> Daniel T. Kline wrote:
> Misconception:
> > That parents in the middle ages didn't love their children or that medieval
> > people didn't have any conception of childhood, a la Aries.
>[Dr Ross wrote:]
> Aries and Le Goff have a lot to answer for on that one. It is obvious
> Aries is grinding an axe.
Dear All
I seem to recall being told that Aries is very right-wing (as in VERY)
which certainly effects his narrative on how attitudes to death changed;
but I'm less sure (not having yet read the childhood book, although it
has been sitting on my shelf for two years!) how this plays out in the
children question.
However, another point: we need to be careful here about what we see as
'misconceptions'. I quite agree that medieval attitudes to childhood were
not as Aries represents them. However, I would also argue that neither
were they the same attitudes as 'we' (=modern westerners) have, for a
whole bunch of social, economic and cultural reasons. A lot of what is at
stake in this discussion of misconceptions comes down to either
repudiating the view that they were the 'same' as us, or that they were
'other' than we are. The problem (and it is a wider
historiographical/philosophical problem) is how we then define,
understand and negotiate that gap... There is a some danger in this
debate of us deriding 'popular misconceptions' to prop up our own
privileged knowledge of the middle ages - when, in fact, our own
knowledge is at many points partial, incomplete, and problematic. This is
not a criticism of the project of rectifying 'misconceptions'; but it is
a note of warning over how we conduct that project.
Cheers
john arnold
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|