The History of Childhood. The Master Work Series. First Softcover Edition

Possibly the heartless treatment of children, from the practice of infanticide and abandonment through to the neglect, the rigors of swaddling, the purposeful starving, the beatings, the solitary confinement, and so on, was and is only one aspect of the basic aggressiveness and cruelty of human nature, of the inbred disregard of the rights and feelings of others. Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly unconscious motives of their elders. . . The present volume abounds in evidence of all kinds, from all periods and peoples. The story is monotonously painful, but it is high time that it should be told and that it should be taken into account. . . "Brilliant . . . bold . . . challenging . . . heavily documented." —The New York Review Of Books "Crucial in understanding how the wounded child is archetypal of our time." —John Bradshaw "Neither history nor psychiatry can ever be the same again. A turning point in the integration of the social sciences." —Reuben Fine, Ph.D. "Lloyd deMause is probably the first scholar who has made a thorough study of the history of childhood without glossing over the facts." —Alice Miller Lloyd DeMause has made major contributions to the study of Psychohistory which is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It seeks to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. Its subject matter is childhood and the family (especially child abuse), and psychological studies of anthropology and ethnology. In a 1994 interview with deMause in The New Yorker, the interviewer wrote: "To buy into psychohistory, you have to subscribe to some fairly woolly assumptions [...], for instance, that a nations's child-rearing techniques affect its foreign policy". The history of childhood is of major importance to any study of human society. This book reviews systematically the attitudes and practices of parents toward their children in different Western cultures and time periods. The chapters of the book are: (1) "The Evolution of Childhood" (Lloyd deMause); (2) "Barbarism and Religion: Late Roman and Early Medieval Childhood" (Richard B. Lyman, Jr.); (3) "Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries" (Mary Martin McLaughlin); (4) "The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century" (James Bruce Ross); (5) The Child as Beginning and End: Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century English Childhood" (M. J. Tucker); (6) "Nature versus Nature: Patterns and Trends in Seventeenth-Century French Child-Rearing" (Elizabeth Wirth Marvick); (7) "Child-Rearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America" (Joseph E. Illick); (8) "A Period of Ambivalence: Eighteenth-Century American Childhood" (John F. Walzer); (9) "'That Enemy Is the Baby': Childhood in Imperial Russia" (Patrick P. Dunn); and (10) "Home as a Nest: Middle Class Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Europe" (Priscilla Robertson). Each article contains references. (HTH) from the Foreword: Possibly the heartless treatment of children, from the practice of infanticide and abandonment through to the neglect, the rigors of swaddling, the purposeful starving, the beatings, the solitary confinement, and so on, was and is only one aspect of the basic aggressiveness and cruelty of human nature, of the inbred disregard of the rights and feelings of others. Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly unconscious motives of their elders... The present volume abounds in evidence of all kinds, from all periods and peoples. The story is monotonously painful, but it is high time that it should be told and that it should be taken into account... Cover 1 Title Page 2 Copyright Page 3 Table of Contents 4 Foreword 6 Editor's Preface 8 Contributors 9 1: The Evolution of Childhood 10 2: Barbarism and Religion: Late Roman and Early Medieval Childhood 84 3: Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries 110 4: The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century 192 5: The Child as Beginning and End: Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century English Childhood 238 6: Nature Versus Nurture: Patterns and Trends in Seventeenth-Century French Child-Rearing 268 7: Child-Rearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America 312 8: A Period of Ambivalence: Eighteenth- Century American Childhood 360 9: "That Enemy Is the Baby": Childhood in Imperial Russia 392 10: Home As a Nest: Middle Class Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Europe 416 Index 441 Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly unconscious motives of their elders. This work includes evidence on this topic from various periods and people. A survey of childhood that reveals startling views of life in Europe and America during the past 2000 years. This book documents the lives of former children who were abused. It places child abuse today into the context of what was routinely inflicted upon Lloyd Demause, Editor. Originally Published: New York : Psychohistory Press, 1974. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.