1st Edition
Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World
Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World explores what it meant to be a child in the Roman world - what were children’s concerns, interests and beliefs - and whether we can find traces of children’s own cultures. By combining different theoretical approaches and source materials, the contributors explore the environments in which children lived, their experience of everyday life, and what the limits were for their agency. The volume brings together scholars of archaeology and material culture, classicists, ancient historians, theologians, and scholars of early Christianity and Judaism, all of whom have long been involved in the study of the social and cultural history of children.
The topics discussed include children's living environments; clothing; childhood care; social relations; leisure and play; health and disability; upbringing and schooling; and children's experiences of death. While the main focus of the volume is on Late Antiquity its coverage begins with the early Roman Empire, and extends to the early ninth century CE. The result is the first book-length scrutiny of the agency and experience of pre-modern children.
List of Figures
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
1. A New Paradigm for the Social History of Childhood and Children in Antiquity
Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto
2. Agency, Experience, and the Children in the Past. The Case of Roman Childhood
Ville Vuolanto
Setting the Scene: Experiences and Environments
3. Children and the Urban Environment: Agency in Pompeii
Ray Laurence
4. Little Tunics for Little People: the Problems of Visualising the Wardrobe of the Roman child
Mary Harlow
5. Touching Children in Roman Antiquity: the Sentimental Discourse and the Family Christian Laes
6. Being a Niece or Nephew in an Ancient City. Children’s Social Environment in Roman Oxyrhynchos
April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto
What Did the Roman Children Actually Do?
7. Leisure as a Site of Child Socialisation. Agency and Resistance in the Roman Empire
Jerry Toner
8. Roman Girls and Boys at Play: Realities and Representations
Fanny Dolansky
9. Age, Agency, and Material Culture in the Roman World: the Graffiti Evidence from Roman Campania
Katherine Huntley
10. Why Roman Pupils Lacked a Long Vacation
Konrad Vössing
11. Becoming a Roman Student
W. Martin Bloomer
Religious Practices and Sacred Spaces
12. Roman Children as Religious Agents: The Cognitive Foundations of Cult
Jakob Mackey
13. Jewish Childhood in the Roman Galilee. Sabbath in Tiberias (c. 300 CE)
Hagith Sivan
14. Resistance and Agency in the Everyday Life of Late Antique Children (3rd-8th c CE) Béatrice Caseau
15. Children in Monastic Families in Egypt at the End of Antiquity
Biography
Christian Laes is an associate professor of ancient history and Latin at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and an adjunct professor in ancient history at the history department of the University of Tampere, Finland. He has studied the social and cultural history of Rome and Late Antiquity, paying particular attention to the human life course: childhood; youth; family; slavery; old age; sexuality; and disabilities. His monographs, and over 70 contributions have been published by international publishers and journals.
Ville Vuolanto is research fellow at IFIKK, University of Oslo, Norway, and adjunct professor in general history at the University of Tampere, Finland. He has published a number of articles on the history of the family and childhood in the Roman and early medieval periods, and is now writing a monograph on children in Oxyrhynchos (with April Pudsey). His latest book Children and Asceticism in Late Antiquity: Continuity, Family Dynamics and the Rise of Christianity was published in 2015.
" ... on account of its impressive thematic breadth, the high-level quality of its contributions throughout, and its deep, critical engagement with issues of method and theory, Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of childhood. From the big questions that it raises to the experiential details that it captures, the volume richly repays its readers for their imaginative journey through these ancient children’s lives."
- Sinclair Bell, Northern Illinois University, USA, 'Childhood in the Past' journal, 2017
