1st Edition
Childhood and Emotion Across Cultures 1450-1800
How did children feel in the Middle Ages and early modern times? How did adults feel about the children around them? This collection addresses these fundamental but rarely asked questions about social and family relations by bringing together two emerging fields within cultural history – childhood and emotion – and provides avenues through which to approach their shared histories.
Bringing together a wide range of material and sources such as court records, self-narratives and educational manuals, this collection sheds a new light on the subject. The coverage ranges from medieval to eighteenth-century Europe and North America, and examines Catholic, Protestant, Puritan and Jewish communities. Childhood emerges as a function not of gender or age, but rather of social relations. Emotions, too, appear differently in source-driven studies in that they derive not from modern assumptions but from real, lived experience.
Featuring contributions from across the globe, Childhood and Emotion comes a step closer to portraying emotions as they were thought to be experienced by the historical subjects. This book will establish new benchmarks not only for the history of these linked subjects but also for the whole history of social relations.
Introduction, Claudia Jarzebowski (Free University of Berlin, Germany)/Thomas Max Safley (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Part I: Communities 1. Model Children and Pious Desire in Early Enlightenment Philanthropy, Kelly Whitmer (The University of the South at Sewanee, USA) 2. "For the Pleasure of Babies and the Sorrow if Children": Children and Emotions in Early Modern Jewish Communities, Tali Berner (The Program in Research of Child and Youth Cultures, Tel Aviv University, Israel) 3.Growing up in VOC-Batavia: Transcultural Childhood in the World of the Durch East India Company, Nicola Borchardt (University of Hamburg, Germany) Part II: Narrations 4. Self-Narratives as a Source for the History of Emotions, Claudia Ulbrich (Free University of Berlin, Germany); 5. Emotional Socialization in Early Modern Germany, Otto Ulbricht (University of Kiel, Germany); 6.The Exploration of the Emotional Selves of Children in Puritan Autobiographical Writings," Paola Baseotto (University of Reading, Great Britain) 7. Children's Diaries as a Source for the History of Emotions, Ariane Baggerman (University of Rotterdam, The Netherlands) 8. How Children Were Supposed to Feel; How Children Felt: England 1350-1550, Philippa Maddern (University of Western Australia, Australia) Part III: Practices 9. Childhood in a Printing-House: Bruno, Basilius, Margarethe, Bonifacio Amerbach and the Challenges of Life in Humanist Basle (1497-1508), Valentina Sebastiani (European University Institute, Italy) 10. "Nature had form’d thee fairest of thy Kind": Grieving Dead Children in England and Sweden c. 1650—1810," Marjo Kaartinen (University of Turku, Finland) 11. Deserters’ Voices on Childhood and Emotion in 18th-Century France, Naoko Seriu (University of Lille II, France)
Biography
Claudia Jarzebowski is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the Free University of Berlin, working in the field of social history, the history of emotions and early modern global history. She has published various articles and books on topics ranging from incest to childhood.
Thomas Max Safley is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in the economic and social history of early modern Europe, he has published more than a dozen books covering the history of marriage and the family, the history of poverty and charity and the history of labour and business.
“This book brings together two fields: the history of childhood, which is experiencing a resurgence of interest, and the relatively new and rapidly expanding field of the history of emotions.” - Linda Pollock, Tulane University
