Barbara A. Hanawalt

Barbara Hanawalt draws primarily on legal records in order to recreate what it was like to grow up in late medieval London—how children and adolescents played, dressed, learned and worked. It's a thorough rebuttal to the work of Philippe Ariès—whose famously influential, though flawed, argument was that there was no such thing as "childhood" in the Middle Ages and that medieval parents didn't love their children. Stylistically, I wasn't the biggest fan of Hanawalt's decision to provide narrative "reconstructions" of some of the court cases and the events which led up to them, but they're never implausible, and I could see them (and the book as a whole) going over well in the undergrad classroom.… (meer)

If you read just one book this year about childhood in medieval London, this should be the one.

Hanawalt's exploration is complete. We learn about apprenticeships and guilds, play and puberty, manners of dress and gender differences. Contra Philippe Aries, who famously argued that the medieval world had little concept of childhood, Hanawalt provides ample evidence that childhood was recognized in innumerable ways.

As the father of a 14 year old boy about to enter high school I found it interesting to be reminded that the functional equivalent of our high school and college educations was an apprenticeship. The apprentice would live with the master's family, and effectively leave his childhood home at this stage of life. Selection of a master to apprentice one's son (and sometimes one's daughter) was attended by all the attention to detail and payments of large fees that attends modern day high school and college choices. In many ways the apprentice became a foster child to the master, with inheritance rights and other quasi familial connections. The complex contracts around the arrangements provide the documentary memory needed to reconstruct the institution of apprenticeship.

As in many things medieval, we are struck by realizations of familiarity and confrontations with strangeness. My historical memory, in terms of direct family ancestors and outside of my reading of Jewish history, extends backwards only as far as the 18th century in Europe. Medieval London is a construct that extends another 3 to 5 centuries earlier, back to the 1300s. It is as far removed from the early 18th century as we are from the 18th century. In this book you can feel the streets of Chaucer's childhood and Shakespeare's childhood.

I read this before bed for a week or two. It always put me to sleep, but not before informing and teaching me about some forgotten verities and some unique cultural realities.… (meer)