2015/06/01 by Linda Pollock, Linda A. Pollock
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #History of Science and Medicine #Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/ahr/120.3.966
Modern parents obsess about raising the emotionally aware child, and no wonder. So-called emotional intelligence—the ability to perceive, understand, control, and evaluate emotions—is deemed by many researchers to be a key predictor of children's ability to fit in at home, get along with peers, do well at school, and develop a well-balanced outlook on life. Was there a similar concern in past societies and if so how did children acquire emotional knowledge? This book brings together two fields: the history of childhood, which is experiencing a resurgence of interest, and the relatively new and rapidly expanding field of the history of emotions. The editors claim that “the history of childhood as a cultural and emotional phenomenon” has attracted little scholarly attention. Even though scholars have looked at “the affective relations between parent and child,” they have failed to take into account the historical and social construction of emotional ties. Based on legal and personal records, along with educational manuals, books of customs, and hagiography, the chapters examine “the relationship between childhood and emotion … in the early modern world, when the understanding of both underwent a fundamental transformation” (p. viii). The authors take it as a given that children were seen “as a social group with [their] own needs,” although “childhood emerges as a function not of gender or age, but rather of social relations” (p. 10). Children were pupils and beneficiaries, for example. The book is not about families per se but about children in multiple settings, concentrating on real life situations, on what the sources tell us, and on taking a child's point of view when possible. The collection as a whole seeks to offer a comparative approach and to provide new perspectives on “how emotions shape perceptions of children and childhood”; on “how emotions lend themselves to historical investigation”; and on “how children can be understood through their experienced and assigned emotions” (p. 9).