Abstract
The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World is an ambitious and far-reaching book. A total of 27 chapters and more than 500 pages cover a wide range of topics examining childhood as a historical phenomenon over the last few centuries. By presenting the current state of research, the anthology is able to show how significantly the history of childhood as an academic field has grown during recent decades. The work widely accepted as the origin and starting point for the history of childhood is the ground-breaking Centuries of Childhood by the French historian Philippe Ariès, first published in French in 1960. In the introduction, the editor Paula S. Fass defines the ambitious objective of replacing Ariès’ work and findings with this volume. Her aim is to offer an alternative approach to the history of childhood ‘that is perhaps less surprising than the one Ariès offered, but just as compelling’ (p. 2). Unlike Ariès, for the editor, childhood is not an invention of Western modernity, but ‘a privileged state, a status to which some children have historically much more access than others’ (p. 2).
After a brief introduction by the editor, the volume is divided in three sections. Part I contains four chapters on ‘Childhood in the Ancient World, the Middle Ages, and Early Modern Europe’. The essays mainly follow the tradition of a history of ideas. By interpreting ‘classic’, influential sources such as the Bible, they are able to make two points that are central for a history of childhood after Ariès: the essays show that the prevalent fixation of research on modern childhoods might be wrong and, at the same time, give an interesting genealogy for some central ideas that emerged before the time we know as modernity but still have a formative power on childhood today, such as the notion of childhood as a time of development, innocence and need for protection.
Part II is entitled ‘Creating Childhoods in the Western World’. This, the main section of the volume, consists of 13 chapters in all. The selection of the single chapters is not explained in detail, but the essays partly reflect on different popular historical fields of research that are now formulated with respect to children and childhood (such as ‘war’, ‘work’, ‘nation state building’ and ‘spaces’). Others are about institutions (such as ‘age, school, and development’ and ‘generation’) and cultural features (such as ‘play’, ‘generation’, ‘images of children and childhood’ and ‘children’s literature’) that have shaped childhood in a particular way. The essays all cover a wide time span (mostly from the 18th to the 20th century).
Finally, Part III addresses ‘Special Children at Special Times or Places’. The caption suggests that it is the children (and their times and places) who are ‘special’, but the articles reveal that these children (and their childhoods) are socially and culturally addressed as ‘special’ and thus question the notion of a universal Western childhood as developed in its different aspects in the chapters of Part II. In this respect, the structure of the book gives credit to the insight that modern childhoods have been – and still are – both global and local, universal and specific. Ivan Jablonka makes this explicit in his essay (though his belief in the global benefit of the values of Western child welfare could perhaps be subject to greater questioning), while Nara Milanich even goes a step further by questioning the very boundaries of ‘modernity’ regarding childhoods in her chapter on ‘Latin American childhoods and the concept of modernity’.
The contributors to the volume are mainly historians from the United States. Nevertheless, the essays cover a wide range of different issues arising in the different regions of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Western world. One aspect which is somewhat underrepresented, however, is the sociological perspective of childhood studies (though there are some exceptions, such as the chapter on ‘Children as Consumers’ by Daniel Thomas Cook). The concept of ‘childhood in the West as a privileged state’ (p. 2) as offered by the editor is more positive than the essays in the volume suggest childhood to be: they also reveal the ‘Janus face’ of modernity and progress. Giving more credit to childhood studies and their findings might have helped provide a historical and theoretical demonstration of these ambivalences, which result from concepts and institutions of ‘Western’ childhood(s). Also, some issues that are important for the field of childhood studies (such as gender issues and the history of sciences ‘making up’ the modern child) are not addressed systematically in separate essays. Yet, The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World is in any case a profound starting point to strengthen these ties between the history and the sociology of childhood.
Though Fass herself directly compares her volume with the 50-year-old Centuries of Childhood, it is helpful to regard the anthology in contrast to other recent histories of childhood. I will pick up two important publications. First, perhaps the most popular monograph in the field nowadays is Hugh Cunningham’s (2005) Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500, which gives a brief overview of the last five decades and an elaborate insight into the current state of research. Second, there is the extensive A Cultural History of Childhood and Family (edited by Elizabeth Foyster and James Alan Marten in 2010), which covers the time span from Antiquity to the Modern Age in no less than six volumes. In comparison, it may be stated that this volume is a well-founded supplement to monographs such as Cunningham’s and at the same time offers a more compact approach than the Cultural History of Childhood and Family. The diversity of issues addressed by experts within these domains make this compendium a most useful standard work for anyone engaged in the field of the history of childhood. While other histories of childhood follow a clear chronological order The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World collects articles in three sections and thus addresses the field of research in a more piecemeal fashion by presenting a compendium of essays that could stand alone for themselves. This lack of system may be seen as a weakness but also as the strength of the volume because the individual chapters offer a broad account of certain aspects of modern childhood. Moreover, the wide range of sound standalone essays shows that the research field has developed enough not to need a new Ariès as a canonised and canonising work. The state of the research is perhaps displayed best in this open style of an anthology.