Gillian Adams sets out a really strong case for the existence of a category of literature for children in the Middle Ages. At some point while I was reading this, I got uncomfortable, but then I double-checked the date and was reassured. This article was published in 1998.

Yes, in 1998 most medievalists who did not study children needed to be convinced that medieval Europe did have a conception of childhood, that they were not just miniature adults or added workforce who were not viewed with love by their parents. By now, even medievalists who don’t work on material involving children usually are aware that our understanding of this has changed significantly. The field of medieval childhood studies is still quite young: the books Adams mentions (Shahar, Schultz, Hanawalt) are still almost the only books devoted entirely to medieval European childhood. (I’m not including some of the others she mentions because they deal with “after 1500,” or with only a specific aspect of childhood, like literacy. Nicholas Orme has a few really important and comprehensive books which were published by then but which she doesn’t mention.)

But medieval childhood studies definitely has progressed beyond simply refuting the Ariès model, and the field of medieval children’s literature has progressed beyond redefining what kinds of texts should be considered children’s literature. Still, this was a really useful article to read because it allowed me to explicitly acknowledge a lot of things I, as one of those “younger scholars” Adams mentions, take for granted as I work on medieval childhood and children’s literature – even as there are many points in her article I think don’t completely hold up.

First, some of the points that now almost go without saying:

Childhood was clearly defined in the Middle Ages, even if it wasn’t what we think of as childhood. Medieval philosophy of the stages of life, which Adams mentions, includes far more than the childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and adulthood that we have. And the idea that children were not loved is absurd, as Adams says, though for more reasons than her claim that equating high mortality with absence of love is historically wildly inaccurate. Evidence gathered from inscriptions on infants’ gravestones, for instance, proves that burying these day-old babies was as heartbreaking and anguish-ridden for their mothers as it is for mothers today. Literature itself, like the Pearl poem in which a father mourns his daughter, is evidence enough that there was love. This poem, of course, is highly allegorical, and it is not all that likely that it was written by an actual father mourning his actual daughter. And yet in order for readers to understand and appreciate the allegory, they would have to understand and appreciate the sentiment of a father mourning his beloved daughter.

In this discussion, Adams sets up a kind of strawman argument. She makes her point as a refutation of Perry Noedelman, saying that a different concept of childhood than we have does not automatically mean no children’s literature existed. She quotes Nodelman as saying that “‘a different conception of childhood operated, [and] that conception required no special literature for children’.” Later in that paragraph, she says that Nodelman “assert[s] that only our conception of childhood can result in children’s literature” (4). Nodelman in fact does not assert this, at least not in this quote (I haven’t read the original, so I can’t tell if her reading is based on anything else he says). He simply says that the medieval conception was different and that this particular difference resulted in no special literature for children.

That’s wrong, of course, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that there may well be a concept of childhood that does not require a special literature for children, and that where Nodelman goes wrong is that the medieval concept of childhood was not in that category. The general consensus for a while has been that children’s literature started in the mid-eighteenth century, but no will argue that the concept of childhood in the eighteenth century is the same as ours is now. It’s a different concept of childhood, which calls for a different definition of children’s literature in that time period.

Once we’ve established that there was a concept of childhood, Adams turns to defining which literature can be rightfully called medieval children’s literature. First of all, didactic literature is literature, and allowing that creates a flood of texts in this category. Besides, conduct books (like Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry), while they are absolutely didactic, are not dry moralistic texts but full of imaginative narrative as well. And who are we kidding – “all literature has an agenda,” and defining literature as being pure art without any practical purpose is absurd. So much of the medieval canon has explicit lessons that to apply that distinction to children’s literature makes no sense.

In terms of fiction, there was probably not such a sharp divide between what adults read and what children read in the Middle Ages. Adams calls this “shared literature,” a concept I had never thought to define, but having the term will be useful to me, I think. The problem Adams has with this is that she claims medievalists specializing in children’s literature tend to look at these texts as shared and to ignore the possibility of some of them being exclusively for children. I’m not fully convinced that this is a problem, and I’ll return to that in a moment.

She also claims that medievalists specializing in children’s literature tend to focus on how well contemporary children’s literature portrays the Middle Ages. If that was true then, it most certainly is not true now. I recently presented a paper on Adam of the Road at the medieval conference in Kalamazoo, and while I did talk about the accuracy of medieval life in the novel, that was because I was concerned with how much influence historical fiction could have on young readers to study that historical period later on, and accuracy was one of the factors I considered. The others on my panel barely talked about historical accuracy. They talked instead about “medievalisms,” aspects of contemporary literature (and film, and video games, etc) which are loosely based on “medieval-y” stuff. Scholars look at what medievalisms do for the modern child reader, how they help them understand their own world, why some themes persist and some models of “medieval-y” stuff are useful in representing certain ideas, how adult authors of children’s literature view the Middle Ages and why, and what all of that might mean.

In any case, Adams’ detailed explanation of how one might determine if a medieval text was aimed at children is incredibly thorough. Many of the strategies she mentions are foundational in studying any medieval text (as she points out, philology – but I can’t imagine that was never indispensable to study of medieval literature). I know that my response here sounds like I think most of Adams’ argument has issues, but I don’t. I think that this chunk is the most essential part of her argument, and I take very little issue with it. But I don’t think it’s useful for me to recap it here, so I’m focusing on the parts I did take issue with in some way or another. I’ll briefly run through a few of her points that I think don’t have as much impact in identifying texts as children’s as she claims.

The question of a child possessing a book seems very important to Adams. Her example of Sado’s inscription sounds convincing (the translation, by the way, seems deliberately clumsy – the Latin is pretty standard and doesn’t sound childish at all, but she’s only quoting the translation), and we might think that being able to prove children owned their own grammar books is useful. But she does acknowledge that children were more likely to hear texts read to them than to read them themselves, and I don’t think she differentiates enough between the modern concept of connection between literacy and a child owning a book, and what the medieval concept might have been. Books were expensive, as she notes, and educational material was usually communal and/or familial, not owned by children.

A larger issue is her almost off-hand comment about using the major characters of a text to determine whether it was aimed at children. If the major character is a child, she says, it’s likely the text was meant to be read by or for children. Even in contemporary literature, that’s not a good indication, so I don’t understand why she would say that at all. Especially within the context of highly allegorical medieval literature, the inclusion of children characters is no indication of an intended audience’s age. This is crucial to understanding how and why medieval children’s literature existed, so this bothers me a great deal.

One of her really satisfying points is looking at texts which are referred to in other texts as somehow connected to children. Intertextuality! Actually, there is a medieval text which lists authors starting from the Classical period and classifies what they’ve written, and that has been used to identify some texts as children’s literature. I came across this while I was writing about Robert Henryson’s fables, which are not classified as children’s literature, but which I want to talk about here for a second because they’ll help me make a point, also related to Adams’ point about considering genres of texts included in books which were obviously used in education. If a genre, like fables, is included in educational texts, we could extrapolate to other fable collections and in some cases posit that they were children’s texts.

So Henryson has never been classified as children’s literature (it’s written in Middle Scots, not in Latin). But his fables are the same fables which Marie de France, Lydgate, and Caxton (and others) use in their own collections. Marie de France and Caxton’s collections have been discussed as possibly being used in the classrooms themselves, as memory and recitation exercises and to teach the lessons of the fables. Lydgate’s is argued to have been used in classrooms as well, but for different reasons. His fables are all really long, as opposed to Marie de France and Caxton’s really short fables and morals. Lydgate’s reflects the medieval lesson of expansion, where students were taught to elaborate on texts for various reasons. His fables could be his own exercise in this tradition and/or an example that could have been used in classrooms.

This is what I find so interesting and useful about Adams’ idea of “shared literature.” It never really occurred to me to separate the children from the adults as an audience for most texts. My work on Henryson can’t be applied to children, but children of course came up in a discussion of fables, and it is possible that my interpretation of these fables working through a manipulation of emotion actually relies on adult readers approaching fables with a bit of nostalgia about the content of fables which they read as children.

If we’re arguing for leaving aside our preconceived notions about children’s literature, one of them has to be that for medieval scholars to look at children’s literature, there may be a reason it’s predominantly shared literature we look at (didactic texts of course sidesteps this question, though even those can be and are considered as adult texts in some ways).

That’s another point I had trouble with. Adams says that proof these texts are not dead is “most of the material in the texts that I cite in the last part of this essay is an integral part of the ‘sea of stories’ and continue to be found in the modern period in works now generally agreed to be children’s literature” (17). But aside from her point about shared literature, she very clearly says just before this quote that a lot of these texts she is identifying as children’s literature are actually sometimes “regular” texts modified for children. Ysengrimus, she says, had a “smutty” section taken out for inclusion in a manuscript for a teaching establishment. She says this is one of the stories Grimm “recognize[d as] a fine story when he saw one,” but it existed as an adult story before that. Based on her previous discussion, it’s not material or content but the style which identifies a children’s text, so the continuation of these stories in children’s literature doesn’t say much about medieval children’s literature. As I mentioned before, I think the useful question here is not similarities in material between children’s literature then and now, but tropes and themes that remain.

Final thought: Adams says that “although Hunt claims that ‘different skills’ are required to read books from earlier periods (202), no different skills are needed for the imaginative works that I have mentioned when they are well translated” (17). Actually, methods of reading differ so greatly that translations always obscure the possibilities of the text. Medieval punctuation actually has such tremendous impact on how a text is read that editors of critical editions have a huge task deciding when to sacrifice some of that in order to enable a modern student’s comprehension of the text. For example, some punctuation leaves a text deliberately ambiguous so that the reader has to puzzle it out, and can – and should – read it twice or three times, attempting a different reading each time, and not choosing one over the other but accepting all as part of the text (Gawain and the Green Knight is notorious for this).

Basically, I think her analysis is really great, but still slips into the flattening of comparison of medieval children’s literature to contemporary ideas of children’s literature that she argues so much against. But since she wrote this in 1998 at the beginning of this realization in scholarship, it makes sense that these inconsistencies would sneak in.

— Esther Bernstein