Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative

Phyllis Gaffney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754669203
• eBook ISBN: 9781317161349
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What do we know of medieval childhood? Were boundaries always clear between childhood and young adulthood? Was medieval childhood gendered? Scholars have been debating such questions over half a century. Can evidence from imaginative literature test the conclusions of historians? Phyllis Gaffney's innovative book reveals contrast and change in the portrayal of childhood and youth by looking at vernacular French narratives composed between 1100 and 1220. Covering over sixty poems from two major genres - epic and romance - she traces a significant evolution. While early epics contain only a few stereotypical images of the child, later verse narratives display a range of arguably timeless motifs, as well as a growing awareness of the special characteristics of youth. Whereas juvenile epic heroes contribute to the adult agenda by displaying precocious strength and wisdom, romance children are on the receiving end, requiring guidance and education. Gaffney also profiles the intriguing phenomenon of enfances poems, singing the youthful deeds of established heroes: these 'prequels' combine epic and romance features in distinctive ways. Approaching the history of childhood and youth through the lens of literary genre, this study shows how imaginative texts can both shape and reflect the historical development and cultural construction of emotional values.

PART 1
Approaches

Chapter 1
Medieval Childhood in Literature

Much more could be done with literary evidence than has been done to date.

—Barbara Hanawalt1

Ariès: From Pioneer to bête noire

No study of medieval childhood can ignore the social historian Philippe Ariès, whose ground-breaking L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime sparked five decades of historical debate about the so-called ‘discovery’ of childhood in Western Europe.2 Ariès insisted upon medieval society’s indifference to childhood, and its tendency to integrate young people into adult life from a very early age. He contended that our current notion of childhood as a special phase of life gradually emerged during the early modern period. In his view, medieval children were seen as small adults and allowed to take part in adult affairs as soon as they were physically able. Later, as attitudes towards childhood were transformed, children were gradually divorced from the adult world, a process illustrated by the manner in which certain games, toys and clothes became specifically reserved for children from the sixteenth century on. The post-medieval discovery of what Ariès calls the particularité enfantine or specific nature of childhood was closely linked with a change in the role and size of the bourgeois family, which became a more intimate, compact unit, and also with the influence of seventeenth-century moralists’ ideas about the fundamental innocence of children, who were increasingly regarded as morally vulnerable beings, in need of protection from adults. These educational preoccupations transformed the concept of the family, making it child-centred and conferring on it a moral and spiritual function. Thus, Ariès concludes, family and school combined to withdraw children from adult society.

Although Ariès’s bold thesis has been shown to be flawed in method and substance,3 its influence has been widespread and it continues to be cited on all sides as the key study in the field.4 This is surprising, given the important work done in recent decades by medieval historians who, provoked by Ariès to return to the sources, have sifted them for evidence of a medieval sense of childhood.

These recent scholars have constructed convincing counter-arguments and re-evaluated Ariès’s claims, in a series of monographs that roundly refute the assertion that medieval Europe was indifferent to childhood.5 From Shulamith Shahar’s Childhood in the Middle Ages (1990) to Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Children (2001), historians have come up with more balanced accounts of attitudes towards children in the medieval period.6 Shahar, considering western Europe from 1100 to 1426 and Orme, focussing on England from the seventh to the sixteenth century, both stress continuities over the centuries, not only in adult emotions vis-à-vis children but also in the experience of childhood itself. A comparably broad time span informs the work of French historians like Didier Lett, Pierre Riché and Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, who bring to light an impressive array of evidence to demonstrate, through all kinds of sources – administrative, legal, iconographic, archaeological, ecclesiastical and literary – just how well-developed was the medieval awareness of the distinct state of childhood, and how profound, universal and enduring were the emotions of adults vis-à-vis children. Art historians have shown up the flaws in Ariès’s argument and methodology. Ilene Forsyth presents an abundance of iconographic examples from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries that run counter to his claim that medieval artists neglected the specific portrayal of childhood, while in a discerning piece about sixteenth-century child portraiture, Laurel Reed argues the complex interrelation between art history and social history, showing that one cannot, as Ariès did, assume a ‘direct link between art and life’.7 Archaeological studies of children’s burial plots have garnered data on children’s clothes, toys and diets; ecclesiastical history has revealed perspectives on matters such as the age of access to the sacraments or the practice of child oblation in religious communities. Historians have drawn convincing arguments, from administrative and legal records, on topics like family size and children’s apprenticeship to the workplace. Didier Lett’s sensitive probings of miracle stories and fabliaux have brought to light some precious glimpses of attitudes to childhood and the lives of children in every social milieu, from peasant to royal. What emerges from the work of these scholars is a richly nuanced sense of the early stages of human life, and it is even argued that some medieval educational theories would not be out of place in manuals for parents or educators from our own time.8

In sum, thanks to the fruitful collaboration of art historians, archaeologists and historians, we now know a great deal about the daily lives of medieval children from a range of diverse sources not previously considered with the history of childhood in mind. This renewed interpretation of the sources renders untenable the thesis that ‘childhood’ is a modern concept, unknown to the medieval west. There is more of an emphasis on permanence in sensitivity to childhood, even if the manifestation of that sensitivity varies from century to century. Among historians, Ariès has definitely fallen from favour. Thus, Nicholas Orme, in the introduction to his 2001 study of Medieval Children: ‘it cannot be over-emphasised that there is nothing to be said for Ariès’s view of childhood in the middle ages, nor indeed of a major shift in its history during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as opposed to changes of detail’.9

The Literary Evidence: a Different Proposition

However, when we turn to consider more specifically the portrayal of childhood in the imaginative literature of the middle ages, the consensus is less clear-cut. Although historians of medieval childhood frequently cite literary sources in support of their arguments,10 not all studies of the literary evidence from Old French sources are as categorical in dismissing Ariès.11 ‘La littérature du Moyen Age est indifférente à l’enfant’ [‘Medieval literature is indifferent to the child’], remarked Béatrix Vadin in 1978.12 Jean Subrenat (1979) argued that the rare occurrence of small children makes the few who are included seem all the more prominent; the great majority of texts pay no attention to them.13 When small children are mentioned, it is argued that their role tends to be passive and they serve as mere cogs in the mechanism of the plot, displaying no independent personality. The child of the fabliau – whose role consists in being killed by the jealous spouse (L’Enfant remis au soleil), in unwittingly revealing the truth (Celui qui bouta la pierre), or in justifying the presence of a cradle to create confusion in the darkened bedchamber (Bodel’s De Gombert et des deus clers) – can hardly be said to exist as an independent literary personage.14

Several essays in the 1980 volume of the Senefiance series, L’enfant au moyen-âge: Littérature et Civilisation, point in the same direction. Although Jeanne Wathelet-Willem observes that a couple of Marie de France’s Lais are particularly revealing about infant care, May Plouzeau’s survey of babies in medieval French literature observes that infants in general are portrayed in a stereotyped way, with traits that remain constant from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.15 An infant is invariably described as beautiful; his laughter, cries and tears are usually all that is mentioned. The stock requirements of infant care are four in number: bathing, clothing, laying to rest and feeding; and in scenes of feeding, emphasis is more often placed on the mother than on the suckling child. Baptism scenes deal more with the crowds assembled than with the recipient of the sacrament. Infants rarely provoke reactions of spontaneous affection from adults. So, although she finds plenty of babies in medieval French literature, Plouzeau is forced to conclude that she cannot modify the argument of Ariès to any great extent (p. 211).

Besides the rarity and passivity of small children, medieval literary texts contain few depictions of the joys of family life.16 J.-C. Payen points out that the two most renowned heroines of romance, Iseult and Guenevere, are childless.17 The prime concern is the triumph of adult love, not fecundity. Courtly romances, written by and for adults, do not necessarily embrace childhood themes.

Social attitudes to the child in medieval literary writings would also seem to support Ariès’s ‘indifference’ thesis. The child is seen as foolish, uncouth, unformed, and marginal in an adult-centred society.18 Vernacular proverbs testify to this view of the child: ‘De fol et d’enfant garder se doit len’ [One should avoid lunatics and children]. ‘Li enfans et li yvres dient voir’ [The child and the drunkard tell the truth]:19 like the court fool or the drunkard, the child, as mute observer of society, can sometimes reveal the truth without even being aware of it himself.20 But mostly, as Philippe Ménard illustrates, he is a source of entertainment to adults, inviting laughter rather than sympathy, and inherently funny because of his naïveté and lack of reason.21

A first glance at the literary evidence, then, suggests that while there are children to be found, they are not accorded full status as characters in their stories. Why this apparent indifference? In a 1990 article, I argued that medieval texts marginalize children precisely because they exalt iuventus, the prime of life or ideal age.22 The hero becomes in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part 1 Approaches
• Part 2 Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Chanson de geste and Romance
• Part 3 Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index