Volume 49, Number 20 · December 19, 2002
The Cradle Will Rock
By Eamon Duffy
The History of the European Family: Volume 1, Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789
edited by David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli
Yale University Press, 365 pp., $35.00
Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe
by Steven Ozment
Harvard University Press, 162 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Medieval Children
by Nicholas Orme
Yale University Press, 387 pp., $39.95
Does childhood have a history? Are the experiences of children, and the relations between children and their elders, constants of human nature, universal through time and space, or are they social constructs, radically differing from culture to culture and from age to age? At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries William Wordsworth wrote of childhood and youth as a uniquely privileged time of innocence and insight—'Heaven lies about us in our infancy,' a paradisal state from which growing up was a progressive exile and disenchantment—'Shades of the prison- house begin to close/Upon the growing boy.' After Freud we cannot quite subscribe to so idealized an understanding of the dreaming innocence of youth. Nevertheless the distinctiveness of childhood as a state utterly different from adulthood is deeply ingrained in our culture, and encoded in icons of childhood as different as Peter Pan and Huckleberry Finn.
Review, 3537 words
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