Tóm tắt

Anyone wishing to study the history of children in the MiddlernAges could well begin with the chapters about them in the famousrnencyclopaedia On the Properties of Things, compiled by Bartholomew the Englishman in the mid-thirteenth century andrntranslated into English by John Trevisa in 1398. Here are accountsrnof conception and birth, the functions of midwives and nurses,rnand the characteristics of infants, boys and girls.1 The discussionrnof boys includes a remark worth examining. As Trevisa expressedrnit, they love talkynges and counsailles of suche children as theyrnbene, and forsaken and voyden companye of olde men. Boys,rnin other words, prefer each other's fellowship to that of theirrnelders. The observation has a special interest today when thernnature of medieval childhood is a matter of debate. One influentialrnwriter on the subject, Philippe Aries, has argued that childrenrndid not lead separate lives from adults. In his opinion, the maturernand the young lived closely together, working and playing inrnsimilar ways, with the result that adults did not generally viewrnchildren as a distinct group or childhood as a special era of life.3rnShulamith Shahar, the author of the best recent survey of medieval children, takes the opposite view. She grants the fact thatrnpeople lived in close proximity with one another. But, she asks,rnwere there not differences between the lives of men and women,rnmasters and servants, and therefore also adults and children? Forrnher, there were indeed such distinctions, causing adults to haverna well-developed concept of childhood and even of stagesrnwithin it