ABSTRACT
As historians of childhood have frequently lamented, first-person narratives by early modern children are among the rarest of treasures. The problem of evidence is particularly acute for the lives of young children. In her recent survey of the historiography of childhood, Margaret King has called the period from birth to adolescence the “silent years.”1 Yet while there is a dearth of personal documents by children themselves, we can learn a great deal from indirect sources. First and foremost among these are the observations of early modern mothers. At their best, family correspondence and other personal documents offer a detailed picture of children’s lives as viewed by adults: we can watch women teaching their sons and daughters in real time, commenting on their development, and sometimes quoting verbatim from children’s own speech.
