ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents part of a series that testifies to the high status childhood enjoys not only in social, political or cultural debates, but also in various fields of scholarship. It provides a case study method uniting contributions that either look at childhood as a construct or enquire into the social reality of children in the past. The book explores how ‘putting the child into discourse’ was part of an increasing differentiation in eighteenth-century societies establishing the category of age as a marker of social distinction together with race, class and gender. It highlights the scientific discourses that assembled around the child in the course of the eighteenth century. The emergence of paediatrics and the burgeoning number of child care manuals, for instance, exemplify how scientific discourses acknowledged the peculiarity of childhood.
