In their "Introduction: After Ariès," (1-10), P.J.P. Goldberg, Felicity Riddy, and Mike Tyler articulate the need for a new line of medievalist response to Philippe Ariès' Centuries of Childhood. As they recognize, to argue "yes, people in the Middle Ages did recognize their children as children, and love them" would be to beat a horse that has been dead for years. They situate Ariès' argument in a larger history of the family as an isolated, private group: "In Ariès' thinking, then, childhood and privacy are interdependent concepts which are held to come into being together. In order to respond to this argument, therefore, it is not enough to show that there was affection between parents and children in the Middle Ages, which has often been done and which Ariès knew perfectly well already; we also need to prise childhood and privacy apart" (3).
One expects, then, that this volume of essays would focus on the project of determining whether the concept of childhood is inextricably linked to the private life of the family and whether the latter is an effect of modernity or can be located in the Middle Ages. One also expects some explanation of the term "youth" used in the book's title, the medieval concept(s) to which it corresponds, and its relation to "childhood" which the introduction uses almost exclusively. These expectations, however, are disappointed. The Introduction does go on to give examples from late fourteenth-century England of the use of the child in public discourse. These examples could surely be multiplied from any region and period if we turned to religious texts and iconography. But the discussion does not relate these uses of the child in public discourse to the nature of the medieval family and thus does not respond to Ariès's argument as the editors suggest we should understand it.
The fungibility of "youth" and "childhood" in the title and introduction reflects the incommensurability of the articles in the volume. Some are excellent, all are interesting, but they do not address the same issues. It may be, indeed, that medieval people viewed everyone from birth through the early twenties as having fundamental commonalities so that there is a category that encompasses them all; but the book assumes rather than makes this argument. There are no thematic ties between the articles, other than the fact that they deal with young persons.
Edward James, "Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages" (11-23), does what one might have expected the introduction to do, asking whether there were recognized periods of childhood and youth in Merovingian Gaul (or, more specifically, in the writings of Gregory of Tours). He looks first at the way classical and later medieval writers divided up the ages of human development: "it would make more sense to translate not juventus but adolescentia as 'youth' rather than as 'adolescence.' Adolescentia corresponds to a much longer time-span than the relatively short period recognized as biological adolescence by modern writers" (14)--the ages, approximately, between fourteen and twenty-five. However, James finds that Gregory does not make the distinctions made in classical writers. He uses terms loosely, referring to himself at eight as "in my adolescence." More importantly, he does not seem to recognize a period of young adulthood: "childhood was a category that was recognized, and to a certain extent even idealized. But . . . adolescence and youth, in the classical sense (adolescentia and juventus), and 'youth' in our sense, were not recognized in practical terms as specific stages in life, with their own problems and their own status" (22). James suggests, rather, that a new stage began at around seven or eight when a child began training to be an adult.
Simha Goldin's "Jewish Society under Pressure: The Concept of Childhood" (25-43 gestures to Ariès at the beginning of the article--the only one of the eight to do so--but the body of the piece is concerned not with the public/private question raised in the Introduction, but with the question of whether Ashkenazi Jews in the central Middle Ages had a concept of childhood, and if so what kind. He argues that indeed they did, and that it was influenced or stimulated by Christian attempts (real or feared) to baptize Jewish children, and the consequent need to protect them. He proposes to demonstrate this by examining the family's attitude to the child and the attitude of the group to the child. Goldin never quite explains how these two sets of attitudes were affected by the threat posed by the church, except that this threat made education in Jewish practice all the more important: "The community indeed recognized childhood as a special time, but because of the threat posed by the Church, it was thought imperative to equip children with the necessary tools as early as possible" and therefore bring them into some adult obligations (43).
The discussion of family attitudes to children is concerned mainly with infants: wet nursing, fathers caring for children (including a discussion, fascinating at least to those of us who are parents, of what happens if a child soils himself while the father is studying the sacred books). I say "soils himself" deliberately; Goldin uses the masculine here. In the discussion of infants and very young children it is not clear whether he is using a generic "he" or speaking of male children. In the second section, concerned with the age at which a child is responsible for his own behavior, Goldin often is clearly talking only about boys. For example "small children" are exempt from laying tefillin (37). But women of all ages are also exempt (or ineligible, depending on whether one considers this an obligation or a right). The "child" who may or may not be old enough to wear the tzitzit is of course a boy as well. Goldin's use of "child" in these situations makes us wonder whether the "child" who at a certain point is old enough to undertake the Yom Kippur fast is also only a boy, or could be a girl. The same Hebrew form can be translated as "boy" or "child," but to translate it consistently as "child" and discuss the religious duties of "children" makes medieval Judaism sound much more inclusive not only than medieval Christianity but also than modern Judaism.
Potentially the most influential article in the volume is Kim M. Phillips' "Desiring Virgins: Maidens, Martyrs and Femininity in Late Medieval England" (45-59). Unlike the previous two articles it is not concerned with querying childhood as a category. Rather, this is an important intervention in the debate over representations of virgin martyrs. Some scholars have read stories of the torture of beautiful young women as erotic, appealing to the voyeuristic interests of a male audience. Others focus on the female audience and emphasize the stories' depictions of these young women as strong-willed and in control of their own destinies. For them the stories are not pornographic but rather exemplary of women's courage and steadfastness. Phillips' contribution is to suggest that while the stories--especially fifteenth-century versions by Bokenham, Capgrave, and Lydgate-- indeed sexualize the virgins, this does not mean the appeal was to men: they "could have appealed to audiences of the lay female elite through a more subtle process than straightforward titillation" (48). The fact that the virgin martyrs were sexually desirable would make them effective as models for aristocratic women: "Maidens of the higher social orders could be more effectively taught the value of virginity and chastity if the models of such virtues were of a feminine type likely to appeal to elite lay maidens, rather than through a total reliance on the ascetic messages delivered in sermon and homiletic modes" (47).
Phillips uses "parasexuality," a term borrowed from a study of Victorian barmaids, for this extension of sexuality beyond the titillating. She argues that for representations of women to have a sexual (or parasexual) appeal to other women need not mean they are homoerotic: "Desire can be the longing for emulation, and that longing may have a sexual tinge where the viewer wishes to emulate the sexual appeal of the object" (53). This point could usefully be applied to some recent work, which implies that any invitation to a male reader/viewer to focus on a male body, even for purposes of emulation, is homoerotic.
As Phillips admits, it is difficult to demonstrate that young women actually did read the stories in this way. She presents evidence of wishes for fashionable clothing expressed by young women who certainly would have come in contact with textual and visual representations of virgin martyrs in similar clothing, but the linkage is indirect. Nevertheless, her interpretation is highly plausible and very suggestive. The problem of whether a text that today seems erotic was read as erotic in the Middle Ages is a perennial one for historians of sexuality, and Phillips presents a new way of looking at that question.
Rosalynn Voaden addresses the problem of authorization in "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Authority in Pearl and in Narratives of the Child King Richard" (61-72). She suggests that there are strong similarities in the way "customary representations of the hierarchy of power are contested in order to invest a child with authority" (61). The parallels are indeed striking, notably the use of ritual to invest the child with authority from another "body," whether sacred king or heavenly queen. A good deal more could be said about the broader context of such reversals of hierarchy. What about the way women claimed God's authority to speak or lead, for example?
Frances Andrews, in "A Safe-Haven for Children? The Early Humiliati and Provision for Children" (73-84), shows that unlike other religious orders or communities the Humiliati made provision for parents to enter the community with their children. This practice could have been related to the issue, raised in the Introduction, of the relation of children and the family to the development of private life. Here was an alternative to oblation in which children might remain with their parents, but certainly not within a private and isolated household. The documentary base is meager; Andrews uses five contracts first published in 1911, but does not say whether these are all that are extant. This article too is tantalizingly brief and the topic deserves further development.
In "Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England" (85-99), P.J.P. Goldberg presents demographic data from the York and Yorkshire records he knows so well. He demonstrates that those who migrated tended to do so in their late teens. Servants and laborers--the most mobile groups--tended not to be married. This sort of work could be a life-cycle phenomenon, something to do until they were able to marry and settle down, as Goldberg has discussed in previous work. He goes on to discuss at some length the mobility and gender breakdown of laborers÷although not young laborers in particular. He is safe in assuming that most of those laborers were young, but as he points out, not all were, because numerous laborers and non-life-cycle servants never married. "As such they neither became householders nor achieved social adulthood. But since they did not reside with their employers, they were not legal dependents either· Within the hierarchical structure of medieval society, the landless, the rootless, the unmarried, those not invested with the responsibilities of householding in the conventional sense, and those not subject to the authority of a lord, a husband, or a master were a potentially destabilizing and subversive influence" (96). Thus, he suggests, there existed a group who were not "youths" by chronological age, but who did not fit into the expected social patterns of adulthood and thus remained in a negative sense perpetual youth. Unfortunately the data do not seem to allow him to estimate their numbers, and the mere confirmation of their existence advances the discussion little. One might ask, in light of the Introduction's reference to Ariès, where someone with neither the private role of a child nor the public role of an adult fits in.
Helen Cooper's "Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances" (101-121), the longest article in the book, gives an interesting catalogue of advice scenes not just in romance but in a variety of medieval narrative genres. They are not, she argues, there to be useful to the readers. However, she says, "[s]uch diverse uses of the motif of advising the young are not susceptible of any single or easy conclusion. Each usage offers its own moral within the particular story within which it occurs" (119). We are presented, then, with a stock motif used in very different ways, but little guidance as to what we might take from these examples.
"'Youth on the Prow': Three Young Kings in the Late Viking Age," by Judith Jesch (123-139) also draws on literature but has a much narrower focus: skaldic stanzas about three actual rulers of Norway and Denmark. She uses them to discuss the nature of kingship in Viking Age Scandinavia. A king had to embody strength and military success, often the province of the young, but also wisdom, more associated with the old, and generosity, which is not age-bound. The poetry about Magnús the Good stresses his youth more than does that about Óláfr Haraldsson and Knútr Sveinsson; she suggests that this is because Scandinavian kingship was moving "from a 'viking' model in which vikings' sons fight their way to the top, to a more 'medieval' model with a growing emphasis on dynastic, ecclesiastical, and national concerns" (136). Rather than being a traditional Viking like his father St. Óláfr, Magnús was king because of the support of the church and aristocracy as well as because of his royal (albeit illegitimate) birth. Youth, then, was valued very differently with the Europeanization of Scandinavian kingship.
Despite the promise of the beginning of the introduction, this is a collection of quite loosely related individual papers from a variety of time periods, disciplines, and approaches. There is much of value here, but the book as a whole is not a major intervention in the history of medieval childhood.