Introduction

Since Philippe Ariès launched his (in)famous thesis that the concept of childhood did not exist as such before the seventeenth century in L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime (1960),1 the cultural construction of childhood has become a vibrant subfield of cultural history, if only because so many historians wanted to prove him wrong.2 In the wake of Ariès’s seminal work, numerous studies were published that trace when, why and how specific childhood imaginaries originated, peaked and declined.3 These inquiries differ strongly about the major fault lines in the history of childhood. Ariès’s thesis that childhood was invented in early modernity has been contested by studies that shift the origination of childhood further and further back in time, while the dating of the supposed “end of childhood” is equally controversial.4 Besides the origination and disappearance of childhood, Enlightened and Romantic childhood paradigms have also been dated and interpreted in divergent ways.5 One major reason for these discrepancies is that cultural histories of childhood tend to be biased toward specific types of source materials, which are selected from disparate discourses such as portrait painting, family photography and popular visual culture, child rearing advice literature,

narrative fiction and ego-documents (diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies).6 Because media formats and technologies do not merely reflect, but actively shape images of childhood as sets of enabling constraints that facilitate the articulation of certain childhood repertoires at the expense of possible alternatives,7 it comes as no surprise that historians who base their observations on an intimate, informal source such as parents’ diaries develop different ideas about historical changes in parent-child bonding than colleagues who take their lead from the formal, public art of portrait painting.8 A restricted focus on a specific type of source need not be problematic at all, as long as historians are wary of inferring generalizations about developments in the culture at large from a limited range of media formats. Such slippage is pervasive, however, generating debates in which the participants talk at cross purposes with each other, assuming they have an argument, whereas all contending parties may very well be equally right within their own domains. One may justly observe that a specific childhood construct is on the wane in, for instance, literature or painting, but that does not necessarily mean that it is disappearing from the culture altogether. In order to avoid unproductive confusion and to develop constructive ways of dealing with historical diversity, the shaping influence of media formats on the cultural construction of childhood needs to be thought through more carefully.