Abstract
Medieval childhood was rooted in patriarchal households and hierarchies of labour, but these structures do not constitute the whole of its semantic depth. The words most directly tied to the concept of a “child” emerged from a different matrix, conceptually split between bodily growth and lineal descent. Childhood was associated with the earth, mother and origins — with profane growth, folly and change. Yet, it was also the most powerful conceptfor imagining the human capacity to be adopted as servants of an eternal, perfectlyfixed God. Ensconced in the mystical tension between ordinary existence and Providential design, the terms of master-servant childhood could not speak-well a discourse of individual development, socialization, authenticity or agency. It was not a means to adulthood.
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Notes
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Georges Duby, “Solitude: Eleventh to Thirteenth Century,” in A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World — Volume II edited by Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988): 522–524.
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P.J.P. Goldberg, Medieval England: A Social History, 1250–1550 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 96; also see his outline of the concept in “Masters and Men in Later Medieval England,” in Masculinity in Medieval Europe edited by D.M. Hadley (New York, NY: Longman, 1999), 56–70.
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See Schultz, The Knowledge of Childhood, 40–42, 256–259; P.J.P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy, eds, Youth in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press, 2004): 5–6.
Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
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© 2013 Patrick Joseph Ryan
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Ryan, P.J. (2013). Childhood Without Adulthood. In: Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364791_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364791_4
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