No girls, no boys, no families: on the construction of childhood in texts of the German Middle Ages.

"One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt."

Michel Foucault(1)

Two paradigms have haunted the study of childhood in the Middle Ages. The first, older but still powerful, assumes that childhood is primarily a natural phenomenon and that it must have been more or less the same in the past as it is in the present. Writing in 1868, Ignaz Zingerle claimed that children must have played the same games in the Middle Ages as they do today, "da sich in der Kinderwelt so wenig andert."(2) Little changes in the historiography of childhood either: more than a century after Zingerle there are still historians who think that the study of childhood in the Middle Ages can serve no higher purpose than to "demonstrate the undying continuum of human experience."(3) The second paradigm, associated above all with the work of Philippe Aries, assumes that childhood is primarily an historical phenomenon, but a recent one, and that there was nothing in the Middle Ages that deserves the name. According to Aries the Middle Ages lacked "an awareness of the particular nature of childhood," with the result that "the idea of childhood did not exist" in medieval society.(4) Although Aries's claims have been challenged from the moment they appeared,(5) they have nevertheless gained wide currency. That children in the past were regarded as nothing more than "little adults" is probably the one "fact" about childhood in the past best known among educated nonspecialists.

Although Zingerle and Aries seem to stand at opposite poles, they are in accord on one fundamental point: both of them seek in the past something that resembles childhood in the present. This is obvious in the case of Zingerle. Since he proceeds from the axiom that little changes in the world of children, he knows in advance that he will find a childhood in the Middle Ages that is more or less like childhood in his own time. The object of Aries's search is a bit less obvious, since he neglects to explain what he means by the "awareness of the particular nature of childhood" or the "idea of childhood" that the Middle Ages are said to lack. One can only assume, however, that these formulas refer to some awareness or idea that Aries himself has and that, judging from his failure to offer any definition, he believes his readers have and share with him. Thus Aries's "awareness of the particular nature of childhood" and his "idea of childhood" can only be a modern "awareness" or "idea." When Aries says that "the idea of childhood did not exist" in medieval society, he means that his idea of childhood did not exist in medieval society.

For Aries as for Zingerle there is but one idea of childhood, their own. Theirs is a strange binary history, one in which there is no past, only the present and the absence of the present. It is history without history. One should keep in mind, however, that childhood is only a noun and that the historical forms to which it refers may vary widely. It is the most obvious term to use to refer to the part of life that precedes adulthood, and if a culture can be shown to distinguish such a stage of life, then there is every reason to call it childhood. It is important to realize, however, that one has named thereby only a stretch of time, not an essence. If one wants to learn something about that stretch of time as it is understood in another culture, one must assume that by calling it childhood one has not made any other suppositions about it. One must be ready to perform the painstaking work, always imperfect, always incomplete, of analyzing the discourses and practices that might reveal how childhood was constituted in a past culture, as much as possible in its own terms. These too may be only nouns. But by attending to the contingencies of their use we will learn more about how other cultures constructed childhood than if we assume that childhood is real and already known, and that the history of childhood has no higher goal than to judge past cultures for their success or failure in recognizing what we know to be true about it.

In what follows I would like to give an example of the kinds of things one can learn if one looks beyond the binary history of Zingerle and Aries and attends to the specific terms in which historical childhood was articulated. My example is based on a relatively complete examination of texts in Middle High German (MHG) written between 1100 and 1350.(6) These texts are religious and secular, primarily narrative, and have to do, almost exclusively, with children of noble or otherwise exalted birth. Obviously these are not historical documents in the usual sense. However, historical documents in the usual sense concerning childhood in the Middle Ages are hard to come by. Thus historians who write about medieval childhood have often had to rely on other kinds of sources: Boswell and Weinstein and Bell on literary texts, Hanawalt on coroners' reports, Le Roy Ladurie on inquisitors' protocols.(7) Whatever its limitations, and they are many, the extant corpus of MHG texts offers our only access to the discursive practices of German speakers of the Middle Ages. To the extent that discourse is inseparable from other cultural practices, these texts offer valuable evidence, in many regards our only evidence, for the cultural knowledge of childhood in the German Middle Ages.

Given the continuing influence of Aries it seems necessary to begin by insisting that MHG writers do recognize a stage of life that precedes adulthood, a stage of life that might reasonably be called childhood. They have a word, kint, that approximates English "child" and another, kintheit, that refers to the early years. When a writer around 1300 refers to Konrad von Fussesbrunnen's Kindheit Jesu as "ein buchelin daz mir seit / von vnsers herren kintheit,"(8) he must have something like "our lord's childhood" in mind. Secular childhood lasts for males until knighting, for females until marriage, or, less frequently for either, until inheritance. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm, Vivianz recalls the ceremony in which he was knighted, "do ich . . . wart ein man mit iuwer helfe / und ich gewan schiltes ammet."(9) To become a knight is to become a man. When a female marries she becomes a wip, which means not only "wife" (as opposed to "husband"), but also "woman" (as opposed to "man") and "woman who has had sexual relations" (as opposed to "virgin"). To marry is to become a woman. Although the entry into adulthood is less clearly marked for religious figures, they too pass through childhood before they become adults. Albert yon Augsburg calls St. Ulrich "kint" when young and "man" when older;(10) according to the Passional Bernhard is said to have been perfect in chastity "inz alder von der kintheit."(11) All the evidence points to the conclusion that MHG writers have some "idea of childhood."(12)