Medieval Children

Rating:
Summary: The nice side of the middle ages.
Review: A couple of years ago Steven Osment published a book called "Ancestors," which sought to criticize the views of Philippe Aries that people in the past had treated their children incredibly callously. Unforuntately, Osment's book was brief and somewhat superficial, even though he was basically right. This book is one that Osment should have written, except that Osment is a historian of Reformation Germany and Orme is a historian of medieval England. Contra Aries, Orme and his fellow scholars "have gathered copious evidence to show that adults regarded childhood as a distinct phase or phases of life, that parents treated children like children as well as like adults, that they did so with care and sympathy, and that children had cultural activities and possessions of their own." They book is lavishly illustrated and based on all sorts of information, from archival studies, to records of the royal family (the family most studied), to an abundance of visual evidence (Pieter Brugel's "Children's Games" is used to special effect). Orme has also found archealogical evidence of toys and school books that children have scribled on.

Orme starts off with conception: "Medieval Christians came to believe that God put the soul into the foetus when it took human shape, at about forty-six days for a male, and ninety for a female; until that point, the embryo was not human and had neither human life nor human soul." This view was held by Innocent III and Thomas Aquinas. We discuss the ceremonies of baptism, the responsibilities of godparents, and the naming of children. We discuss the relative rarity (though not absence) of birthdays. We learn about cradles and swadling, about weaning and day and night time activities. Infanticide was viewed with disapproval, and we learn about accidents and possible abuse. Perhaps 42.5% of children died before they were ten in the late 1500s. We learn about changing views of the fate of unbaptised children.

Especially interesting are children's use of rhymes and songs, to which Orme devotes a whole chapter to. We also learn about the use of toys, a practice well developed by the Middle Ages. Orme talks about dolls, windmills, and tops. He shows use pictures of toy knights on horsebacks which were mass-produced from moulds. "Children, of course, have never confined themselves to toys made specially for them. Poor or rich, they have fashioned their own from anything lying at hand. Gerald of Wales, describing his childhood...in the 1150s, recalls how he and his brothers played with sand and dust...They built towns and palaces, and he made churches and monasteries." Orme goes on about games, such as marbles and chess, as well as playing at war.

Orme devotes another chapter to the church, and like today some churches were tolerant of small children wandering around, and others were more easily irritated. There are, rather surprisingly, two chapters on reading, one on learning how to do it, and another on literature for children. Since most children did not know how to read in medieval England this might be a bit excessive. It is interesting to learn about the different alphabets and how children were taught to learn syllables, but perhaps this is a bit much. On the other hand, Orme forcefully reminds us that literacy was not the result of the invention of printing. Instead increased literacy encouraged the development of the printing press. Orme is part of a historical trend which emphasizes the importance, if not the predominance, of literacy in the late medieval period as opposed to the supposed ubiquity of an exclusively oral tradition. Orme concludes with a chapter on growing up. He reminds us that contrary to what many people think, the marriage of children or their execution was a rather rare event. Nor was a callous greedy apprenticeship that common either. All in all, Orme has provided a thorough dissection of the child's role in medieval England. No doubt much of this is applicable to the rest of Europe. One only wishes, giving that so much of Orme's account deals with the Church, about how Jews raised their children.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of information.
Review: Everything you ever wanted to know about medieval childhood but didn't know who to ask. And some beautiful illustrations as well.
Other reviews have summarized the contents nicely, so I won't bother.
I took one star away, because a few of his statistics strike me as questionable. (I'm not sure that they are wrong, so I won't down-grade him more than one star.) For example, he claims that the average age at marriage was 26 for women, 28 for men. Which seems quite high to me. (While it is a myth that everyone married at 15, early 20's seems more realistic. Unless he is including remarriage of widows/widowers in his figures, which would, of course, bring the average up.) He also claims an average birthrate of about 3 children per family, with a 'survival-past-childhood' rate of less than 2 ... a figure which would have resulted in the total disappearence of the population within a few generations. And finally, while he doesn't give specific literacy figures, he seems to imply that literacy was quite widespread ... which was not the case, and continued to be not the case for quite some time after the introduction of movable type. (Books were extremely expensive, well beyond the means of even the middle classes, let alone the vast peasant/working classes. Most people had no use for reading. The gentry/nobility were usually literate [at least the male half]. Below that level of society, outside the monestaries, very few people could read or write.

Despite these flaws, the book has a lot of interesting information. (Though he does seem to be trying VERY hard to demonstrate that various objects/stories/songs/games/activities were used/read/sung/played/done by children ... rather than by society as a whole.)Well worth the read, though it might be worth waiting to see if it comes out in paperback.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of information.
Review: I've never seen such a thorough treatment of the subject. It is, to say the least, exhaustive, as well as thoroughly footnoted.

Chapters cover all aspects of childhood, from pregnancy and birth to upbringing, the child's place in religion, how children entertained themselves, and how they were educated. There was quite a bit here that I had never seen before, dispelling many commonly-held misconceptions of how children were treated and viewed in the period.

The book is large, with good pictures and photos. The writing is extremely good, very readable, and free of overly high-blown language. I especially appreciated the information on education and recreation -- I had never seen medieval spellers or hornbooks, and never knew what kinds of games children actually played. Another chapter covered how children were treated by the Church -- how they were entered into its service, and even quite a bit about the Feast of Innocents, where children took the place of the bishop and priests and had a service!

Overall, I found the book to be absolutely a good addition to my history library, and suggest that others interested in the subject may find it so as well. It's $$$, but such a good value doesn't come along often.

Rating:
Summary: Lavishly presented and formatted, but is lacking...
Review: One can tell that Nicholas Orme has done extensive research on this book, digging up any and all facts about medieval children, and I applaud him for making the effort for what promised to be interesting subject matter. However, the fact remains that children were NOT extensively documented then, like they are today, and Orme digresses (distractingly often) into the realm of personal conjecture and an almost constant apology for the lack of sources. What I found most irritating was that about half of his sources date from Tudor England, which is better categorized as Renaissance rather than Medieval, and NONE of his sources predate ~AD 1,000. But the illustrations are heavenly, the hardback editon is a joy to handle, and I did learn quite a lot, but overall, the project was rather more ambitious than the material he had to work with.

Rating:
Summary: A Wealth of Information
Review: This book has so much information, you will wonder why you did not get this book sooner. This book will answer so many of your questions that you may ask concerning life in the middle ages from birth to adult. If you are interested in life in the meddle ages, then I recomend this book to you. The table of Contents:1. Arriving2. Family Life3. Danger and Death4. Words, Rhymes, and Songs5. Play6. Church7. Learning to Read8. Reading for Pleasure9. Growing Up.To give you an idea of just how much information you can find in this bok. I will discuss the first chapter "Arriving" with you. You will see how much one chapter can answer all your question, and this book has 9 chapters.The chapter, Arriving starts our discussing birth, the understanging of churches ideas of birth, time a women was pregnant in te middle agesm 8-10 months. The use of a relic to help in a good birthing. Widwife is discussed, How in royal and noble births, the queen or countess was allowed to choose the chamber where she would give birth. The other subtopic of arriving was Baptism:The Institution, :The Ceremony, Names, Birthdays and Records. The Family Life gets it the family size and shapes in the middle ages, the care given to babies in the middle ages. It discusses that medieval children were weaned as long as 2-3 years and why. Discusses how more aspects of life was done in the daylight, than at night. It goes onto discussing parents and children, giving examples of a confrontation with a irritated father. It discusses the Poor: Talking about how prenant women in need, or neey women with small children, were chiefly thrown on the mercy of teir family, if they had one, or onprivate charaty. It goes into how Parliamentary made laws to deal with the poor. There is just so much information, you can't pass up this book.