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476
Middle ages and childhood
A separate concept of childhood was unknown in the early Middle Ages. “Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it” because artists were “unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale.” -
1201
Law brought child-beating into the public domain
“If one beats a child until it bleeds, then it will remember, but if one beats it to death, the law applies.” Most medieval descriptions of beating were quite severe, although St. Anselm, as in so many things, was far in advance of his time by telling an abbot to beat children gently, for “Are they not human? Are they not flesh and blood like you?” -
1401
Bad Parents Giving Their Children To The Devil.
Durer’s fifteenth-century Ritter von Turn and sixteenth-century.
parents who give the Devil the children they promised to him.
at the age of seven or earlier into the homes or to monasteries as servants, pages, ladies-in-waiting, oblates, or clerks, practices still common in early modern times. As with the equivalent lower class practice of apprenticeship, the whole subject of the child as laborer in the homes of others is so poorly studied that it unfortunately cannot be much examined here. -
1453
Philippe Aries’s book (Centuries of Childhood)
Aries argues that while the traditional child was happy because he was free to mix with many classes and ages, a special condition known as childhood was “invented” in the early modern period, resulting in a tyrannical concept of the family which destroyed friendship and sociability and deprived children of freedom, inflicting upon them for the first time the birch and the prison cell. -
The use of the child as a “toilet” for adult projections
The new-born babe is full of the stains and pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through our loins. Baptism used to include actual exorcism of the Devil -
Untimely death
The child at nurse might be “stifled, over-laid, be let fall, and so come to an untimely death; or else may be devoured, spoiled, or disfigured by some wild beast, wolf or dog, and then the nurse fearing to be punished for her negligence, may take another child into the place of it. Robert Pemell reported the rector in his parish told him it was, when he first came to it, “filled with suckling in-
Children were put in “dark closets, where they were sometimes forgotten for hours. -
Child-adult relationship and its impact on childhood
Existence of so many contradictory attitudes on the adult’s part without the least resolution. The child is loved and hated, rewarded and punished, bad and loving, all at once. That this puts the child in a “double bind” of conflicting signals But the conflicting signals themselves come from adults who are striving to demonstrate that the child is both very bad (projective reaction) and very loving (reversal reaction). -
Control device-frightening the child with ghosts-in order to discuss its projective character.
The number of ghost-like figures used to frighten children through-out history is legion, and their regular use by adults was common until quite recently. Most ancients agreed that it was good to have the images of these witches constantly before children, to let them feel the terror of waiting up at night for ghosts to steal them away, eat them, tear them to pieces, and suck their blood or their bone marrow. -
The mother is literally reborn in the child
Once born, the child becomes the mother’s and father’s own parent, in either positive or negative aspect, totally out of keeping with the child’s actual age. The child, regardless of sex, is often dressed in the style of clothes similar to that worn by the parent’s mother, that is, not only in a long dress, but in one out of date by at least a generation. Children are not just dressed as “miniature adults” but quite clearly as miniature women, often complete with decollate’. -
the informal abandoning of young children to other people by their parents occurred
quite often right up to the nineteenth century. The parents gave every kind of rationalization for giving their children away: “to learn to speak” (Disraeli), “to cure timidness” (Clara Barton), for “health” (Edmund Burke, Mrs. Sherwood’s daughter), or as payment for medical services rendered (patients of Jerome Cardan and William Douglas). -
Medieval infanticide
Parental infanricidal acts were usually projected onto Jews or witches.
England the legal presumption was that infants who died had been murdered if not proved otherwise, we should take these clues as a signal for the most vigorous sort of research into medieval infanticide. And just because formal records show few illegitimate births, we certainly shouldn’t be satisfied with assuming that “in traditional society people remained continent until marriage,” since many girls managed to hide
