The title of Nicholas Orme's book Medieval Children is misleading. Like most other studies on medieval childhood, or more generally on any topic related to the medieval life cycle, it deals with the High Middle Ages, mainly from the thirteenth century onwards. Orme chooses to end the Middle Ages unusually late: the second quarter of the sixteenth century. Moreover, as it is explained right from the introduction, the study concerns itself only with England and not with the rest of Europe. In other words Medieval Children is about children in England from 1200 to 1550, but sources as early as late Antiquity and, far more often, as late as the second half of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries are also used.
The titles of the chapters are as straight-forward as the title of the book, discussing childhood from "Birth" to "Growing up." Orme ends childhood with the mid teens, paying close attention to the multiple boundaries set to the first age by medieval people themselves. Except for schooling that he already treated in previous books, Orme covers here all aspects of the life of the children and this book is by far the most detailed on the topic. It is indeed a mine of information on issues as far apart as the very mundane use of the pot-chamber and the technical and theoretical issue of the "children and the law." It illustrates perfectly Orme's mastery of primary sources of all sorts: dictionaries, archaeological findings, lives of saints, medical treatises, monastic customaries, etc. He used for instance plays portraying the birth of Christ in order to illustrate the absence of fathers from the birth-chambers: Joseph always leaves to get something (light and fuel or midwives) and comes back to find Jesus born. He then cites a romance, Bevis of Hampton, that gives an original explanation for the absence of the father: women do not show their privy parts to men! Unlike similar studies on the topic that also use a vast array of sources, one gets the extremely reassuring impression from Orme's work that he did not pick selectively nor chose carefully between what he had picked in order to present only a biased picture. Orme had read all and has usually taken time to ponder them.
Indeed, he sometimes offers delicate analyses of the data collected from his primary sources. For instance, his study of the representation of children on tomb effigies from the end of the fourteenth century onwards is thoughtful and enriching. Sadly such analysis is not consistently applied. Rather Orme chooses too often instead to list many different facts without much examination. For instance, he describes the intriguing ordinances of royal and aristocratic families on what the birth-chamber should look like without commenting. Linked with this peculiar parti pris privileging of facts to interpretation is his very limited exploitation of secondary sources. Occasionally he makes an extensive use of them (for example the work of the Opies on the nursery rhymes), which renders his text immediately more gripping and interesting for the scholar. However that is the exception rather than the rule, and more often than not the medievalist reader is frustrated by the absence of perspective. For instance, even though quite a lot of literature has been published on the frequency, or rather infrequency, of infanticide during the Middle Ages, Orme has completely ignored this literature.
These last comments beg the question of the audience envisaged for such a volume: for whom was it written? Books by Philippe Aries and Lloyd deMause and their representations of a pitiful childhood in past times once grasped the imagination of other scholars (historians, psychologists, sociologists, etc). However, as the numerous mistakes of their depressing portrait were pointed out, the history of childhood took a turn to another extreme, and its new message attracted a very different public. Publication houses understood quickly that there was a market out there on medieval childhood. Orme's Medieval Children is understandable by all. Undergraduate students as well as professors looking for examples for their lectures on medieval daily life will be delighted. However they probably form only a tiny fraction of the public that Yale University Press hopes to reach. As was the case with the French book by Pierre Riche and Danielle Alexandre-Bidon, L'enfance au Moyen Age (Paris, 1984), following a beautiful and popular exhibit at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, Medieval Children contains magnificent illustrations. Both volumes can be offered to non-specialists as splendid coffee table books. Barbara Hanawalt's book Growing up in London, without color plates but adorned with easily grasped drawings and gentle fictitious tales, was probably produced for a similar audience if a different position on the bookshelves.
These three volumes have the same message to transmit to their readers: the charming little ones of the Middle Ages were usually much cared for by their loving parents; and when the parents were dead, society at large tried its best. Today's parents who care sufficiently about the topic of childrearing to buy expensive volumes dealing with it can only be delighted to recognize themselves in their forerunners of some six hundred years ago: the characters remain the same but the change of scenery is stunning. Of all medievalists who have studied the history of childhood and adopted the continuity thesis (cf. Barbara A. Hanawalt, "Medievalists and the Study of Childhood," Speculum, vol. 77/2 (April 2002): 440-60), Orme is probably the most frank on the issue: he does not believe that there is such a thing as a history of childhood. For him, medieval childhood is very similar to late twentieth and early twenty-first century childhood: "And, as the reader will by now have realized, I believe them [the children of the Middle Ages] to have been ourselves, five hundred or a thousand years ago" (10). As an historian, I beg to disagree. As a girl (the "girl" here is obviously important) raised in France (both north and south) and North America in the 1960s and 70s, I can assert on personal experience that there are fundamental geographical and temporal differences in the modes of childrearing, if only within the Western World and in the last forty years. Let's not even talk about the dissimilarities of treatment between the children of Aleppo and the ones of Toronto. Future historians of medieval childhood should avoid both the continuity and the discontinuity theses, and rely far more heavily on ethnographical studies.
Because of his desire to insist on the similarities between then and now, Orme is occasionally led to manipulate his information. Between the images of the half empty or half full glass, he will again and again choose the latter, even when the glass is in fact nine-tenths empty (for instance, regarding the number of individuals who might have known their birthday date in the Middle Ages, (50)). He also makes the same methodological errors as the other advocates of the continuity thesis. Can one really use miracle stories depicting parents first as crying out at the wounds or death of their little ones, and then as being much relieved by their cure or resurrection, as unconditional proofs of parental love? Why should medievalists suddenly suspend their critical judgement when dealing with parental love, and read literally an hagiographical source that they would otherwise never have read in such a simplistic manner? This does not mean that miracle stories cannot be used for such a research, but only in a comparative perspective, without picking and choosing the miracles and the beneficiaries.
Orme insists also that Aries was wrong in claiming that there were no representations of the children in the Middle Ages. However, in order to convince us of the contrary, he produces no analysis of the iconography of the medieval child, nor reference to any secondary study on the topic (he could have cited, among others, the excellent article by Michel Pastoureau, "Emblems of youth: young people in medieval history," in A History of Young People in the West, vol. I: Ancient and Medieval Rites of Passage, ed. G. Levi and J.-C. Schmitt, trans. C. Naish, Cambridge (MA): Belknap Press, 1997, pp. 222-39), and instead fills his book with an iconography of which more than two-thirds of the images date from the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and more often than not were not made in England. This is best illustrated by the first four images of his book. The jacket illustration is a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, dating from 1560; the second image, adorning the table of content, comes from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 135, a French Book of Hours from the second quarter of the sixteenth century; the third image, that decorates the title page of the introduction, is again taken from Bruegel's Children's game; and the fourth has been found in an early sixteenth-century Flemish manuscript. Last but not least, Orme also contradicts his own claim that there is no history of childhood. Again and again in his book, he points to an evolution that started in the twelfth century, at least in the written sources. One example among many is offered by the following statement: "After 1200, childhood was more likely to be regarded as a distinct sub- adult condition, requiring separate treatment" (216). However, he never ponders on the characteristics of the changes that took place, nor their causes.
All this said, Medieval Children is the best book on the topic so far, based on an amazing array of primary sources, written by an extremely reliable scholar. It is simply too bad that our darling little ones move us and our publishers so much that we do not keep all our objectivity when talking about them, even the five-hundred-year-old ones.