Childhood In Modern Europe

This invaluable introduction to the history of childhood in both Western and Eastern Europe c.1700-2000 seeks to give a voice to children as well as adults, wherever possible. It addresses a number of key topics, including conceptions of childhood, ideas about family life, culture, welfare, schooling, and work.

Colin Heywood's classic account of childhood from the early Middle Ages to the First World War combines a long-run historical perspective with a broad geographical spread. This new, comprehensively updated edition incorporates the findings of the most recent research, and in particular revises and expands the sections on theoretical developments in the 'new social studies of childhood', on medieval conceptions of the child, on parenting and on children’s literature. Rather than merely narrating their experiences from the perspectives of adults, Heywood incorporates children’s testimonies, 'looking up' as well as 'down'. Paying careful attention to elements of continuity as well as change, he tells a story of astonishing material improvement for the lives of children in advanced societies, while showing how the business of preparing for adulthood became more and more complicated and fraught with emotional difficulties. Rich with evocative details of everyday life, and providing the most concise and readable synthesis of the literature available, Heywood's book will be indispensable to all those interested in the study of childhood.

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

This edited collection examines different aspects of the experience and significance of childhood, youth and family relations in minority religious groups in north-west Europe in the late medieval, Reformation and post-Reformation era. It aims to take a comparative approach, including chapters on Protestant, Catholic and Jewish communities. The chapters are organised into themed sections, on 'Childhood, religious practice and minority status', 'Family and responses to persecution', and 'Religious division and the family: co-operation and conflict'. Contributors to the volume consider issues such as religious conversion, the impact of persecution on childhood and family life, emotion and affectivity, the role of childhood and memory, state intervention in children's religious upbringing, the impact of confessionally mixed marriages, persecution and co-existence. Some chapters focus on one confessional group, whilst others make comparisons between them.

Early Modern Childhood is a detailed and accessible introduction to childhood in the early modern period, which guides students through every part of childhood from infancy to youth and places the early modern child within the broader social context of the period. Drawing on the work of recent revisionist historians, the book scrutinises traditional historiographical views of early modern childhood, challenging the idea that the concept of ‘childhood’ didn’t exist in this period and that families avoided developing strong affections for their children because of the high death rate. Instead, this book reveals a more intricately detailed character of the early modern child and how childhood was viewed and experienced. Divided into five parts, it brings together the work of historians, art historians and literary scholars to discuss a variety of themes and questions surrounding each stage of childhood, including the household, pregnancy, infancy, education, religion, gender, illness and death. Chapters are also dedicated to the topics of crime, illegitimacy and children’s clothing, providing a broad and varied lens through which to view this subject. Exploring the evolution in understanding of the early modern child, Early Modern Childhood is the ideal book for students of the early modern family, early modern childhood and early modern gender.

This book draws on original material and approaches from the developing fields of the history of emotions and childhood studies and brings together scholars from history, literature and cultural studies, to reappraise how the early modern world reacted to the deaths of children. Child death was the great equaliser of the early modern period, affecting people of all ages and conditions. It is well recognised that the deaths of children struck at the heart of early modern families, yet less known is the variety of ways that not only parents, but siblings, communities and even nations, responded to childhood death. The contributors to this volume ask what emotional responses to child death tell us about childhood and the place of children in society. Placing children and their voices at the heart of this investigation, they track how emotional norms, values, and practices shifted across the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries through different religious, legal and national traditions. This collection demonstrates that child death was not just a family matter, but integral to how communities and societies defined themselves. Chapter 5 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

Drawing on art history, literary studies and social history, the essays in this volume explore a range of intersections between gender and constructions of childhood in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, England, France and Spain. The essays are grouped around the themes of celebration and loss, education and social training, growing up and growing old. Contributors grapple with ways in which constructions of childhood were inflected by considerations of gender throughout the early modern world. In so doing, they examine representations of children and childhood in a range of sources from the period, from paintings and poetry to legal records and personal correspondence. The volume sheds light on some of the ways in which, in the relations between Renaissance children and their parents and peers, gender mattered. Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood enriches our understanding of individual children and the nature of familial relations in the early modern period, as well as of the relevance of gender to constructions of self and society.

No detailed description available for "Growing up in Europe".