ABSTRACT
The history of European childhood as a field of study has virtually exploded since its inception in 1962 with the publication of Philippe Ariès's pioneering Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. 1 The first to draw attention to the importance of this life stage as an area of scholarly inquiry, Ariès's work has been one of the primary influences prompting historians over the following half century to arrive at a better understanding of what childhood and parenting were like during the medieval (Ad 500–1500) and early modern (Ad 1500–1800) periods. His work emerged during a pivotal time for historical studies, when scholars were forging new paths of exploration. While the annals of war and treaties remained classical subjects, professional historians, particularly from the Annales School in France and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in the United Kingdom, turned their attention to social history. Borrowing methods from psychology, biology, sociology, and demography they formulated new questions and crafted new narratives. Childhood as an area of historical study was a product of this moment, which was also a time of strong interest in Freudian psychoanalysis and Jean Piaget's studies of child development, areas that explored human ambivalence toward the early stages of the lifecycle. 2 The 1960s and 1970s also gave rise to the study of the so-called “forgotten people,” which included the subaltern classes, women, and children. The rise of informatics and historical research based on archival and parish collections enabled scholars to reconstruct demographic patterns for nameless people by using records of birth, baptism, marriage, and death as well as tax data and notarial documents. Further, the burgeoning fields of cultural studies and art history made literary texts, diaries, poetry, ages-of-man literature, and illustrations with distinct life-cycle stages, advice books, family letters, humanist writings, catechisms, hagiography, and iconography popular sources for the exploration of social life. The confluence of all of these developments advanced childhood studies, an interdisciplinary field that would expand over the late twentieth century in multiple directions.
