ABSTRACT
Scholarly interest in the medieval family, and particularly in medieval children's lives, has burgeoned since the publication of Philippe Ariès' Centuries of Childhood (1962). Ariès argued that “In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” (129), for too many children died (39). Because of this “demographic wastage” (40), the Middle Ages were indifferent to childhood as a concept and a distinct phase of life. In what is fundamentally an extension of Ariès' thesis, many critics reason that if the medieval period had no discrete conception of children or childhood, then it follows that the Middle Ages could not have possessed anything like “children's literature.” For example, in “Defining Children's Literature,” the lead article in Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature (1996), Peter Hunt states unequivocally, “When the mortality rate was high, and in strata of society where poverty and subsistence were the norm (that is, until the eighteenth century), the view of childhood as a protected stage was not possible. In medieval times, there was little concept of childhood” (13).
