An investigation into a variety of texts providing guidance for teachers, parents, and children themselves. The question and procedures of integrating children into wider society during the medieval and early modern period are debated across a wide range of contemporary texts, in both print and manuscript form. This study takes as its focus the ways in which vernacular literature (including English courtesy poems, incunabula and sixteenth-century printed household books, grammar school statutes, and pedagogic books) provided a guide to socialising children. Theauthor examines how the transmission and reception of this literature, showing how patterns of thought changed during the period for parents, teachers, and young people alike; and places children and family reading networks into the context of debates on the history of childhood, and the history of the book. Merridee L. Bailey is a social and cultural historian of late medieval and early modern England. She is an Associate Member of the Facultyof History, University of Oxford.
Reviews
A very useable overview and well-thought-out interpretation of a large corpus of texts very important to the history of English literature and elite culture. * SPECULUM *
This is an excellent continuation of the recent interest in the history of the child. ... A well-researched and solidly argued study. * MEDIAEVISTIK 26 *
Bailey's mastery of the didactic and proscriptive texts she has studied is exhaustive and commendable, made even more impressive by the sheer number of manuscripts and incunabula she consulted. * AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW *
[The author's] comprehensive research provides a foundation for future scholars to work in a rich field that rewards close analysis. * MEDIUM AEVUM *
Offers important new ways of understanding the construction of late medieval and early modern society from childhood into adulthood. * PARERGON *
An important study of continuities and shifts in the literature that shaped children and attitudes toward children and young people in Late Medieval and sixteenth-century England. * CHILDHOOD IN THE PAST *
[M]akes a number of significant contributions to the existing historiography. [...] a well-researched and thoughtfully argued monograph which I hope receives significant attention from social and cultural historians of late medieval and early modern England. * REVIEWS IN HISTORY *



Book Information
ISBN 9781903153420
Author Merridee L. Bailey
Format Hardback
Page Count 284
Imprint York Medieval Press
Publisher York Medieval Press
Weight(grams) 624g