In her article Medieval Children’s literature: Its Possibility and Actuality. Gilliam Adams argues for a new, flexible philological approach towards children’s literature of the Middle Ages, one that is more comfortable with textual instability in its material context (18).

As part of this process Adams suggests that we ‘strip away preconceptions of what children’s literature ought to be’ and instead focus on the fiction actually written and read by children in those times.

In order to do this we must dispose of some commonly held myths about medieval children like the ‘Aries thesis’ (2) that proposes that the concept of childhood was ‘discovered’ in the seventeenth or eighteen century.  Adams maintains that concepts of childhood did exist in earlier ages, but that they were different from present day concepts.

Adams goes on to enumerate other ‘barriers to locating a medieval children’s literature’ such as:

• The assertion that the ‘middle ages made no provision for a separate literature for children apart from pedagogical texts designed to teach them to read, to write, to cipher and to behave civilly”(2)
• The idea that parents’ did not love or were afraid to love their children because infant and child mortality were so high”. (3)
• The idea that in the Middle Ages children were viewed as ‘miniature adults’ (2)
• The idea that a different conception of childhood operated in the past and that conception required no special literature for children. (4)

Adams argues that there is no reason that a culture, even with notions of childhood different from our own, would not develop a special literature for those children, and labels such an attitude a form of ‘cultural imperialism and ideological colonialism’ (4)

She argues that pedagogical works are in fact literature, even if their aim was instructional, and not to entertain.

While I agree with Adam’s points, what I find exciting is not just the expanded view, the reconsideration of historical childhood[s], but of historical literacy that her paper encourages.  For example, the quote taken from Suzanne Reynolds, that ’emphasizes the orality of education’ in the Middle Age – that students ‘do not read (in our sense of the term) the text at all, for it remains at all moments and in all senses in the teacher’s hands…” Just as children might have been thought of in a different way, so were books and ideas of what it was to be literate. Reading was not the internal, silent, solitary process that it is today, but an external, oral, aural and communal one.

Part detective, part archaeologist, her approach is methodical and seems a combination of New Criticism (inferences and deductions based on a close reading of the text) and Historicist, asking for consideration of the texts in the context of their times. ‘If we wish to certify [certain] texts as children’s literature, we must examine their use of language, the local meaning of terms, – the literary and legal evidence for what constituted a child at that time, the location, situation and other possible audiences’ (16) It is by this process that Adams seeks to prove the presence of a child reader and by association, the qualification as a children’s text.

In her search Adams tests a work against specific criteria. She asks: is there a dedication to a child, introductory material indicating a younger reader, is the language simple and direct? Is a child directly addressed or portrayed as a main character? Are there explanatory glosses directed as inexpert readers?

It very much remains for Adam’s to prove whether or not a text was written for a semi-literate adult or a child. Such theories are problematic. How can we ever know with certitude? We can’t, but if we broaden our definition of literature to include those didactic, non-fiction texts that children might have read, then such texts could more safely be ascribed to classification.

Most of the works cited are in Latin, which stands to reason because most of the works are didactic, and ‘most education was conducted in Latin throughout the European Middle Ages,’ (15) Although Adams does reference Chaucer’s Astrolabe as an obvious example of non-fiction for children, she says that ‘neither space nor the limits of my investigation to date permit addressing the possibility of Medieval children’s literature in the vernacular.”  She contends that more work needs to be done in this field to connect vernacular work directly with children. I wonder if similar studies of works in the vernacular might not yield more conclusive evidence, just because language, style and content would make classification both easier and obvious.

In conclusion Adams says that she hopes ‘to counter the current wave of ahistoricism among some scholars – blind to the fact that like readers at the end of the middle ages, we face a radical transformation in both the way that words are transmitted and the way that children are constructed.’

What I think she means by this is that since we in the present are undergoing a ‘radical transformation’ then we should be sensitive to similar transformations in the past, and, rather than let that transformation narrow our definition of children’s literature was, or is, that our awareness of and sensitivity to, a continuum of change, should allow for some inclusion.