translations include The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Misfortunes as Told by Himself, edited and translated Robert S. Rudder (New York: Ungar, 1973) and Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler: Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, edited and translated by Michael Alpert (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969, revised edition 2003).
  968. Find this resource:
  969. Ozment, Steven E., ed. and trans. Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in Early Modern Germany: A Chronicle of their Lives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
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  971. Selection and translation of 207 letters recording the experience of three youths in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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