Drawing on art history, literary studies and social history, the essays in this volume explore a range of intersections between gender and constructions of childhood in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, England, France and Spain. The essays are grouped around the themes of celebration and loss, education and social training, growing up and growing old. Contributors grapple with ways in which constructions of childhood were inflected by considerations of gender throughout the early modern world. In so doing, they examine representations of children and childhood in a range of sources from the period, from paintings and poetry to legal records and personal correspondence. The volume sheds light on some of the ways in which, in the relations between Renaissance children and their parents and peers, gender mattered. Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood enriches our understanding of individual children and the nature of familial relations in the early modern period, as well as of the relevance of gender to constructions of self and society.

Drawing on history, literature, and art to explore childhood in early modern Spain, the contributors to this collection argue that early modern Spaniards conceptualized childhood as a distinct and discrete stage in life which necessitated special care and concern. The volume contrasts the didactic use of art and literature with historical accounts of actual children, and analyzes children in a wide range of contexts including the royal court, the noble family, and orphanages. The volume explores several interrelated questions that challenge both scholars of Spain and scholars specializing in childhood. How did early modern Spaniards perceive childhood? In what framework (literary, artistic) did they think about their children, and how did they visualize those children’s roles within the family and society? How do gender and literary genres intersect with this concept of childhood? How did ideas about childhood shape parenting, parents, and adult life in early modern Spain? How did theories about children and childhood interact with the actual experiences of children and their parents? The group of international scholars contributing to this book have developed a variety of creative, interdisciplinary approaches to uncover children’s lives, the role of children within the larger family, adult perceptions of childhood, images of children and childhood in art and literature, and the ways in which children and childhood were vulnerable and in need of protection. Studying children uncovers previously hidden aspects of Spanish history and allows the contributors to analyze the ideals and goals of Spanish culture, the inner dynamics of the Habsburg court, and the vulnerabilities and weaknesses that Spanish society fought to overcome.

Building on recent critical work, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of the nature and forms of medieval and early modern childhoods, viewed through literary cultures. Its five groups of thematic essays range across a spectrum of disciplines, periods, and locations, from cultural anthropology and folklore to performance studies and the history of science, and from Anglo-Saxon burial sites to colonial America. Contributors include several renowned writers for children. The opening group of essays, Educating Children, explores what is perhaps the most powerful social engine for the shaping of a child. Performing Childhood addresses children at work and the role of play in the development of social imitation and learning. Literatures of Childhood examines texts written for children that reveal alternative conceptions of parent/child relations. In Legacies of Childhood, expressions of grief at the loss of a child offer a window into the family’s conceptions and values. Finally, Fictionalizing Literary Cultures for Children considers the real, material child versus the fantasy of the child as a subject.

This edited collection examines different aspects of the experience and significance of childhood, youth and family relations in minority religious groups in north-west Europe in the late medieval, Reformation and post-Reformation era. It aims to take a comparative approach, including chapters on Protestant, Catholic and Jewish communities. The chapters are organised into themed sections, on 'Childhood, religious practice and minority status', 'Family and responses to persecution', and 'Religious division and the family: co-operation and conflict'. Contributors to the volume consider issues such as religious conversion, the impact of persecution on childhood and family life, emotion and affectivity, the role of childhood and memory, state intervention in children's religious upbringing, the impact of confessionally mixed marriages, persecution and co-existence. Some chapters focus on one confessional group, whilst others make comparisons between them.

In this volume, the author argues that blood was, crucially, a means by which dramatists negotiated shifting contours of domesticity in 16th and 17th century England. Early modern English drama vividly addressed contemporary debates over an expanding idea of "the domestic," which encompassed the domus as well as sex, parenthood, household order, the relationship between home and state, and the connections between family honor and national identity. The author contends that the domestic ideology expressed by theatrical depictions of marriage and household order is one built on the simultaneous familiarity and violence inherent to blood. The theatrical relation between blood and home is far more intricate than the idealized language of the familial bloodline; the home was itself a bloody place, with domestic bloodstains signifying a range of experiences including religious worship, sex, murder, birth, healing, and holy justice. Focusing on four bleeding figures—the Bleeding Bride, Bleeding Husband, Bleeding Child, and Bleeding Patient—the author argues that the household blood of the early modern stage not only expressed the violence and conflict occasioned by domestic ideology, but also established the home as a site that alternately reified and challenged patriarchal authority.

In its six case studies, The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France works out a model for (early modern) gender, which is articulated in the introduction. The book comprises essays on the construction of women: three in texts by male and three by female writers, including Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, in the first part; La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné, in the second. These studies thus also take up different genres: satire, tragedy and treatise; memoir, novella and letter-writing. Since gender is a relational construct, each chapter considers as well specific textual and contextual representations of men. In every instance, Stanton looks for signs of conformity to-and deviations from-normative gender scripts. The Dynamics of Gender adds a new dimension to early modern French literary and cultural studies: it incorporates a dynamic (shifting) theory of gender, and it engages both contemporary critical theory and literary historical readings of primary texts and established concepts in the field. This book emphasizes the central importance of historical context and close reading from a feminist perspective, which it also interrogates as a practice. The Afterword examines some of the meanings of reading-as-a-feminist.

This book is a study of children, their books and their reading experiences in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain. It argues for the importance of reading to early modern childhood and of childhood to early modern reading cultures by drawing together the fields of childhood studies, early modern literature and the history of reading. Analysing literary representations of children as readers in a range of genres (including ABCs, prayer books, religious narratives, romance, anthologies, school books, drama, translations and autobiography) alongside evidence of the reading experiences of those defined as children in the period, it explores the production of different categories of child readers. Focusing on the ‘good child’ reader, the youth as consumer, ways of reading as a boy and as a girl, and the retrospective recollection of childhood reading, it sheds new light on the ways in which childhood and reading were understood and experienced in the period.