Abstract
The infants-of-Eden debate outlined at the outset of this chapter provides the framework for Chaucer’s depiction of the child between birth and seven years and addresses the tensions between innocence and experience in addition to questions raised in legal venues about whether young children were to be held culpable for their actions. Chaucer’s infants are considered at pivotal moments in their lives and within their narrative circumstances. Included here are readings of the scenes of the infant eaten by a sow on the Temple of Mars in the Knight’s Tale, the cradled infant in the Reeve’s Tale, the dead child of the Summoner’s Tale, the Hugolino boys of the Monk’s Tale, Griselda’s children of the Clerk’s Tale, and the Prioress’s litel clergeon.
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- 1.
Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912; reprint 1996), 19–21.
- 2.
William Blake, ed. Michael Mason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 61.
- 3.
Kathryn Ann Taglia, “Cultural Constructions of Childhood: Baptism, Communion, and Confirmation,” in Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan, ed. Constance M. Rousseau and Joel T. Rosenthal (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), 255–287.
- 4.
See William F. MacLehose, “A Tender Age”: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), esp. Chap. 2; a brief history is recounted by John Wall in The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion, ed. Richard A. Shweder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 145. See also Philip L. Reynolds, “The Infants of Eden: Scholastic Theologians on Early Childhood and Cognitive Development,” Medieval Studies 68 (2006): 89–132.
- 5.
Istvan Bejczy “The Sacra Infantia in Medieval Hagiography,” The Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 31 (1994): 143–151. See also a discussion of the Holy Innocents by Martin R. Dudley, “‘Natalis innocentum’: The Holy Innocents in Liturgy and Drama,” 233–242 and Andrew Martindale, “The Child in the Picture: A Medieval Perspective,” 197–232.
- 6.
Augustine, De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione et De Baptismo Parvulorum (A Treatise on the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, and on the Baptism of Infants), trans. Philip Schaff http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu.
- 7.
See Allison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1998), 10.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid., 13.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Gil Valentine, “Children’s Bodies: An Absent Presence,” in Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth, ed. Kathrin Hörschelmann and Rachel Colls (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 22–37.
- 12.
Esp. Daniel Kline, Jane Cowgill, and Gil Valentine.
- 13.
Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). See also Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013).
- 14.
Barbara Hanawalt’s comments on swaddling in “Medievalists and the Study of Childhood,” Speculum 77.2 (2002): 440–460. Just as there is disagreement on the concept of childhood, there is disagreement on the efficacy of swaddling. On the one hand, it was thought to be beneficial to the growth and development of limbs, on the other, it could be understood as a means by which to straighten out the infant presumed to be born morally defective.
- 15.
J. Allan Mitchell’s Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), shows how this interconnectivity operates. See chapter on “Childish Things.”
- 16.
John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, 296. Orthography modified.
- 17.
Ibid., 297. See also J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human, esp. chapter on “Being Born.”
- 18.
Ibid., 296
- 19.
Ibid., 298. For a history of thought on the development of the fetus, see Paivi Pahta, Medieval Embryology in the Vernacular: The Case of De Spermate (Helsinki: Societé Neophilologique, 1998).
- 20.
Ibid., 298.
- 21.
Trevisa, 301.
- 22.
Ibid., 299.
- 23.
See William F. MacLehose, “A Tender Age”: esp. Chap. 2.
- 24.
Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
- 25.
Sherman Hawkins recounts this in the following way: “Roman law greatly influenced canon law on accountability, especially in establishing a fixed age of responsibility. Incapacity for guilt is included in the same terms with incapacity to take an oath. The standard of age applied only negatively, however: the Summa Bambergenesis (1181–1185) rules out the possibility of doli capacitas before seven. But after seven, the subjective capacity for guilt is the only standard. Augustine denies full moral responsibility, not only in ‘the first period of life, which passively submits to the rule of the flesh,’ but also in ‘the second, in which speech is possible and infancy is passed’ but reason and will are still weak” (608). See “Chaucer’s Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise,” JEGP 63.4 (1964): 599–624.
- 26.
Rob Meens’s comment is useful here: “Children who sin are never called infantes; mostly they are labeled pueri. While infantia seems to accord with the classification, best known from the work of Isidore of Seville, that includes children up to seven years in this group, pueritia seems to span a wider range, maybe from seven to twenty years of age, in monasteries even to twenty-five years.” See “Children and Confession in the Early Middle Ages,” The Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 31 (1994): 53–65.
- 27.
See entry in The Oxford Companion to Chaucer, 93. The one exception here is “puella,” which is used three times in the Knight’s Tale to refer to the name of a well-known geomantic figure, that is, “Puella.”
- 28.
As suggested by the authors of the entry in The Oxford Companion to Chaucer, 93.
- 29.
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007).
- 30.
Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). All quotations derive from this edition.
- 31.
Orme, Medieval Children, 35. See also Emily Steiner, “Naming and Allegory in Late Medieval England,” JEGP (2007): 248–275. See also Jane Bliss, Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008). While Bliss does not address this narrative directly, there is a correlation between the namelessness in romance and the namelessness of children in Chaucer’s works.
- 32.
MED, s.v. page. Terms include “boy,” “lad,” “man,” “woman,” “child,” “a person, creature, everyman, and fellow.”
- 33.
Then again, perhaps Chaucer was thinking of Robert Grosseteste, the bishop of Lincoln (1235–1253) who, according to Nicholas Orme, “specialised in bringing up noble boys as pages in his household; Grosseteste authored the Latin poem Stans Puer ad Mensam (“The Boy Standing at the Table”), which was subsequently translated by Lydgate into English and widely read. See Fleas, Flies and Friars: Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages (Exeter: Impress Books, 2011), 39.
- 34.
One of the presumed sources for the tale is Le Meunier et Les Deux Clercs in which “the cleric has taken the child in its cradle and pinched its ear to make him cry out; when she heard the cry she turned about and went in that direction. When she found the cradle she was reassured, and she lifted the cover and lay down beside the cleric, who hugged her tight” (Norton Critical Edition, 347). While the infant in Boccaccio’s Decameron (sixth tale, ninth day) does not cry out, he is explicitly identified as the wife’s child, while the daughter, Niccolosa, is described as 16 years of age and already involved with a young man, Aleyn’s equivalent, named Pinuccio. See also Suzanne Greer Fein, “‘Lat the Children Pleye’: The Game Betwixt the Ages in the Reeve’s Tale,” in Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales, ed. Suzanne Greer Fein, David Raybin, and Peter Braeger (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 73–104. “The baby remains a faceless character, never even crying” (85). Fein then turns to the cradle as the signifying object of note.
- 35.
As Fein sees it, this is “the perennial contest between age and youth whereby age possesses what youth desires until, inevitably losing strength with time, age must cede to acquisitive youth all its holdings, youth now supplanting—but in the process becoming—age” (74).
- 36.
See Naoe Kukita Yoshikawa, “Holy Medicine and Diseases of the Soul: Henry of Lancaster and Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines,” Medical History 53 (2009): 397–414.
- 37.
Alcuin Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Blamires does not address the presence of the “propre page,” but the scene raises the question of whether the infant is implicated in the game playing of the adolescents even while seeming to sleep through it all.
- 38.
Leah Sinanoglou, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” Speculum 48 (1973): 491–509. See also Mary Dzon, “Boys Will Be Boys: The Physiology of Childhood and the Apocryphal Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages,” Viator 42.1 (2011): 179–226.
- 39.
Merrall L. Price, Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2003). Given this thread of Franciscan affective piety, it is all the more ironic that by the fifteenth century, a disturbing vision should be recorded by a Franciscan nun, who, according to Price, “saw her Savior in the form of a serving dish filled with the body of a child, dismembered into fragments of bloody meat, while the voice of God the Father explained that the sin of the world was responsible for carving up His son. This extraordinarily potent image of the Christ child fragmented and destined to be eaten is, of course, the logical and literalized extension of the doctrine of transubstantiation”(28).
- 40.
According to Peter Brown, Augustine’s observations of his own son, Adeodatus, augmented his recollection of early childhood. See Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California, 1967; reprint 2000).
- 41.
Augustine, Confessions, 27–28.
- 42.
Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932); Book 7, Chap. 17, Sect. 1336a. Also cited in Medieval Children, 63.
- 43.
Giles of Rome, De Regimine Principum, Book 2, Chap. 15, trans. John of Trevisa, ed. David Fowler, et al. (New York: Garland, 1997).
- 44.
Abelard and Heloise, The Letters and Other Writings, trans. William Levitan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2007), 71.
- 45.
Rodney Delasanta, “The Mill in Chaucer’s ‘Reeve’s Tale’,” The Chaucer Review 36 (2002): 270–276.
- 46.
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2003), 145.
- 47.
Orme, Medieval Children, 62.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
That cruel hounds may also be a clear and present danger is suggested by the legend of the Holy Greyhound who saves a cradled infant from the imminent attack of a venomous snake. See Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children Since the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
- 50.
This is reminiscent of the Visio Anglie in Gower’s Vox Clamantis wherein the rebels who attack London are described as domestic beasts gone wild. See Lynn Arner, “Civility and Gower’s Visio Anglie,” Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media, scholarworks.wmich.edu/accessus/.
- 51.
Edward Wheatley, “Murderous Sows in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and late Fourteenth-Century France,” The Chaucer Review 44.2 (2009): 224–226. Wheatley notes that this image is not found in Boccaccio’s Teseida, the primary source for the Tale.
- 52.
Ibid., 225.
- 53.
Wheatley cites the original document dated 9 January 1386.
- 54.
E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: William Heinemann, 1906), 140.
- 55.
Anila Srivastava, “‘Mean, Dangerous, and Uncontrollable Beasts’: Mediaeval Animal Trials,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 40.1 (2007): 127–143.
- 56.
James Joyce’s famous remark “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man suggests the figural implications of the act. Gower’s description of the rebels as domestic beasts gone wild in Book 1 of Vox Clamantis also resonates in this scene.
- 57.
Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden: Brill, 1993). Cohen notes the meaning of the mystical lamb motif in late medieval iconography: “A sacrificial victim was invariably perceived in animal terms. The dying animal had to be pure and blameless, so that its public ritual death could cleanse the community” (107).
- 58.
Paul Schiff Berman, “Rats, Pigs, and Statues on Trial: The Creation of Cultural Narratives in the Prosecution of Animals and Inanimate Objects,” New York University Law Review 69.2 (1994): 288–326 (304).
- 59.
Orme, Medieval Children, 46. “The years three and seven were significant, three being the age of weaning while seven marked the transition from infancy to childhood.”
- 60.
Ibid., 58.
- 61.
Shweder, ed. The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion, 178.
- 62.
See William MacLehose, “Nurturing Danger: High Medieval Medicine and the Problem(s) of the Child,” in Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parson and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1996), 3–24.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
See “Sir Gowther,” in the Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), 263–307. For a relevant reading, see Anna Chen, “Consuming Childhood: Sir Gowther and the National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.3.1,” JEGP 111 (2012): 360–383.
- 65.
William MacLehose, “The Holy Tooth: Dentition, Childhood, and the Cult of the Christ Child,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, ed. Mary Dzon and Theresa Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 212–213.
- 66.
In addition to the mother or the wet nurse, this could include a woman given the responsibility to rock the infant’s cradle. See Nicholas Orme’s account of William of Bibbesworth, “the English knight who wrote about everyday life in his late thirteenth-century treatise on how to learn French, [in which he] recommended mothers to hire a bercere (‘rocker’ or ‘rockster’ in English). Medieval Children, 59.
- 67.
Louise O. Vasvari, “The Story of Griselda as Silenced Incest Narrative,” http://www.academia.edu/555723/.
- 68.
Rob Meens (as well as Abelard in Scito te ipsum) talks about overlaying as an accidental occurrence that should not accrue guilt and punishment for the parent most often responsible for such deaths, that is, the mother. Nonetheless, Abelard advocates punishment for these women so that they can serve as exempla to other mothers. Burchard of Worms’ earlier penitential provides a similar attitude toward maternal care when he imposes a penance of three years on a woman who has “placed her child near a fire, so that the child was killed by boiling water from a kettle that was hung there by someone else. It is not the person who boiled the water who is to blame, Burchard says, but the mother who has put her child in such a dangerous place. For it is her responsibility to take care of the child during the first seven years of its life.” See “Children and Confession,” 60–61.
- 69.
Mary Hayes, “Privy Speech: Sacred Silence, Dirty Secrets in the “Summoner’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 263–288.
- 70.
Barrie Ruth Straus has written about this reversal in “Reframing the Violence of the Father: Reverse Oedipal Fantasies in Chaucer’s Clerk’s, Man of Law’s, and Prioress’s Tales,” in Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, ed. Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall L. Price (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002), 122–138.
- 71.
The act of cannibalism punished by Dante in Inferno 33 (a motif extended into 34), is still a contested matter. While some scholars argue convincingly that the act of eating one’s sons is an inversion of the Eucharist, others (such as Robert Hollander) refute that claim. See Ronald B. Herzman, “Cannibalism and Communion in Inferno XXXIII,” Dante Studies (98): 53–78.
- 72.
Daniel Pinti, “The Comedy of the Monk’s Tale: Chaucer’s Hugelyn and Early Commentary on Dante’s Ugolino,” Comparative Literature Studies 37 (2000): 277–297. Theodore Spencer, “The Story of Ugolino in Dante and Chaucer,” Speculum 9 (1934): 295–301.
- 73.
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling with Ronald L. Martinez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 525.
- 74.
David Lee Miller, Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father’s Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3.
- 75.
Patterson, 510.
- 76.
J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man, 74.
- 77.
Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, 300. The first three terms in brackets have been added as translations; the other two have been added by the original editor of Trevisa’s text, in this case for Book 6, Joseph Grennen. See Nicole Clifton, “Kynde Innocence: Children in Old French and Middle English Romance,” PhD diss. Cornell University, 1993.
- 78.
Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts, Book 2, Chap. 3, “Moreover, when my father seeing me in the bath, how the signs of manhood began to bud in me, and plumed already with a stirring youthfulness: as if in this sight he had first rejoiced in hope of having grandchildren by me, he gladly told it to my mother” (73).
- 79.
See Kate A. Bauer, “The Portrayal of Parents and Children in the Works of Chaucer, Gower, and the Pearl-Poet,” PhD diss. New York University, 1995, esp. Chap. 1. The word “litel” is used 12 times according to the Chaucer Concordance also cited by Bauer.
- 80.
Over a century ago, when source studies were in their ascendancy, Carleton Brown traced a number of potential sources for the Prioress’s Tale, coming to the conclusion that there must be an X factor, a missing exemplar that functioned as Chaucer’s source. The contention here is that despite the ubiquitous retelling of some version of this legend, Chaucer has made it his own by changing details and by putting the tale in the mouth of his Prioress. See Carleton F. Brown, “Chaucer’s Prioresses Tale and Its Analogues,” PMLA 21 (1906): 486–518. Brown also makes a case for the boy’s status as schoolboy rather than as chorister, an argument that appears to have taken root. See “Chaucer’s ‘Litel Clergeon’,” Modern Philology 3 (1906): 467–491.
- 81.
MED, s.v. prymer. This is an item considered valuable enough for parents to bequeath to their children in their wills. The “litel book” especially when it is linked to the Virgin and the devotional practices of women, recalls the iconic image of the Virgin being taught to read by her mother, St. Anne. Nicholas Orme describes the book as possibly an alphabet tablet, Book of Hours, etc. See also Nicola McDonald, “A York Primer and its Alphabet: Reading Women in a Lay Household,” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 194–197.
- 82.
Oxford Dictionary of Saints, ed. David Hugh Farmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). “The number three appears several times in this legend, as in the case of three boys whom he is said to have raised to life after they were murdered in a brine-tub by a butcher, and in his saving of three unjustly condemned men from death and three sailors near the coast of Turkey” (316).
- 83.
The Feast of Fools originally consisted of four separate celebrations: St. Stephen’s Day (26 December), John the Evangelist’s Day (27 December), Holy Innocents’ Day (28 December) and the Feast of the Circumcision (1 January) that allowed the inversion of ecclesiastical hierarchies; for boys to mock their masters and lower church members to mock their superiors.
- 84.
“And I heard a voice from heaven like the sound of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder; the voice I heard was like the sound of harpers playing on their harps, and they sing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the hundred and forty-four thousand who had been redeemed from the earth. It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are chaste; it is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes; these have been redeemed from mankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are spotless” (Revelation, 14:2–5).
- 85.
Lee Patterson, “The Living Witnesses of Our Redemption’: Martyrdom and Imitation in the Prioress’s Tale,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 507–560 (508–509).
- 86.
Ibid., 515. See also Sherman Hawkins, “Chaucer’s Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise,” 599–624. While Hawkins’ primary focus, as his title suggests, is on the Prioress, he offers a history of the phrase that is useful for a broader contextualization.
- 87.
“Two Sermons Preached by the Boy Bishop,” ed. J. Nichols, Camden Miscellany, n.s. 14 (London: 1875; repr. 1965), 1–29 (19).
- 88.
For a comprehensive background on the boy bishop celebration and the violence it encouraged, see my essay, “‘Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child’: Proverbial Speech Acts, Boy Bishop Sermons, and Pedagogical Violence,” in Speculum Sermonis: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Medieval Sermon, ed. Georgiana Donavin, Cary J. Nederman, and Richard Utz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 141–155.
- 89.
See Neil MacKenzie, The Medieval Boy Bishops (Leicester, UK: Matador, 2012). MacKenzie begins his book with a chapter on the murder of a boy bishop, Bartholomew Divitas, in 1367 in Paris. His body was found in the Seine. See also The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), I: 336–371; for discussions of the boy bishop as a feature of liturgical drama, see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), 135–138; Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), I: 104–111.
- 90.
Orme, Medieval Children, 106.
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Salisbury, E. (2017). Infantasy and the Silent Child. In: Chaucer and the Child. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43637-5_3
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