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 "A valuable contribution." -- American Historical Review
Beginning in the early thirteenth century, the burial of a child became an event of dramatic consequence. Child death took on a symbolic power, with great concern expressed over the fate of the body. William F. MacLehose follows the evolution of this social anxiety during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an anxiety focused on images of children's vulnerability and susceptibility to external threats.
Employing a wide range of sources, including historical chronicles, medical writings, Marian legends, hagiography, and popular theological texts, MacLehose advances four important discussions of childhood that directly link fragility with other sources of cultural anxiety: medical writers who began to articulate an increasingly paradoxical view of women's bodily fluids milk and menstrual blood; as simultaneously essential and potentially fatal to the survival of the fetus and the newborn; doctrinal debates on the fate of children who died before baptism; accusations against Jews, who were charged with the ritual murder of Christian children; and the so-called Children's Crusade of 1212, which was justified on the basis that corruption was an inevitable part of a child's growth.
William F. MacLehose works on the connections between medical, natural philosophical, and religious thought in Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
His research emphasizes the transformations within medical knowledge as the medieval west rediscovered the Hippocratic-Galenic traditions via the Arabic world. His primary interest lies in the importance of childhood as a source of interest and concern within medieval society as reflected in the fields of embryology, obstetrics, and pediatrics.
Read "A Tender Age": Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries Online
Author: William F. MacLehose
Publisher: Columbia University Press (February 10, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0231503709
ISBN-13: 978-0231503709
INTRODUCTION
In 1203, a long-standing quarrel between two powerful local lords in central France erupted in a startling incident of aggression that was both actual and symbolic. Peter of Courtenay, count of Nevers and Auxerre, had for some time attempted to assert jurisdiction over land held by the bishop of Auxerre, Hugh of Noyers. Tension rose between the two authorities until Peter ravaged a church under Hugh's protection and blinded one of the bishop's vassals.
As a result, the bishop excommunicated the count and placed his lands under interdict, allowing no services except baptism for infants and last rites for the dying. The incident would have been simply one of many tense interactions between episcopal and secular authority in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had Peter not responded in a manner that shocked his contemporaries.
While Peter was residing at Auxerre, a child died but, because the interdict was in effect, could not receive a burial in consecrated ground. The mother, distraught by her inability to bury her child properly, turned to the secular authorities for help. According to a chronicle of the bishops of Auxerre, Count Peter, "stirred up by the persistent shouting and tears of the child's mother, had [the body] buried in the bishop's very bedchamber, before the bed of the lord bishop, in reproach against him and in contempt of God. ...
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