Download PDF | Matthew Koval - Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050-1300)_ Constructions and Realities in a European Context-Brill (2021).
230 Pages
Introduction
When early chronicler of medieval Poland, Gallus Anonymus, compared Polish duke Bolesław Chrobry’s treatment of recalcitrant nobles to a kind father correcting his misbehaving children while washing them in a bath,1 there was no known conscious intention to provide later scholars with information about the treatment and perception of childhood and children in medieval Poland. Indeed, writing about social categories and age groups generally is an interest of contemporary historians, and certainly not a goal of those of the pre-modern past.
As the historiographical discussion below will illustrate, the explosion of interest in the topic of childhood specifically stands in contrast to the seeming lack of medieval interest in the topic as such. It would be deceiving, however, to conclude that the next generation was not on the minds of medieval people. Inheritance, education, lineage, naming, and much else besides of importance was intimately connected to young age. Even when children as embodied beings were not themselves of interest, the whole concept of the life cycle and age was and remains a fundamental guiding concept in human societies.2
Therefore, children and childhood are a fundamental building block of human society and a necessary part in understanding it. This book will focus on perceptions of childhood in medieval Polish history from a period when Poland was transitioning from a pre-Christian collection of disparate peoples into a Christian kingdom, namely from 1000 to 1300. This places it alongside the Czech lands, Hungary, and Scandinavia as a sort of borderland of Europe, all in the same processes of Europeanization, and scholars have produced much literature comparing phenomena in these borderlands of Europe to each other, as well as to the “core” countries of France, England, Italy the Low Countries, and western Germany.3
This makes Poland of this time period an excellent candidate for the kinds of discoveries that come from comparison. As an additional motivation, the Polish sources of this time, while few, are in a number of ways highly unique. Not only are there unusual sources such as Gallus Anonymus’ twelfth century Gesta or the twelfth through early fourteenth century Henryków Book, produced by Cistercians monastics in Silesia, but there are also a series of saints’ lives written about elite women from this era. Sources like these need to be brought into the general discussion of childhood in Europe. The downsides of focusing on this time and region are, of course, the general lack of sources in number.
This might lead one to conclude that scholars can only reconstruct an incomplete image of the meaning childhood for this region. The reality is, however, that, as we will see in later chapters, even sources that are very close together in time often betray strikingly different purposes for and illustrations of children. In other words, there is not necessarily one monolithic “childhood” to reconstruct, anyway, but many different childhoods.4
In fact, this is the real purpose of my book, namely to show the value not of trying to reconstruct some whole societal vision of an age category, but to show how images of children and childhood are best understood within the context of the purposes of texts themselves. Children are not simply narrative chaff, a disposable note at the margins of larger stories, but are often right at the heart of the themes and goals of the writers. We cannot just read stories of children as “unwitting evidence,” having no real place in the minds and imaginations of past peoples, as has been argued, as we will see below, from Philippe Ariès in the past to James Schultz more recently, but instead we must first carefully analyze their place within their contexts, and then we can begin to evaluate whether we can detect more general themes and mindsets about children. This is precisely the method this book will employ.
Each chapter will examine children within a broader context of a source, and within that context show how children functioned within its argument and purpose, and then consider what impression this leaves of children and childhood. In the conclusion, I make broader conclusions across texts and sources about any common themes that emerge, and then put these in conversation with the situation in other parts of Europe. Through this whole process, I will argue that children and childhood, far from being unimportant or tangential, are often highly relevant even to sources that seem to have nothing to do with childhood.
Historiographical Context It is obligatory in all historiographical discussions of medieval childhood to begin with the 1960 publication of Philippe Ariès L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien regime. In this seminal work, Ariès challenged the traditional narrative that “the family constituted the ancient basis of our society, and that, starting in the eighteenth century, the progress of liberal individualism had shaken and weakened it.”5 Ariès was concerned that his contemporaries were imposing modern “common sense” categories on the past and assuming that the familylife prized by bourgeois culture was constant throughout time. Central to this traditional narrative was a phase of life called “childhood,” in which younger members of society were conceived of and treated as different from adults. Ariès questioned this notion by pointing out that “in the tenth century, artists were unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale. How did we come from that ignorance of childhood to the centering of the family around the child in the nineteenth century?”6 From an examination of mostly art historical sources, Ariès concluded in a chapter tellingly named “The discovery of childhood,” that “medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know about childhood or did not attempt to portray it. It is hard to believe that this neglect was due to incompetence or incapacity … it seems more probable that there was no place for childhood in the medieval world.”7 Along these lines, Ariès suggested that the origins of a more realistic and sensitive depiction of children appeared in medieval art only in the thirteenth century.
This “type” of the child, according to him, slowly became more similar to the modern artistic representation of children, though the modern type of childhood did not completely develop until well into the seventeenth century.8 Ariès went as far as to suggest that only by the thirteenth century did Christian societies really begin to realize that “that the child’s soul too was immortal” and begin to treat children as anything more than weaker, less valuable adults.9 Ariès’ idea that there was no place for children (as a separate social category) in medieval society has been thoroughly dismantled in recent decades. Nicholas Orme’s work collates and summarizes this transition in thought in his 2001 book, Medieval Children.10 Orme argued that Ariès’ evidence was insufficient to explore fully the issue of childhood as a social category, for he drew only from “paintings, sculpture, and a few (mainly literary) records of the fifteenth century.”11 In contrast, Orme points to a slew of scholars writing during the last two decades of the twentieth century in a number of disciplines (from archaeology, to sociology, to art history, to literary theory, etc.), all of whom successfully chipped away at Ariès’ thesis.
From this work, Orme heralds a new consensus that medieval “adults regarded childhood as a distinct phase or phases of life, that parents treated children like children as well as like adults, and that they did so with care and sympathy, and that children had cultural activities and possessions of their own.”12 Drawing mainly on literary and art historical evidence (without ignoring archaeology), Orme draws on a wide variety of sources—philosophical, religious, and medical texts, childhood songs, paintings, and toys—to show that there indeed existed a unique social role for children. How did we get from Ariès to Orme? In literary studies, Shahar Shalmuth, is recognized as one of the first scholars to question old paradigms about the role of children. One of her most famous examples concerns St. Ida of Louvain’s 13th century vision (as recorded in 14th century hagiography), where Ida helps St. Elisabeth bathe a rambunctious and playful young Jesus who liked to splash around in the tub. The Vision, as reproduced by Shahar reads, “he [Christ] made noise in the water by clapping his hands, and as children do, splashed in the water until it spilled out and wet all those around him.”13 For Shahar, this text, and many other similar texts, show that childhood indeed existed as a unique category for medieval people, and that there were certain behaviors associated with this state by adults. Nevertheless, Shahar can be accused of collapsing time and trying to reconstruct one late medieval version of “childhood” where in fact many “childhoods” existed during the long span of the Middle Ages and its various regions. An alternative the Shahar’s overly broad analysis over time and space is Barbara Hanawalt’s discussion of the meaning of the transition from childhood to adolescence in mostly late medieval London, which adds much of the age and gender nuance that Shahar lacks.14 Benefiting from a fortunate well of textual sources which this author can only behold with jealousy from the vantage point of medieval Poland (including her use of wills, apprenticeship contracts, manuals on child-rearing), Hanawalt tries to distinguish different stages of life for children (identifying apprenticeship as a key turning point in society’s view of a child) and examines to what extent wealth and gender altered conceptions of a child.
Hanawalt’s work shows the benefit of focusing on one region and time period. A more recent treatment of views of medieval childhood, and one to which this book is indebted in terms of method, is Phyllis Gaffney’s Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative, which mines Old French poetry, and especially such new forms as the chanson de geste and the romance, from 1100 to 1220 for tropes and images of children.15 Gaffney shows how different genres of French secular literature exhibit strikingly different portrayals of childhood. While the creation of a new genre may reflect a new conception of social categories in society, this is not necessarily the case. Significantly for this book, Gaffney examines how images of children work within the purposes of the text and within the context of age and gender paradigms and expectations. Despite the new enthusiasm for childhood, some scholars have urged caution, questioning whether references to the behavior of children actually allow us to access a coherent medieval view of childhood as a positive category, while others have suggested the evidence actually suggests a general devaluing of children and childhood. The most noted example of this concern is found in James Schultz’s The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages 1100–1350, in which courtly and chivalric poetry is combed for references to childhood. Schultz concludes from his study that children “knew that they were members of lineages but knew nothing of families in the modern sense … they knew that though their parents loved their offspring according to a law of nature, [but] as children per se they had little status.”16
In other words, children only had relevance to medieval Germans in relation to adult behavior, acts, concerns, and goals. Childhood, if it existed at all in people’s minds as a positive concept, was simply an expression of alterity and difference from adults. A more recent study by Patrick Joseph Ryan investigates how words and concepts related to children and childhood function within the social hierarchies, as expressed in medieval language, law, and literature.17 Ryan tries to reconstruct the discursive structures, metaphors, and connections of the medieval English worldview, while focusing especially on the evidence of linguistics, and concludes that the best parallel of the relationship between children and parents is that of the slave to the master. This conclusion does not negate emotional feelings towards children, nor does it imply that children were actually treated like slaves, but simply posits that young age had a particular place structurally within the wider hierarchies and expectations of the medieval worldview. While Ryan’s short study can be challenged for its oversimplification of an enormous body of evidence and for its adherence to dictionary definitions of words rather than examination of words in dynamic context, my research in this book suggests that the function of children within hierarchical dynasties as a conceptual theme does have some resonance with certain texts in Poland.
While the question of accessing childhood(s) remains a topic of debate, the past decade has shown the discussion is moving away from a critique of Ariès and has taken on a life of its own, as seen in a proliferation of collected editions of articles which bring new dimensions and topics to the conversation, from medieval emotions to regional customs and habits, as well as treating the methodological problems facing scholars interested in childhood, from the issue of sources to the problem of imposing modern social categories on the past. Most notably, various authors in Albrecht Classen’s Childhood in the Middle Age and the Renaissance betray a steady optimism about the potential of using a variety of sources to access childhood from legal records, hagiography, family manuals, inscriptions, art, and letters.18 Classen is convinced that this new wave of research has produced a “paradigm shift” in the way scholars understand past children.
A few years later, a prominent student of Anglo-Saxon childhood, Sally Crawford, published Children, Childhood, and Society, a collection of studies in which archaeological analysis was used in conjunction with textual evidence to discuss childhood from the Bronze Age in the Near East to the High Middle Ages in Europe, presenting childhood as a shifting social category that can be usefully compared across time.19 More relevant to my own research is Shannon Lewis-Simpson’s Youth and Old Age in the Medieval North, which contains a series of essays that, among other things, are concerned with establishing different stages of childhood in the medieval north, as well as exploring what social markers (such as initiation rituals and legal customs) marked off these stages.20 Last but not least is the magisterial Kindheit und Jugend, Ausbildung und Freizeit, the proceedings of a colloquium, which includes a series of short studies on childhood in the medieval north from Ireland to Russia, including five articles from Poland. These compare across regions a similar range of topics and provide an excellent foundation for comparative studies and conclusions.21 Jane Baxter describes an interesting archaeological parallel to the shifts in the discussion of children from Ariès to Orme.22 Initially, archaeologists regarded children as either insignificant to understanding a culture or labored under an uncritical acceptance of the modern constructions of childhood. This situation changed in 1989 when Grete Lillehammer published the first archaeological study of childhood.23 This seminal article “underscored the lack of consideration that children had received previously in archaeological interpretations despite ample evidence of children in the material record of the past.”24
Nevertheless, childhood has proved difficult to study archaeologically for two major reasons. First, as with discussions of children in texts, archaeologists have struggled with the realization that “childhood is a sociocultural construct that is shaped and formed,” which implies that archaeologists cannot assume too much about age categories and their characteristics in other cultures.25 The second challenge is the “perceived invisibility in the archaeological record” of child activity and children’s bodies.26 The archaeology of children has been influenced by approaches introduced for the study of gender, since traditional societies may have attempted to create gender roles for children through practice and ritual. However, children often appear to be treated (especially in mortuary contexts) in ways radically different from both male and female adults (though somewhat more similar to females), in other words, almost like a separate gender category.27 It is through this connection with gender that the archaeology of childhood has come to partake in “more sophisticated theoretical levels through associations with more general trends and emphases on identity and agency as important ways of understanding the archaeological record.”28 This has resulted in a new research paradigm where “identity in general and the overlapping constructions of age and gender specifically have been central in attempts to expand understandings of what childhood meant in different times and places.”29
The challenge for this book is to bring text and archaeology, two radically kinds of sources of information, in conversation with each other. John Moreland has noted a long history of skepticism and hesitation surrounding this endeavor, beginning with the 1950s and Christopher Hawkes famous “ladder,” which was interpreted as implying that archaeology was mostly useful for understanding technology and production, and not particularly adept at illuminating ideas and mentalities, which makes archaeology unsuitable for comparison with texts.30 Lewis Binford, on the other hand, with his processualist approach suggested that ideological elements could indeed be deciphered in archaeology, as they were encoded in the systems that archaeology studied, and indeed archaeology for Binford provided a more complete image of ideology than texts ever could.31 These assumptions were, in turn, challenged by those who critiqued the treatment of human action and intention as mindless processes endemic in the New Archaeology.32 Responses to this controversy ranged from attempts to decipher meaning in archaeology, including looking at the “biographies” of objects to determine how they expressed meaning in different contexts, to considering archaeology itself to be a “text” which can be “read” by the careful and informed scholar. These approaches are, of course, problematic because they assume that 21st-century researchers can truly understand and reconstruct past meanings, while also assuming that any object in the past bore only a singular meaning. Moreland concludes that while the search for one definitive meaning from archaeology may elude us, multiple perspectives, voices, and meanings of modern scholars will nevertheless create a useful and enriching conversation about the past.33
One of the methods by which patterns across modes of human expression, including archaeology, can be put into conversation is through the concept of metaphors, as expressed in Scott Ortman’s classic article, in which he argues that the human propensity to relate experience through metaphor allows for comparison and analysis of patterns, even when exact meaning cannot be reconstructed.34 In this book, metaphors and higher level relationships between concepts in archaeology and text will be related in that fashion. Before discussing the Polish historiography related to childhood, it is important to look at the Polish historiography of the Middle Ages, in general. The state of research in the field, its major research centers, and its topics of concern are described in detail in Ryszard Grzesik’s survey published in English in the yearbook of the Central European University.35 According to Grzesik, the major turning point in Polish medieval historiography was 1956, with the death of Stalin and the emergence of relative Polish independence within the Soviet sphere, rather than in 1989 with the fall of communism generally. Since the 1960s Polish medievalists have generally kept abreast of developments within western medieval studies, whether or not their own contributions were recognized outside their country.36 Instead, Polish historiography had been driven by cultural, political, and religious interests. The year 1966 was a momentous year in the evolution of Polish historiography and archaeology, as both state and church competed to further their narratives on the 1000 year anniversary of the conversion of Mieszko I and the entrance of Poland into the European Christian community of the Middle Ages. This year did not simply have ramifications for the church celebrating religious history, but also was the traditional date for the founding of the Polish state, and thus the anniversary sparked a renewed interesting in explaining the emergence of the Polish nation.37
Discussions of ethnicity, and the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, as well as their relationship to Germanic peoples both in pre-historic times and in the period of colonization in the High Middle Ages were also significant, as well as the recent attempts to critically analyze the major primary sources, especially their origins, transmission, and influences.38 More recently Polish medieval history has experienced its own “literary turn” with a significant proportion of these studies focused on the 12th century gesta of Gallus Anonymus. For example, Jarosław Nikodem writes about how Gallus portrays the weak and defective rulership (and fatherhood) of Władysław Herman compared to his glorious son Bolesław.39 Other Polish scholarship involved in this literary turn was translated into English and now informs a wider audience. For example, Przemysław Wiszewski analyzes Gallus in terms of his role in the construction of the Piast dynasty, its attempts at legitimizing itself, and its efforts to shape its image.40 Most significant for this book, Zbigniew Dalewski showed how Gallus Anonymus labored to turn a victim into a villain when he crafted his narrative so that Zbigniew appeared a grasping, dishonorable, untrustworthy character and thus almost deserved his horrific fate at the hands of his half-brother Bolesław III, which had shocked Polish popular opinion.41 In this book, Dalewksi revealed for all to see how Gallus was not a passive recorder of events, but instead a masterful shaper and weaver of stories for his own ends, and it is with just this in mind that this book will approach Gallus. In terms of childhood specifically, scholarship on medieval childhood in Poland has taken off in the 1990s at the same time as in western Europe.
One of the first forays into the topic was Beata Wojciechowska’s article on childhood in medieval culture.42 This pioneering work noted a number of trends that this book will expand upon and develop, such as the puer senex trope, the importance of education for children, and the special concern and care for children that appears in the miracula of the saints. On this foundation the study of childhood in Poland began to grow, until the year 2004, when, as signaled by two seminal publications, one might say, with only a hint of humor, that the field of childhood came of age in that country. First, Małgorzata Delimata published her book on childhood in medieval Poland, which remains a standard within the field.43 Delimata’s work takes a bird’s eye perspective to childhood in Poland, and tries to outline the reality of childhood from birth to youth in law, health, education and care. The legal status of children in various contexts is a special focus of this masterfully researched book. Also in 2004 a major collection of essays on childhood was published by Wojciich Dzieduszycki and Jacek Wrzesiński, which covered a number of issues regarding medieval and early modern times.44 These essays cover a wide range of mortuary topics across time, but in the medieval context discuss the anthropology of child bones, the description of child deaths in texts, the presence of various kinds of grave goods (such as painted eggs) within child graves and the placement of children within cemeteries. In 2013, a similar, yet smaller, collection appeared, edited by Paulina Romanowicz, focusing on a wide range of topics, with toys being the major topic of a number of chapters.45 It would be out of place not to mention here the work of Dorota Żoładż-Strzelczyk, particularly her book on childhood in “old Poland,” which, covers everything from childrens’ diets to the nature of their education and play to their depiction in art.46 Unfortunately, her work focuses on early modern Poland, from the fifteenth century onward, and therefore can only aid this book indirectly, namely by proving a perspective on how things “turn out” in the centuries after those covered in the following pages.
With all of this excellent historiography already published on childhood in Poland, what use is this project at hand? There are three essential, yet interrelated, justifications, which will be discussed in turn. First, due to the general paucity of sources for the time period covered by this book, namely 1000–1300, Polish scholars have tended to note this informational drought and, perhaps more wisely than the author of this book, have focused their efforts on the greener pastures of later centuries. No book exists solely for childhood in these three centuries as multiple books do for the later period. Nevertheless, there are sources from the early Piast period that are highly pertinent to any conversation about medieval childhood, and they merit fuller treatment than they have garnered. This is related to the second justification, namely that this book approaches the problem of childhood from the opposite angle from previous attempts on the problem in Poland. Instead of selecting sundry topics related to childhood and then mining the sources for information about these topics, this book takes each source as its own starting point, and winnows them to find what patterns and topics emerge. In this process, the sources themselves help to guide what themes will receive treatment. This is not some naive attempt to take sources at face value or to pretend that the bias of modern researchers will somehow magically not affect the nature of the discussion, but simply an attempt to find what medieval authors themselves have to say about children, and how they say it, and from this foundation make our analysis and conclusions.
This method of approaching childhood in the Middle Ages is itself rather innovative, and the closest parallel is in Phyllis Gaffney’s work mentioned above, for Gaffney also tries to tease out childhood and its construction from the context of each source, though the scope of my work and the nature of the sources examined covers a wider range of kinds of sources (such as archaeology) and topics (such as saintly children) than Gaffney’s. This book will enumerate a number of reasons why Poland has sources that are put in useful dialogue with Gaffney and with so many of the other scholars writing on this topic, and this leads to the final justification for it. The vast majority of the material written on childhood in Poland is in Polish, which, unfortunately, seems to remain impenetrable to most scholars outside that country. The introduction of the goldmine of the Polish material to the rest of the field will be a contribution in and of itself. Before continuing, two issues of content and scope must receive attention. First, the scope of years covered in this study might raise questions. After all, the Piast dynasty ruled Poland from the mythical days of before Mieszko I’s conversion in 966 to the death of Kazimierz the Great in 1370. This book, on the other hand, ends its investigation around the year 1300. Scholars will probably suspect, given this date range, an underlying chronological scheme relating to the concept of the “High Middle Ages,” often dated from 1000–1300,47 as well as a commitment to the concept of “Medieval Transformations” taking place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.48 The time span of 1000–1300, and especially the latter end of it, is thus associated with changes such as population growth, the spread of new agriculture, Christianization, colonization, the rise of new religious orders, the appearance of new architectural styles, and a whole array of other phenomena that shaped both eastern and western Europe, and as this book tries to compare eastern and western Europe, it will adopt this widely accepted framework within which to do this. This could still leave the question of if and to what extent this framework, often applied to other parts of Europe, is useful for Poland, though many scholars appear to answer in the affirmative.49 In terms of strictly political history, the early fourteenth century marks the end of the division of Poland into various regions by the Piast dynasty, and the creation of a more unified and organized society and state, which in itself suggests a natural stopping point for our study.
The second important issue to address is the choice of texts for inclusion into this study. Scholars will note that I chose to include all the major texts from the early Piast period in terms of chronicles and have done likewise with hagiography. Some notable texts have been excluded from this study due to questionable dating. For example, Kronika Wielkopolska (The Chronicle of Greater Poland), records Polish history up to 1273 from the perspective of this province and contains the first mention of a number of famous Polish legends, such as that of Lech, Czech, and Rus’. The problem with this text is that it was compiled through multiple editions, and this creates the situation where authorship for parts or all of the text is dated through the late thirteenth through late fourteenth centuries, with the latter dating far beyond the scope of this book.50 Another reason for a text’s exclusion is related to size of the text in question. This criterion stems from the aims and methodology of this work, which is to see how childhood functions within a narrative framework. This method requires, of course, a large enough of a narrative to produce significant results. It is for this reason that a few minor works, especially chronicles, composed near the end of the thirteenth century and beyond have been excluded from this study. The most notable example of this is Chronicon Polono-Silesiacum (The Polish-Silesian Chronicle), which, by most accounts, was written at the end of the thirteenth century, and thus could technically qualify for inclusion in this book.51 Unfortunately, much of this text is not original and relies heavily on borrowings from Vincent Kadłubek for much of its early material. To make matters worse, the size of the text itself does not make it particularly useful for comparison to Gallus or Vincent. In the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Latin text of this chronicle extends only 15 pages, with the majority of these pages closely following Vincent.52 Texts such as this simply cannot receive the same sort of literary analysis to make it comparable to the rest of the material in this study.
Description of Contents The book will begin with a chapter on the early twelfth century gesta attributed to Gallus Anonymus, which is perhaps the most famous text from Poland during the early Piast dynasty. This text, one of battles and warriors, while seemingly an unlikely place to find children, nevertheless turns out not only to be riddled with passages and references to children, but even uses youth and coming of age as a major metaphor and structuring principle for the text itself. At the beginning of the book a series of initiation rituals are used to mark the coming of age of Poland itself into a Christian society.
Furthermore, the greatest hero of this work, namely Bolesław III Wrymouth, is described and praised extensively through stories of his childhood and youth, and readers are both drawn to his courage and heroism, but also often driven to sympathize with his tender years and the threats he faced as a boy in a chaotic and badly ruled kingdom. Parents and people are presented as sympathetic and caring towards children, and especially towards the noble young Bolesław III. The second chapter is dedicated to another chronicle, much less famous, at least in Anglo-Saxon scholarship, the chronicle of Vincent Kadłubek, who composed his work about a century after Gallus, but with some overlapping material. Vincent does not use childhood to such an extent as Gallus as a structuring principle for his work, but he nevertheless uses youth and age as a powerful rhetorical tool to lampoon the wicked leaders, nobles, and peasants of Poland, while at the same time using it to enshrine the virtues that he champions. In doing this he makes great use of the puer senex trope, in which a virtuous child is presented as having the behavior of a mature person, to highlight the worthiness of his youngest heroes.
At the same time, the associations he imputes to youth, namely foolishness, intemperate behavior, impatience, wasting time on worthless games, and general stupidity, are attached to those Vincent finds unworthy. The third chapter covers the Henryków Book, one of the most intriguing and singular sources to survive from the medieval period. It has no one identifiable genre, but draws elements from many, and tells of the foundation and expansion of a Cistercian monastery in Silesia from the 13th through early 14th centuries. This book, which has the primary purpose of confirming the landholdings of the monastery, is nevertheless filled with considerable detail about the nature of rural relationships in this part of the Piast lands, and even includes many in-depth, fascinating, and often scandalous stories about the colorful characters that inhabited these lands. The primary focus of children in this book is their potential to challenge the status quo of the holdings of the monastery. Old Polish patrimonial customs clashed with the purchases, assumed to be final by the monks, of valuable resources and assets. The Henryków book is, in essence, written entirely with the younger generation in mind, which will need to be reminded through the written word of the deeds of their ancestors. In this sense, the Henryków Book is all about the shaping of memory and the education of generations in the works of older days.
There is a deep consciousness in the terminology used in the increasingly precise language of the charters issued for donations that the children, grandchildren, or other descendants of contemporaries will return and be instructed by these documents. In this sense, the Henryków Books is a sort of child for childless Cistercians, who can stand face-to-face with their enemies’ offspring and defend the monastery against future challengers and threats. At the very least, the Henryków Book provides brief glimpses into the lives and behaviors of children from the less exalted rungs of society. The hagiography discussed in the fourth chapter is extremely illuminating for several reasons. First, the flurry of female saints in the thirteenth century Poland such as Hedwig, Kinga, and Salomea provide the only extensive descriptions of female children from the early Piast era. While these holy girls are by no means portrayed as typical, and the descriptions of their lives fall within the conventions of hagiography from all of Europe during this period, they nonetheless can be compared with the images of saintly and heroic male children like Stanislaus and Adalbert. The hagiography raises a number of issues, such as whether saintly virtue is inborn or learned, and whether all forms of play and childlike behavior are always unbecoming to a saint to not.
In the canonization process of St. Stanislaus in particular, children also play an important rhetorical role in pre-figuring and bringing about his elevation. From another angle, the miracula, or lists of miracles attached to the vitae for the purpose of proving a saint’s sanctity, we can also draw a number of conclusions about the incidence of children in these miracles, what kinds of miracles children experience, and even about the treatment and the events in the lives of non-elite children. Standing somewhat apart from the other the other chapters is the fifth, about the archaeology of childhood in mortuary contexts in medieval Poland. The purpose of this chapter is simply to see what, if any, conclusions can be drawn about children and their place in society from archaeology. This is no simplistic attempt to test for elements already found in the textual portions of the book, but instead to observe the major issues and patterns in the archaeology of childhood in Poland and see if, broadly speaking, there can be any conversation between text and archaeology.
This chapter addresses a number of pertinent issues including: the incidence of child burials, the presence/ absence of grave goods and their nature, children in multiple burials, and the placement of children together in different segments of the cemetery. To conclude the chapter, correspondence analysis, a mathematical tool, will allow us to explore patterns in relation to children, gender, and sex, to see how children appear on this spectrum. The final chapter also serves as the conclusion of this book. In this chapter, all the material covered from the very different sources surveyed up to this point will be finally compared and larger themes emerging from all the chapters will receive treatment. These themes include: the prophetic nature of childhood, growth/age categories, emotions toward children, care towards children, and negative vs. positive examples of children. Once the similarities among chapters have been teased out, these similarities will be compared to relevant examples across medieval Europe, so as to situate the nature of conceptions of childhood in Poland within a larger conversation, and to assess how similar or different Poland was from its contemporaries.
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