Linda A. Pollock

Forgotten children : parent-child relations from 1500 to 1900

Preface Acknowledgements 1. Past children: a review of the literature on the history of childhood 2. The thesis re-examined: a criticism of the literature 3. Issues concerning evidence 4. Attitudes to children 5. Discipline and control 6. From birth to twelve 7. Summary and conclusions Appendix Bibliography and citation index.

ANGER AND THE NEGOTIATION OF RELATIONSHIPS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

This article, through a detailed examination of the private papers of the English landed elite, argues for the important place of anger in early modern society. It investigates the verbal expression of rage, from irritation to fury, in men and women: why it was aroused, how it was articulated, its effects, and in what circumstances anger was regarded as a legitimate response. Anger was a forceful invitation to renegotiate unsatisfactory aspects of relationships. It spotlighted deficiencies in duty, unacceptable conduct, disrespect, broken promises, and frustrated expectations. The article also challenges the prevailing approach to the history of emotions and suggests that we move from a model of linear repression to one of situated experience. Rather than postulating the gradual suppression of unacceptable emotions, historians should examine the conventions governing the expression of emotions in context, as well as the many perspectives on what was acceptable behaviour and what was not. Focusing on the situated use of emotions brings to light the different emotional mentality of the seventeenth century which linked emotions in unfamiliar ways. It also enables to us to uncover the interaction of emotions and how individuals engaged in daily life with cultural scripts, as well as bringing us closer to unravelling the emotional system of early modern England.

Rethinking Patriarchy and the Family in Seventeenth-Century England

The historiography on the English family is divided between those who view the family as a sanctuary of emotional support and those who consider it an institution of female oppression, sibling jealousy, and intergenerational rivalry. The detailed archives of the Barrett-Lennard family reveal that this divide is mainly the product of a simplistic depiction of family life in the past, which fails to take into account the shifts in family relationships. Moreover, in examining patriarchy in the home, historians have concentrated on the marital relationship, excluding other male- female diads such as brother and sister. Finally, they have not yet thoroughly investigated patriarchy in action as opposed to in principle. Patriarchy was so long-lasting not because its harsh strictures were softened by affection but because the system contained within it the necessary structures for mitigation.

Book Review: Women in Early Modern England 1550-1720

ing of basic elements of family names for both daughters and sons—in keeping with a flexible conception of family membership that certainly recognized and valued the patriline but did exclude the matriline (and relations through women) when it was needed or advantageous. These comments do not undermine the picture of Athenian family behavior that Cox so skill fully and carefully presents, but they do suggest that the complexity of Athenian family relation ships—of who marries whom and who inherits from whom—was in fact not a challenge to Athenian inheritance laws so much as a product of them. The second problem with Cox’s “straw oikos” is her idea that modern discussion, following Xenophon, generally considers the oikos as a nuclear family (pp. 130-35). Neither Xenophon nor the authors Cox quotes (e.g., S. C. Humphreys), however, actually takes the position Cox attributes to them. For Xenophon, as for the historians who follow him, the oikos is essentially the household, people, and property, and all that they together produce. Again, as with the legal structures of the Athenian family, Cox’s descriptive survey of family relationships illuminates (rather than challenges) the notion of the oikos as household. At the core of the oikos were mar riage and the production of children—even when these marriages and the resulting parent-child relationships were not stable or simple. Cox shows repeatedly that the integrity of the oikos as household was threatened by such realities of ancient Athenian life as the prevalence of war, the dependence on slaves, or the keeping of concubines, but she does not show that the conceptionof the oikos as household was challenged by those realities. In sum,Household Interests i a careful work of scholarship, but one with some organizational and conceptual weaknesses that may limit its usefulness to both the general and specialist reader. For the most part, Cox speaks directly to the specialist (providing little historical or legal context). Although she is apparently widely read in the area of family history, comparative material is not brought to bear in any significant way on the data presented. The strength and the interest ofHousehold Interests lie in its careful culling and cataloging of the social strategies and practices of the families of the Athenian orations.

Benjamin Roberts, Through the keyhole: Dutch child-rearing practices in the 17th and 18th centuries, three urban elite families . (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998.) Pages 223. £45.00.

By utilizing personal documents such as diaries and letters, Roberts reconstructs the way in which three Dutch merchant families from different cities brought up their children during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He wishes to establish what the practice of bringing up children was, to investigate and explain the objectives of parents, and to compare child-rearing over time. The behaviour of each family is traced over three generations so that the author can attend to both change and continuity in child-rearing practices. The research is directed specifically towards a solution of the historiographical debate on parenting behaviour in the past, trying to decide whether, in Roberts’ terms, the black or white legend is the more correct. After reviewing the secondary literature and the areas of contention, and introducing the families and their world, Roberts examines the physical nurturing of small children from pregnancy and childbirth through infant feeding and childhood illness. It was mainly fathers who supplied the information on these matters, and it is clear from Roberts’ research that child-delivery was not an exclusively female affair. Babies were normally breastfed by the mother. If a wet nurse was employed this was usually because the mother could not feed the baby herself, and the nurse invariably resided in the home. Parents were not only concerned whenever a child was ill but also did all they could to ensure that health was restored. A separate chapter studies affection between parents and children, concentrating on three transitions in the parent–child relationship: arrival of infant, death of child, and departure from home. Roberts sensibly concludes that although affection is a biological constant, its expression has been culturally and socially constrained. In the Netherlands, expressing affection in the eighteenth century was

Book Reviews : Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500-1800. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. xxii+442. U.S.

This is an ambitious work. Based on sources such as works of drama, conduct books, as well as nine case studies of gentry marriages, it focuses on the changing attitudes to the meaning of gender throughout the early modem period. Part one is an account of the early modem ideological framework of gender, detailing in particular ideas about the body; part two deals with the lived experience of patriarchy; and part three traces the path toward modem gender. Fletcher’s main thesis is that men’s power in history has resided in their ability to transform patriarchy by replacing its ancient scriptural and medical basis with a new secular ideology of gender. Tudor England sought to understand gender by understanding the body. Heat was viewed as the source of strength: physical, intellectual, and moral. Women were colder than men and hence were the weaker vessel, placed on a vertical hierarchy below men. Because there was no precise boundary between heat and cold, these ideas about the body provided shifting sands for a system of gender order. In real life the static, prescriptive, and essentially biblical pattern of acceptable behavior for women could not be upheld. Women could not be dominated to anything like the degree implied by the patriarchal ideal, in the home and at large. Marriages were only in certain limited ways patriarchal in practice: Wives were expected to be autonomous and show considerable initiative in day-to-day household management. In society, women were so important economically, as

37.50 (hardcover

The history of childhood has been dominated by a few main issues: whether or not there was a concept of childhood in the past; the amount of affection and intimacy between parents and children in the past; the severity of the discipline imposed on children in the past. One group of historians claims that the domestic, nuclear, child-centered family emerged gradually in the eighteenth century; the other that parent-child relations throughout history can be characterized by continuity rather than change.There seems little hope of reconciling the protagonists in the debate. We need to begin our study of past childhood afresh, attempting to discern not the existence of otherwise of concepts of love or childhood, but rather how parents viewed their role and what it was they wished to achieve as they nurtured their children from infancy to adulthood.All societies face similar problems in bringing up their young: how to ensure that children will become responsible, productive, mature individuals, fully compatibl...

Training a child in the way he/she should go. Cultural transmission and child-rearing within the home in England, circa 1550–1800

Part 1 Introduction: case studies legal records courtship the making of marriage marriage, property and the Common Law customary unions and concubinage contract marriage - the first suppression 1540-1642, the revival 1642-1660, the second suppression 1660-1753 clandestine marriage - definition and development, demand from the laity, supply by the clergy, repressive legislation and actual growth 1666-1730, reform and abolition 1730-1753. Part 2 Case studies: courtship and contract forced marriage by the parish forced marriage by the seducer or suitor clandestine marriage - a fleet person, a valid clandestine marriage, a forged clandestine marriage, a bigamous marriage.