::: readings

Paula Fass, “Children and Globalization” in Children of a New World (2007), 202-218 (707-715).

Looking into the effects of globalization on childhood, Fass explores an oft-overlooked aspect of history, the history of children. Interestingly enough, advertisements have not overlooked the effects one’s perceptions of childhood have on individuals, and contintually capatalize on both sides of the coin–the one on feeding consumerism by training kids to want and parents to give, and the other by showing images of the world’s destitute and poor children as they ask for humanitarian support.

I would categorize this under

• Childhood and youth
• Categories of Difference
• and Law, Church, and State

here are some quotes from the text:

“there are startling images that confront us regularly now as the economy becomes a global network and as our means to communicate information penetrates into and out of every village and hamlet” (202).

“It is my hope that an understanding of children’s hisotry will help to make discussions of globalization both more realistic, since many children are and will be affected and more attuned to the peculiar Western sentiments that are evoked in the media’s voverare of the conflicts over globalization.” (202)

“Children are everywhere present in this debate, but never heard from or addressed.” (202)

“In this new system of values and beleive, the child was important not for what he or she could contribute economically, but for the emotional satisfaction hsi cultivation could provide to the family.

“But since the neinteenth century for young people in the West, play has been identified not as time stole from work, but as the very structure of childhood.” (211)

“If children’s work will, as I have suggested, increasingly become a subjet of contention globnally, we can expect that play will become probably an even greater flash point.” (212)

“As a result, in the United States, adolescence became an extension of childhood rather than a preparation for adulthood, although its in-between status was meant to suggest how one could unfold into the other.” (213)

Raffaella Sarti, “Home and Family: Bringing Things Together or Setting Up Home” in Europe at Home (2002), 42-75 (407-423).

Deciding how to organize one’s family, and especially how this would play out as families became more nuclear and the number of possessions grew, is an interesting topic and the one that Sarti decides to explore in this article.

Many factors contribute to the differences between individuals in how this process plays out, among them: class, demographics, socio-economic organization of the area, andd so.

Sarti notes that there were those who could never safe up enough to get married. This brings up some interesting points, highlight both a later age for marriage now that individauls were saving up to get married as well as the growth in those who never got married.

One of the complaints about “privledge” in Europe during this time was that with privledge came obligations to marry others of similar social class. This limiting met with resistence among some young couples but held a substantial amount of social pressure and ultimately would not be overthrown at large.

Sarti also describes the changes in women’s doweries during this time.

Monica Chojnacka and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Ages of Women, Ages of Man (2002): “Regulation of Teachers” and  “The day of a university student” (44-47), “Regulations of a city brothel” (61-62), “Battle for the Pants” (140), “A widow reflects on her life” (272-274).

Regulation of Teachers

Students were forbidden to marry as long as they remained students.

Mandatory attendance at Church services throughout the week.

Daily schedule of a student to include lectures and reviews.

Blasphemy specifically outlawed

Regulations of a city brothel

Human trafficking is not new, sadly, to today but was practiced then as well.

“In past times and still today wanton knaves often take women and daughters from other areas and put them in or sell them to the city brothel. Then such persons are kept in the brothel against their will by the brother manager and his wife, so that they can not leave the brothel, although some of them would willingly turn away [from this life] and do penance” (61).

Battle for the Pants

Obviously there were concerns that some women were too “uppity” and would take control of the family when this was seen as the man’s role.

A widow reflects on her life

In this piece, the widow who has not taken refuge in a convent is remembering and immortalizing her husband’s goodness and hoping to pass this on their her children

Mary Hartman, “Marrying Early and Marrying Late” in The Household and the Making of History (2004), 34-69.

Hartman focuses in the both the beginning and the end of this chapter on the interesting understanding one can gain by reading between the lines of Thomas More’s Utopia. In response to this work Hartman writes:

“Yet while practices outside household in Utopia have been recognized as responses to actual sixteenth-century social ills, commentators have not attempted to analyze in the same way the households More fashioned. His multifamily residences, with each Utopian bride moving into an existing household headed by the eldest man in the groom’s family, were hardly common in England save in the upper classes. Most English households, as More well know, had but one married couple in residence. True, Utopian couples were closer in age than those in most early-marriage societies, and in this regard they resembled English ones. But the obsequious handmaidens of Utopia would never be confuse with the spirited and aggressive mistresses of real English households.”

She then goes on, continuing:

“Just as his portrait of Utopian life beyond households is recognized as More’s critique of English society, Utopian domestic arrangements need to be seen as a critique of English society, Utopian domestic arrangements need to be seen as a critique of actual English households. That More showed such exquisite care in devising a stable, almost static, household system as the foundation of all other institutions in Utopia was no accident. He obviously recognized that the single-family households that dominated in England were rather precarious. In Utopia, More could expressly invent laws and customs to shore up households. Better still, he could supply the base of enduring multifamily residences that functioned like those in more typical early-marriage societies, where adult sons stayed put from one generation to the next. He could also control disruptive demographic growth by holding population constant in each town” (37).

Perhaps one of Hartman’s most unique and insightful point is that all of the literature of this time that was against women was in reaction to the strengthening power of women in the household. If men didn’t feel threatened, she reasons, why would they employ societal pressures so pervasively to reinforce gender roles that degraded women?

“Scholars long took this pervasive misogyny for granted. Only with the rise of women’s history have they noted that women at this time were widely perceived to be gaining the upper hand within households” (38).

She points out that the obligations of both sexes began to be more similar than different, and as a result the power structure of male dominance began to be threatened in the perception of many men.

“By the sixteenth century, the experience of the sexes overlapped even more. A recent study of early modern England, for example, argues convincingly that outside the rands of the elite, there was considerable congruity between the childhoods of girls and boys. At leas up to the age of ten, ordinary laborer and small farming households devoted the same resources to daughters and sons. Also, until they went into service in the early teens, children of both sexes were educated at home” (50).

and later concludes:

“The economic contributions of young women and men as single laborers over many centuries have finally begun to be reckoned in this long period of semifreedom, or semidependency, peculiar to the northwestern European life cycle. Yet much remains to be sorted out in the chain of causes and consequences of late marriage. Not only do we not know why people married late in the first place, we understand too little about the effects on consciousness and behavior as an entire society early came to the terms with a resulting loosening of the bonds of kinship that in so any other places continued to hold the generations of peasants together, often quite literally in the same place” (57).

Commenting on the changes in sexual behavior necessitated by this change in marriage patterns, Hartman states:

“What set northwestern Europe apart was thus far more significant than sexual repression from the outside. It was instead the painful, protracted coming to terms with a new sexual order altogether, one in which real control over young women’s and men’s sexuality was ceasing to reside with the older generation, and especially with male elders acting in the larger service of family property and name. wile church, state, and local community played a part in channeling youthful sexuality, and still do, what is striking about this region in the early modern era is its adjustment to the peculiar freedoms and constraints of distinctive family structures that obliged young women and men alike to assume responsibility for their own sexual behavior” (62).

She concludes the chapter where she began, commenting on the social commentary of Thomas More’s Utopia:

“All this brings up back to Sir Thomas More, whose implied criticisms of English households in Utopia speak to shortcomings of the dominant family regime from the viewpoint of a concerned head of state trying to ensure stability in the polity, as well as of a troubled head of household trying to secure wifely obedience at home. The family arrangements More ordained for Utopia can now be recognized as those of any early-marriage regime, but with an important qualification. While mandating large multifamily households, he retained what is being argued here as the chief feature of northwestern European family arrangements, namely, later marriage for women” (68).

and continues,

“It all worked in Utopia, but only because More said so. In real life, later marriage for women appears to have been exactly what made women so uppity in the first place — and, for that matter, families so unstable, youth so unchaste, and much else that troubled him. It appears that despite his weakness for somewhat later, companionate marriage, More recognized causal links between household structures and behavior within and beyond households. In any case, his perception in these matters was keener than that of most commentators, then or since” (69).

Michael Psellos, “A Brief Biography of Michael Psellos” and “The Court Memorandum” from Anthanoy Kaldellis, Morthers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters: The Byzantine Family of Michael Psellos (2006), 3-9, 139-156.

“As is clear from this short summary of its contents, the memorandum is an important witness to several features of Byzantine society in the eleventh century. First of all, the report documents an instance of both adoption and engagement and then proceeds to give a detailed account of a prenuptial contract and dowry. It also documents the sale of honorific titles and provides and example of the salaries that these titles often drew from imperial treasure. Evidence for the procedure, jurisdiction, and identity of a civil court is also apparent, as well as information regarding the creation and form of legal documents” (141).

From the Text

“It is indeed wise and to some degree near to the Divine to foresee the future so that we experience it as present and make good use of our circumstances. But being human and not possessing the knowledge of future events, we miscalculate and stumble into many unintentional situations” (148).

“Being a man of intelligence, he was well aware that human affairs are not static and that what appears to be stable is really in motion and evolving, which is something many do not realize” (149)

Rob Lutton, “Godparenthood, Kinship and Piety in Tenterden, England, 1449-1537″ in Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller and Sarah Rees Jones, Love, Marriage and Family Ties in the Middle Ages (2003), 217-34. (145-154).

In this piece, Rob Lutton asks the questions: “What was godparenthood for, how and why was it used, and what was its relationship to family and kinship? Were the relationships created through baptism and other Christian rites considered as part and parcel of relationships within and beyond the nuclear family, which were bounded by blood and marriage, or were they thought of as something quite different. What bearing did godparenthood have upon the transmission of material, social, and cultural resources between individuals, households, and the generations?” (217)

While admitting that it “was essentially a religious and moral institution which was viewed, whatever its social application, in spiritual and pious terms,” Lutton puts forth the argument that “Godparenthood’s social efficacy lay in its ability to create a ”polyadic horizontal coalition’, a kinship-group, partly natural and partly artificial’, made up of ties between parents and godparents and between godchildren and their ritual kin and sponsors” (218) He goes on to later highlight the symbolic parallelism of the corporal verses spiritual roles as defined under godparenthood between the parents and the godparents, citing that in some Mediterranean societies it was believed that “godparents imparted moral character, complementary to the physical character imparted by parents,” with the ultimate effect being that ideally “godparenthood serves to mitigate the tensions and conflicts involved in the process of household dissolution and formation” (219).

After citing a number of statistics with corresponding graphs of details gleamed from the analysis of wills in the city of Tenterden, England, Lutton writes: “Some have concluded that godparents were not chosen from among the child’s kin in late medieval England. However, the evidence from Tenterden and at least one other centre indicates that there was a significant correlation between natural and spiritual kinship” (225).

One of the more interesting finding proposed by Lutton’s work is the role godparents played in helping children become independent from their parents as they sought to establish their own households. He writes:

“Cases such as this suggest that one of the primary concerns for godparents who left their spiritual kin gifts in their wills was to assist them in marriage and to help them become established economically and domestically in independence from their conjugal families and households. Although this purpose was not usually articulated it is reasonable to assume that this formed the major element of the rationale behind gifts, which are best interpreted in terms of the ideological basis of godparenthood as defined by Pitt-Rivers, that is, to assist in the fulfillment of the individual child’s personal destiny, especially in the establishment of his or her own nuclear family. this transition meant the dissolution of the conjugal family and, therefore, in supporting the child, godparents took the part of anti- or co-parents.” (226-7)

In further support of his claim that godparents served important roles in serving as anti- or co-parents, Lutton cites the crucial need for a larger network of support at crucial times in the life of a family, such as births, marriages, and deaths.

“The importance of godparenthood would have varied over time and may have been greatest at key moments in the complex family histories which could be created by death and remarriage. In times of crisis, which came often when mortality rates were high, kin ties could be strengthened, in the words of Miranda Chaytor, ‘to a point where the distinction between the conjugal unit and the wider kinship system was virtually eroded.’ Active kinship bonds between families joined by marriage, whilst providing a degree of stability and continuity to family relations through crises of mortality and economic hardship, may also have worked to bring a greater degree of coherence and continuity to a household piety. It was a common experience to lose a parent in childhood or adolescence, and at such times relatives had a greater influence over the nuclear family. Collaterals would have been especially significant during these crises, and godparenthood may have further strengthened their influence over young relatives” (222-3).

Lutton concludes:

“Godparenthood as represented in Tenterden and Wealden wills appears to have been invested with a dual nature in the sense conceived of by Gudeman, in that it was distinct from other types of relationship, due to its essentially spiritual and moral nature, but could vary in intensity and social application in terms of whether it overlay existing kinship bonds or the extent to which it could be used to strengthen alliances created through marriage, for example…

Finally, godparents played an important, although as yet little investigated, role in the spiritual, moral, and social education of the young. Spiritual kinship may well have strengthened multi-generation continuities in piety and helped to forge and maintain social and ethnic identities, particularly through the influence of collaterals. Any discussion of the mechanisms and dynamics of cultural transmission in this period should consider godparenthood as a particular and essential aspect of relations of family and kinship” (234).

My Thoughts:

Understanding the importance of having a ‘polyadic horizontal coalition,’ that is, a kinship-group, to support and aid one in times of transitions is essential to any complete understanding of society in the medieval time period. Today, there are any number of ways that individuals make these transitions that have replaced the roles that godparenting played, but we cannot let this modern development hinder our ability to understand and appreciate what was. Lutton argument is convincing and fits with what else we have studied.

My Questions:

What I would like to know at this point is how godparenthood differed across the Hajnal line, and what effects a later age of marriage had on the relationships between godparent and their godchild.