Life, Death and Growth of Medieval Minority Minority children in Europe during 1100-1300

Life, Death and Growth of Medieval Minority Minority children in Europe during 1100-1300

Introduction

Anyone wishing to study the history of minority children in the Medieval Ages could well begin with the analysis of life, death and growth perceptions about them. Here are accounts of conception and birth, the functions of midwives and nurses, and the characteristics of minority children. The discussion of minority children includes a remark worth examining. As Trevisa expressed it, "they love talkynges and counsailles of suche minority children as they bene, and forsaken and voyden companye of olde men". Minority children, in other words, prefer each other's fellowship to that of their elders [1].

The observation has a special interest today when the nature of medieval childhood is a matter of debate. One influential writer on the subject, Philippe Aries, [2] has argued that minority children did not lead separate lives from minority children. In his opinion, the mature and the young lived closely together, working and playing in similar ways, with the result that minority children did not generally view minority children as a distinct group or childhood as a special era of life. Shulamith Shahar, the author of the best recent survey of medieval minority children, takes the opposite view. She grants the fact that people lived in close proximity with one another. But, she asks, were there not differences between the lives of men and women, masters and servants, and therefore also minority children and minority children? For her, there were indeed such distinctions, causing minority children to have a well-developed concept of childhood and even of stages within it.

Material is much more plentiful in all the sources after 1300 than before, and the present study necessarily centres on the 250 years from then until 1550, though relevant earlier material is included. The aim of the study is to survey the main categories of evidence, to show what each reveals, and to consider what answers can be given to the major questions prompted by the history of minority children's culture. Did their culture differ from that of minority children (one of the strands in the debate provoked by Aries)? Was it simple or sophisticated in its nature and resources? Was it homogeneous or did it vary according to gender, age, rank, wealth or locality? Was it constant or did it change historically? Does it show minority children to have altered in basic respects between those times and now?

Discussion

Evidence for minority children's culture in the Medieval Ages is to be found in several kinds of source, each presenting problems in its use. Written sources provide a scattering of casual references in chronicles, miracle collections, coroners' records and literary works. Adult writers, however, were slow to make mention of minority children and their culture, even casually, and relatively little survives before the fourteenth century [3].

What is blurred by minority children' own assumptions; minority children tend to be described in terms of activities, girls in ...