ABSTRACT
Although the history of the family and parent-child relations is shrouded in controversy, there is general agreement that from the late seventeenth century a new attitude towards children began to manifest itself, so much so that the eighteenth century has been claimed as a ‘new world’ for them.1 The extent to which the treatment of children prior to this time had been either ‘autocratic’ or even ‘ferocious’ is disputed, but there is no doubt that they were held to be the inheritors of Original Sin, which justified a near-universal corporal punishment. However, in some respects, this was probably countered by the more benign influence of the humanists, who believed in ‘the child’s capacity for good and the moral neutrality of its impulses’. Here was an optimism which acted as a corrective against the more dour Protestantism.2
