ABSTRACT
Ariès has written that in the long medieval era, the seven ages of human life was an accepted concept, originating in sixth century Byzantium by Fulgentius’s reading of the Aeneid. The first stage was characterized as from birth to the age of seven,
2 For the subsequent scholarly critique of Ariès’s conclusions of the benign neglect of children by their parents in the medieval period due in part to high infant mortality, see, for example, David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Pierre Riché and Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, L’enfance au Moyen Age (Paris: Editions du Seuil. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1994); R.C. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents. Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Louis Haas, The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300-1600 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Sally Crawford, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Ltd.,
these children being termed “infants.” This was followed by the second period of life, from age 7 to 14, called pueritia (boyhood), and it is this age that will primarily concern us here.3 As Ariès noted, each stage of life had its appropriate dressing conventions, in which “infants” went from wearing little collared robes as they began to walk, and then transitioned at around the age of seven to more specifically gendered costume.4 However, in the tumultuous sixteenth century in Europe, the sartorial markers between pueritia and adolescens at 14 became blurred with the introduction of the codpiece on young boys. The necessity arose to present an uninterrupted display of overt masculinity in formal dress. In Fig. 10.1, we see the codpiece as part of Ranuccio Farnese’s formal portrait. Here, Pope Paul III’s grandson is pictured as a serious boy (or is he already a man?) about midway through his pueritia, about the age of 11 or 12.5
In this chapter, I want to explore the codpiece for young boys and to inquire as to its meaning. Here, I will discuss this aspect of the changing styles of the time, especially in the clothing of boys beginning early in their pueritia and into early adolescens. In their ensembles the codpiece played an important role. In this century of tumultuous change, it seemed to be crucially important to those adults who commissioned the images of these male children so costumed to demonstrate familial stability with this socially constructed image of masculinity. What was its meaning at the time? Here, I will argue that the picture of familial continuity and strength that portraits of nubile females had accomplished for the families of the upper ranks in the fifteenth century, portraits of young males of the same stratum of society shown in codpieces did for the sixteenth. When the necessity for displaying such stabilizing outward signs of masculinity waned in around 1580, the codpiece disappeared for all males of the upper classes beneath new styles of garments, fashioned to address new societal concerns.
