J. Allan Mitchell

This book represents the best and worst of academic writing.

The best: fascinating topic, full of new and interesting ideas that have implications far outside of the narrow field of medieval ideas of childhood development. Mitchell takes the narrow concept of childhood development and studies a wide variety of medieval sources to see what medieval people thought about the creation of a human being. The results are fascinating. As I have seen in so many other fields, medieval ideas are fluid, creative, and fixated on liminal and divergent states. The same is true of their ideas of childhood - they are full of ideas about what makes a human different from other creatures, and not surprisingly, they find human identity to be very fluid and fraught with danger. They see humans as part of a continuum that moves from plant to animal to human to divine, and the distinctions between all of these things are nebulous and cause anxiety. Is a deformed or underdeveloped human still a human? Mitchell also examines the medieval material world, in the form of toys and tables, and again finds that medieval understandings of the role of physical objects are far more complex and sophisticated than modern ideas of physical objects. Mitchell convincingly argues that medieval people have already explored many of the ideas that contemporary philosophers are coming up with now about ecology and the role of humanity in the world and our relationship to physical things.

Unfortunately, the best is accompanied by the worst. The prose of this book is painfully, prohibitively dense. This book is important enough that it has the potential to reach and influence a huge audience outside of academic medieval studies. However, it is so difficult to read that it will never reach a lot of that audience. The book is full of specialized jargon and neologisms, none of which is ever defined. I read the e-book, and was constantly tapping on words to get definitions, and dictionaries don't know about a lot of the words in this book. I have nothing against neologisms, but they need to be defined to be useful. Mitchell is also very inconsistent in how he talks about other authors - he makes assumptions about what authors will be familiar to his readers. So he'll say "Campbell says..." and then quote Campbell, but you have to go to the footnotes to figure out which Campbell this is. Sometimes he will say that an author he is citing is a philosopher, or author of a certain book, and sometimes he just quotes people without mentioning their credentials. This is particularly annoying in a book that draws on so many different fields - if he were only citing other medieval historians, I wouldn't be bothered by this. But he cites medieval philosophers, modern historians of the Middle Ages, contemporary philosophers, and such a wide array of sources that it would be really helpful to have a little context about who these people are.

This is a fascinating book, and I know it will have a huge impact on medieval studies and particularly the study of medieval philosophy and childhood. It is a shame that the writing will make it inaccessible to so many people.… (meer)