Abstract
This section takes aim at the ill-conceived idea that “emotional distance” from children was a coping strategy dictated by high child-mortality environments. Our confrontation with the precariousness of our existence cannot be understood with ahistorical psycho-dynamic theories. For the Middle Ages, it requires that we unpack the logic of correspondence that defined the unique position of childhood relative to human mortality in ordinary existence and our capacity for adoption as “children of God”. We explore this theme through the complex semantic histories of generation and age, by examining the Greek sense of paideia, and presenting the ancient motif of the Ages of Man.
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Notes
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Ariès has been rightly criticized for his handling of iconography, but his sense of a twelfth- or thirteenth-century shift toward “life-like” or “realistic” representation of the human body has not been overturned. The point is stated well by Andrew Martindale in “The Children in the Picture: A Medieval Perspective,” in The Church and Childhood edited by Diane Wood (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1994): 206. Also see Duby, “Solitude,” 512, 524.
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In light of the history of utilitarianism and disciplinary institutions for childhood, my view of Epicureanism is less than celebratory. Yet, its revival seems significant for the modern sensibility. See Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York, NY: WW Norton & Company, 2011): 227–233.
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See Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Existence (c. 1225?–1274) trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949).
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (New York, NY: Benzinger Brothers, 1947–1948): the first part of the second part, question 82.
Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986): 19, 47–48.
John Anthony Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988): 14.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, N.Y.: Scribner, 1971): 10–17; Sears, The Ages of Man, 21–22, 27.
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Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1975)
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
The epistemological shift is outlined in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1970). In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1977), Foucault explored the modern episteme in terms of disciplinary techniques of hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination.
On graphic visualization see Andre Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization, and Graphic Visualization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
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Ryan, P.J. (2013). Generation, Age and the Logic of Correspondence. In: Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364791_5
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