Life and Death

[chargirlgenius]

I love Barbara Hanawalt, but man, is she depressing. She wrote about every day life for children in London, and now I’m finally reading The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. She used coroners’ inquests for her main source of evidence, so every anecdote used to prove a point includes somebody dying!

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Obviously, people in the past faced death much differently than we do today. When you could easily die of a fever or an abscessed tooth, life, death, and risk took on different shapes than they do now. We now live in a world when we can know days in advance that a deadly storm is coming, and can get out of the way. I can’t even fathom what life (and death) was like before this was possible.

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Stay safe, everybody. I don’t think I have many on my flist from Texas, but I’m sure that people have friends and family there.

Comments

[frualeydis.livejournal.com]

I never found her books depressing. Maybe beacuse what she proved was that people did care about their children; which has been a hotly debated subject since the 1960s.
For more on children in the Middle Ages you should really read Shulamith Shahar.

/Eva

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

I agree with that. I was happy to see that premise illuminated.

I only get to read a page on each way to the parking lot, so I'm reading in snippets. So far, it's "A wall fell on this lady", "a guy crawled into the oven and roasted himself", "a girl tripped and fell into a cauldron of hot liquid." Oy!

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's because I'm such a soft touch, but how could people ever doubt that parents in the past cared for their children? Is that the "child as livestock" approach that people use to explain away farmers having large families?

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

One assumption is that infant and child mortality was so prevalent, that parents must have steeled themselves against the loss, by not caring so much. Then you factor in the fostering system, plus many incidents where infants were babysat by toddlers, or where children were left alone so the parents could work. What this doesn't take into account is that both parents *had* to work, and hanging a swaddled baby in the tree or on the wall was actually much safer than leaving and infant in a cradle on the floor to be mauled by a pig (which happened).

[frualeydis.livejournal.com]

What Char said. I just want to add that the theory was mainly created by a french intellectual born early in the 20th century - Philippe Ariès and if he had any children he probably never really did things with them until they got bigger; that's the way things were.
Also, the same argumetn is quite often heard when peoplke are discussing the high infant mortality in Africa. It's not true there either of course.

/Eva

[quodscripsi.livejournal.com]

Plus you factor in the fact that he uses almost no medieval evidence and is an early modernist.