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Wickberg’s Door: Childhood and Structures of Thought

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Book cover Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture

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Abstract

The mainline approach toward the history of childhood suffers from two major problems: (1) it has failed to honestly confront epistemological divergences inherent in the field; (2) this smoothing over of differences has fostered an inability to move beyond the “Ariès debate”. Examining childhood as structure of thought andfeeling takes a clear position on these issues and offers strong reasons for studying childhood historically. The section concludes by outlining the book’s argument that childhood in medieval England was embedded within master-servant hierarchies that extendedfrom a sense of being in time (age) as a correspondence between earthly change and eternal order.

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Notes

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  68. Ironically, the two main sources of this problem are also the most important wellsprings for contemporary critiques of modern liberal conceptualizations of power: Marx’s concept of ideology and Freud’s concept of defense mechanisms. Valuable alternative ways to think about ideas and power were offered by Raymond Williams on hegemony and “structures of feeling” in Marxism and Literature (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1977).

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  89. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). For an outline of the major threads that make-up the discursive structure of modern childhood see Patrick J. Ryan, “Discursive Tensions on the Landscape of Modern Childhood,” Educare — Veteskapliga Skrifter (2011: 2): 11–37; and my articles cited above — “‘Young Rebels Flee Psychology”’ and “How New is the ‘New’ Social Studies of Childhood?”

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  90. These are Heywood’s summary assessments on Ronald Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997)

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  94. Paula Fass (ed.), The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013): 1–14. Fass has developed this line of thought over a number of publications. See “Children and Globalization,” The Journal of Social History vol. 36, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 963–977; Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization (New York University Press, 2007); “The World is at Our Door: Why Historians of Children and Childhood should Open Up,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 11–31.

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  95. A particularly egregious distortion of Centuries was delivered by Albrecht Classen, “Philippe Ariès and the Consequences: History of Childhood, Family Relations, and Personal Emotions, Where do We Stand Today?” in Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality (New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter, 2005): 1–65. Classen merged Ariès with deMause in order to claim that the Ariès Thesis positioned childhood in the “dark ages”, as a time when people “badly mistreated their children, neglected them, or regularly spanked them brutally, if they did not even kill them in times of famines” (p. 23). From this position, Classen elevated the Ariès Thesis to a “paradigm”, furthering something called “pastism”, or negative attitudes toward the medieval world (p. 20).

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  1. King’s University College, Western University, Canada

    Patrick Joseph Ryan

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Ryan, P.J. (2013). Wickberg’s Door: Childhood and Structures of Thought. In: Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364791_1

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