ABSTRACT
Not yet two years old, Prince Philip cried through his bother’s baptism, becoming so upset that the ceremony was stopped so that his governess could comfort him. The Virgin Mary learned to read at age three. Five-year-old Princess María Teresa amused the royal court by imitating how her royal father twirled his mustache. An adolescent boy counseled a friend to heed his mother’s sage advice. Twelve-year-old Alonso de Contreras killed a schoolmate with a penknife. At 14, Luisa de Carvajal beat her own back bloody with a silk whip in an effort to assure her soul’s salvation. The aging Don Quixote enacted a paternity he never really had by offering fatherly advice to the young males he encountered. All these vignettes give us a series of tantalizing and contradictory glimpses into the lives of both real and fictional children and their parents in early modern Spain. Fragments of childhood can be found in a wide variety of texts and documents, challenging scholars of early modern Spain to cooperate across disciplines and develop a dialogue between these sources that can help uncover the complex realities of this fragile stage of early modern life.
