Childhood and Gender in Later Medieval England

Following Philippe Ariès, scholarship on medieval children has focused not on childhood per se but on parent-child relations, seeking to show these either in positive or in negative terms. This article attempts to understand childhood and the ways boys and girls were socialized into their respective genders in later medieval England without privileging the parent-child nexus. It also engages with work by James Schultz on the vocabulary used to designate children by looking at Middle English usage, and work by Barbara Hanawalt on fatal childhood accidents recorded in coroners’ rolls. The article explores the fragility of the statistical findings from coroners’ rolls before going on to explore the same source qualitatively. In particular it considers play, a particular characteristic of childhood, and interactions between siblings and peers. Girls may have learned nurturing roles from an early age, but parental interaction seems have been limited and benign neglect was perhaps fairly normal.