Medieval Children [Hardcover]

Nicholas Orme (Author)

Book Description

This is a history of children in England from Anglo-Saxon times to the 16th century. Starting at birth, it shows how they were named and baptised, and traces the significance of birthdays and ages. This leads to an account of family life, including upbringing, food, clothes, sleep and the plight of the poor. The misfortunes of childhood are chronicled, from disablement, abuse, and accidents to illness, death, and beliefs about children in the afterlife. Further chapters explore the oral culture of medieval children (words, rhymes, and songs), play, religion, learning to read, and literature for children. Finally, we see how they grew up, began to work, came of age, and experienced sexuality. The result is a vivid recreation of what it was like to be young, which reveals the central importance of children in English medieval history for the first time. The traditional view of a past in which there was no childhood is shown to lack any foundation. On the contrary, children were recognized as special and different, and possessed their own flourishing culture, much of it like that of young people today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his classic Centuries of Childhood (1962), historian Philippe AriŠs argued that the view of childhood as a distinct period of life emerged only in the 16th and 17th centuries. Medieval adults, AriŠs said, often viewed children as miniature adults. Building on others' subsequent research, Orme (From Childhood to Chivalry; etc.), professor of history at Exeter University, challenges AriŠs's widely accepted views, demonstrating in exhaustive detail that medieval culture indeed distinguished between child and adult experience, and that children occupied a special place in society. Orme carefully examines each stage of childhood from birth clearly an auspicious event in the medieval world to adolescence. Since birth in the Middle Ages was fraught with dangers, the Church provided women with relics to assure a safe delivery. Royal women undergoing labor borrowed the girdle of Virgin Mary; poorer women laid objects such as jasper stones or drawings of the cross across their stomachs to ensure a healthy and uneventful birth. Parents remembered children's birthdays by associating the day with a saint's feast day, but apart from records kept by royal families, there were few written birth records. Children devised songs, rhymes and games using cherry pits and hazelnuts, for instance; toys ranged from simple peashooters hollowed from balsam wood to more elaborate dolls and mechanical toys made for royalty. As children grew up, boys did manual labor alongside their fathers while girls helped their mothers with domestic tasks. Orme's fascinating study reveals medieval society through a keen look at its youngest inhabitants. Meticulous detail and 125 luscious illustrations, 75 in color, make this an elegant and definitive study.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-In this scholarly work, Orme re-creates the lives of children of all classes and ages in England. Many medieval writers defined childhood as stretching from infancy to about age 28, and this study covers that age range. Beautiful illustrations, inclusion of rhymes and storytelling, and organization by subject rather than chronologically, will help mature teens understand a period in history (1000-1500) in which personal accounts of daily life were few, much less first-person accounts written by "children" as defined above. A comparable work, Shulamith Shahar's Childhood in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 1990; o.p.) covers the same period for the whole of Europe and also uses storytelling, but its dense text and lack of illustrations make it less attractive. Both works demonstrate that, especially from birth to preadolescence, there are more similarities than differences in the treatment of children then and now, especially in their relationships with parents, teachers, relatives, and friends. Teens will also be made aware of the challenges of research into periods when few written records exist.
Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (December 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300085419
• ISBN-13: 978-0300085419
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #698,122 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The nice side of the middle ages., January 2, 2003

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Medieval Children (Hardcover)

A couple of years ago Steven Osment published a book called "Ancestors," which sought to criticize the views of Philippe Aries that people in the past had treated their children incredibly callously. Unforuntately, Osment's book was brief and somewhat superficial, even though he was basically right. This book is one that Osment should have written, except that Osment is a historian of Reformation Germany and Orme is a historian of medieval England. Contra Aries, Orme and his fellow scholars "have gathered copious evidence to show that adults regarded childhood as a distinct phase or phases of life, that parents treated children like children as well as like adults, that they did so with care and sympathy, and that children had cultural activities and possessions of their own." They book is lavishly illustrated and based on all sorts of information, from archival studies, to records of the royal family (the family most studied), to an abundance of visual evidence (Pieter Brugel's "Children's Games" is used to special effect). Orme has also found archealogical evidence of toys and school books that children have scribled on.

Orme starts off with conception: "Medieval Christians came to believe that God put the soul into the foetus when it took human shape, at about forty-six days for a male, and ninety for a female; until that point, the embryo was not human and had neither human life nor human soul." This view was held by Innocent III and Thomas Aquinas. We discuss the ceremonies of baptism, the responsibilities of godparents, and the naming of children. We discuss the relative rarity (though not absence) of birthdays. We learn about cradles and swadling, about weaning and day and night time activities. Infanticide was viewed with disapproval, and we learn about accidents and possible abuse. Perhaps 42.5% of children died before they were ten in the late 1500s. We learn about changing views of the fate of unbaptised children.

Especially interesting are children's use of rhymes and songs, to which Orme devotes a whole chapter to. We also learn about the use of toys, a practice well developed by the Middle Ages. Orme talks about dolls, windmills, and tops. He shows use pictures of toy knights on horsebacks which were mass-produced from moulds. "Children, of course, have never confined themselves to toys made specially for them. Poor or rich, they have fashioned their own from anything lying at hand. Gerald of Wales, describing his childhood...in the 1150s, recalls how he and his brothers played with sand and dust...They built towns and palaces, and he made churches and monasteries." Orme goes on about games, such as marbles and chess, as well as playing at war.

Orme devotes another chapter to the church, and like today some churches were tolerant of small children wandering around, and others were more easily irritated. There are, rather surprisingly, two chapters on reading, one on learning how to do it, and another on literature for children. Since most children did not know how to read in medieval England this might be a bit excessive. It is interesting to learn about the different alphabets and how children were taught to learn syllables, but perhaps this is a bit much. On the other hand, Orme forcefully reminds us that literacy was not the result of the invention of printing. Instead increased literacy encouraged the development of the printing press. Orme is part of a historical trend which emphasizes the importance, if not the predominance, of literacy in the late medieval period as opposed to the supposed ubiquity of an exclusively oral tradition. Orme concludes with a chapter on growing up. He reminds us that contrary to what many people think, the marriage of children or their execution was a rather rare event. Nor was a callous greedy apprenticeship that common either. All in all, Orme has provided a thorough dissection of the child's role in medieval England. No doubt much of this is applicable to the rest of Europe. One only wishes, giving that so much of Orme's account deals with the Church, about how Jews raised their children.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exhaustive and well-written., August 16, 2002

By 

Cas (the Idaho mountains) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Medieval Children (Hardcover)

I've never seen such a thorough treatment of the subject. It is, to say the least, exhaustive, as well as thoroughly footnoted.

Chapters cover all aspects of childhood, from pregnancy and birth to upbringing, the child's place in religion, how children entertained themselves, and how they were educated. There was quite a bit here that I had never seen before, dispelling many commonly-held misconceptions of how children were treated and viewed in the period.

The book is large, with good pictures and photos. The writing is extremely good, very readable, and free of overly high-blown language. I especially appreciated the information on education and recreation -- I had never seen medieval spellers or hornbooks, and never knew what kinds of games children actually played. Another chapter covered how children were treated by the Church -- how they were entered into its service, and even quite a bit about the Feast of Innocents, where children took the place of the bishop and priests and had a service!

Overall, I found the book to be absolutely a good addition to my history library, and suggest that others interested in the subject may find it so as well. It's $$$, but such a good value doesn't come along often.

10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lavishly presented and formatted, but is lacking..., May 27, 2003

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Sandra Barnett (Wilmington, DE United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Medieval Children (Hardcover)

One can tell that Nicholas Orme has done extensive research on this book, digging up any and all facts about medieval children, and I applaud him for making the effort for what promised to be interesting subject matter. However, the fact remains that children were NOT extensively documented then, like they are today, and Orme digresses (distractingly often) into the realm of personal conjecture and an almost constant apology for the lack of sources. What I found most irritating was that about half of his sources date from Tudor England, which is better categorized as Renaissance rather than Medieval, and NONE of his sources predate ~AD 1,000. But the illustrations are heavenly, the hardback editon is a joy to handle, and I did learn quite a lot, but overall, the project was rather more ambitious than the material he had to work with.