Dervin on Medieval Childhood

When Dan Dervin turns his most talented hand from examining contemporary American culture and politics, his usual beat, to the history of childhood in late antiquity and the early Christian era, it is cause for considerable interest and anticipation.

I think he’s right to begin his essay by citing authorities such as Boswell and deMause, especially because an article by Boswell on the practice of oblation, published in The American Historical Review several years ago, called for historians to more seriously consider deMause’s childhood history work.

Dervin argues from the few documents available that some kind of softening took place in attitudes toward children despite beatings, other harsh punishments, and childhood abandonment—the latter amounting to between twenty and forty percent of all children, according to Boswell’s figures. Nor does Dervin deal particularly with the issue of the large number of infanticides almost certainly also taking place in the period.

Some new and softer attitudes toward children were clearly abroad at the time and the appearance of ambivalent feeling towards children must have signaled a positive shift in their treatment. Relying on sources such as St. John Chrysostom is inevitable for any scholar of the period but necessarily begs the question as to what was actually being done to children as opposed to what was being suggested should be done to them. Still, sources are scarce and evidence such as Chrysostom, as well as the words of the early church fathers and Augustine, cannot be dismissed out of hand. I very much like the way Dervin brings in the traditional historical argument that outside forces do play a role in changing consciousness and behaviors and are not mere reflections of psychological changes already having taken place.

This is especially evident in his introduction of “real world” economic issues when he points out, for example, that necessary “sweat-of-the-brow labor,” child labor and apprenticeship “may have cut short childhood but did not disregard children per se.” (These reality factors are too often ignored by psychological historians focusing almost exclusively on inner psychodynamic processes.) The essay’s implicit and explicit reminders that the history of childhood is really quite complex and nuanced— what we intuitively understood all along—is a welcome addition to the literature.

More problematic to me is the introduction of documents from a later era to argue points made for earlier time periods, as for example, with the invocation of Anselm of Canterbury, Aquinas, and Dante in an essay on the early Christian centuries, although I’m aware that Dervin is using them to draw comparisons and contrasts to highlight those earlier points.

The essay takes on special psychohistorical substance for me when Dervin moves into the region of trauma and disguised and symbolic memories of child abuse. Provocative notions such as Michael Grant’s blunt pronouncement that the Murder of the Innocents “is invented,” (apparently largely confirmed by the conservative New Catholic Encyclopedia), and Dervin’s several subsequent and stimulating paragraphs at making psychological sense of the original myth and its persistence are for me the essay’s high points. It’s here where a detailed and complex give and take—more than can be provided here—will doubtless sharpen and enrich our understanding. As Dervin puts it so aptly in the essay’s last sentences, “traumas centering on separation and abuse….gain conscious representation and survive through dubious historical displacements…[and] can neither be assimilated… nor safely repressed and laid to rest,” confirming yet again what psychological historians have repeatedly found (need it be said again?) whatever their particular subject or time period.

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