Abstract
The topic of children and sexuality has not attracted much attention from medievalists.1 There is no entry for children in the index of Bullough and Brundage’s Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (1996). There is no entry for abuse, incest, or sexuality in relation to children in the index of Pierre Payer’s study of sex in the early medieval penitentials (1984), or in Shulamith Shahar’s study of children in the Middle Ages (1990); in more recent studies, abuse (physical, mental, sexual, verbal) does appear in the index of Orme’s study of medieval children (2001) and incest in Phillips’ book on medieval maidens (2003), but none of these terms is indexed in Albrecht Classen’s collection of essays on childhood in the Middle Ages (2005). Brundage does have an index entry for children in his magisterial study of legal attitudes to sex during the Middle Ages (1987), but he is mostly concerned with issues of legitimacy and inheritance, rather than the sexuality of children. The same concerns are reflected in the index of Karras’s recent study of medieval sexuality (2005) under children, though she does briefly discuss their sexual experience too (in relation to awareness of parental sexual activity, and also to rape cases). As for medieval literature, Jean-Charles Payen maintains that ‘l’enfant n’est pas un personnage fréquent dans les oeuvres médiévales’; this is particularly true of chivalric romance, where the protagonist has to be old enough to fight and to fall in love.2
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Notes
There has been a great deal of interest in medieval children in recent decades. For bibliography see Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001),
and the introduction and individual essays in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005) (which was brought to my attention by George Rousseau at a very late stage in the writing of this essay).
There is also a useful survey in Barbara Hanawalt, ‘Medievalists and the Study of Childhood’, Speculum, 77 (2002): 440–60.
Jean-Charles Payen, ‘L’ Enfance occultée: note sur un problème de typologie littéraire an Moyen-Age, in L’Enfant au Moyen-Age’, Senefiance 9 (Provence: CUERMA, 1980), pp. 179–200; see also Classen, Childhood, pp. 10–11 and 12–20.
For more extended discussion see the chapter on medieval incest law in Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 9–52.
See, for instance, Lowell Edmunds and Alan Dundes (eds), Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook (New York: Garland, 1984)
and Allen Johnson and Douglass Price-Williams, Oedipus Ubiquitous: The Family in World Folk Literature (Stanford: Stanford: University Press, 1996).
See Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations, including a text and translation of the ‘Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri’ (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991)
and G.A.A. Kortekaas, The Story of Apollonius (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004). For Shakespeare’s play see the Arden edition; William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ed. Suzanne Gossett London: Arden Edition, 2004). My synopsis follows the standard Latin version, though there are variations of both names and plot in some other versions (in the play the protagonist is Pericles; his wife is Tarsia, daughter of Simonides; and his daughter Marina marries Lysimachus).
For references and discussion see Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Arthur and Mordred’, Variations on an Incest Theme’, Forum forModern Language Studies, 25 (1989): 1–15, and Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, pp. 213–19; the account of the incest and of the exposure differs slightly in the French and English versions.
See Sir Thomas Malory, Works, ed. E. Vinaver, 3rd edn, rev. P.J.C. Field, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), I. 41, 44 and 55.
Philippe de Beaumanoir, La Mankine, ed. and trans. Barbara Sargent-Baur (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). The best-known Middle English version is Emaré; there are versions in most European languages. For further references and discussion, see Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, pp. 145–91.
Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ed. M. François (Paris: Champion, 1963), pp. 229–33.
Much has been written about medieval children since the publication of Ariès’s controversial book in 1960: see Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). For bibliography see n. 1 above.
Rufinus of Bologna, cited by Glenn McEdwards, ‘Canonistic Determinations of the Stages of Childhood’, in Gunar Freibergs (ed.), Aspectus et Affectus: Essays and Editions in Grosseteste and Medieval Intellectual Life in Honor of Richard C. Dales (New York: AMS Press, 1993), p. 70.
Glenn McEdwards, ‘Canonistic Determinations of the Stages of Childhood’, p. 73 assumes that the age of menarche was probably about twelve. See also Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 26;
Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 145; Orme, Medieval Children, p. 329;
and Kim Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in Medieval England, 1270–1540 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 9–10 and 24–6. I am indebted to Dr Elisabeth Dutton for bringing Phillips’ useful book to my attention.
Mary Martin McLaughlin ‘Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries’, in Carol Neel (ed.), Medieval Families: Prespectives on Marriage, Household and Children (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 48;
see also James Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 357.
For detailed discussion, illustration and bibliography, see Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)
and also John Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
See Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 18, 153–4.
Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450–1700 (Longman: London, 1984), p. 166.
R.H. Helmholz, ‘And were there Children’s Rights in Early Modern England?’, International Journal of Children’s Rights, 1 (1993): 23–32.
Orme, Medieval Children, p. 79 cites John Mirk, fourteenth-century author of a manual for parish priests, who urged that children over seven should not sleep together; see John Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. Gillis Kristensson, Lund Studies in English, 49 (Lund: Gleerup, 1974), p. 80 (lines 216–21). See also Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, p. 101.
‘La Bourjosse de Romme’, in B. Munk Olsen (ed.), Dits en quatrains d’alexandrins monorimés de Jehan de Saint-Quentin, Société des anciens textes français (Paris: Picard, 1978), pp. 40–1.
See, for instance, Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, pp. 55–76; Steven A. Epstein, ‘The Medieval Family: A Place of Refuge and Sorrow’, in Carol Neel (ed.), Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household and Children. Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 422–3 (I return to his argument at the end of this essay).
See the useful collection of early penitentials in translation by John T. McNeill and Helena Gamer 1938, and for discussion of the incest refer-ences Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials (Toronto and London: Toronto University Press, 1984), pp. 30–2. In Payer’s appendix on ‘The Language of the Penitentials’ (140–53) the word incestus does not appear; references to mother/son incest occur under fornicare and fornicatio.
Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, trans. Elborg Foster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and idem, The Knight, the Priest and the Lady, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Allen Lane, 1984).
Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), especially chapters 3, 6, and 7.
Michael Mitterauer, ‘Christianity and Endogamy’, trans. Markus German, Continuity and Change, 6(3) (1991): 295–333 (320–1).
David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 61–2, 78 and 135, and ‘Making Sense of Incest: Women and the Marriage Rules of the Early Middle Ages’ in Bernard S. Bachrach and David Nicholas (eds), Law, Custom and the Social Fabric in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of Bryce Lyon (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1990), passim.
Notes
Jean E. Jost, ‘Loving Parents in Middle English Literature’, in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 307–28 (p. 327).
William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2004), I.O, 11. 26–33.
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. J.H.P. Pafford (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1999), III.iii, 1. 70.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Clerk’s Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 150, 11. 988–9.
James A. Schultz, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages 1100–1350, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1995), p. 14.
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© 2007 Elizabeth Archibald
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Archibald, E. (2007). Incest between Adults and Children in the Medieval World. In: Rousseau, G. (eds) Children and Sexuality. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230590526_3
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