Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture

Abstract

"Master-Servant Childhood" offers a new understanding of childhood in the Middle Ages as a form of master-servant relation embedded in an ancient sense of time as a correspondence between earthly change and eternal order. It challenges the misnomer that children were 'little adults' in the Middle Ages and corrects the prevalent misconceptions that childhood was unimportant, unrecognized or disregarded. The book argues for the value of studying childhood as a structure of thought and feeling and as an important avenue for exploring large scale historical changes in our sense of what it is to be and become human