Between the 17th and 19th centuries auto-biographers and diarists invented new ways to write about childhood and children. At the same time, pedagogical ideas about child-rearing changed. This book looks at the connection between these developments. Egodocuments can bring the past alive, and allow us to sketch six intimate portraits. The second part of the book concentrates on the changes. Childhood became more highly valued as a phase of life. Children were taken more seriously. This is shown in chapters on child's play, punishment, wet-nursing and independence. Around 1800, in diaries, parents more openly grieved about the loss of a child, which indicates both a change of literary conventions and changes in the way emotions were felt and expressed. Finally, autobiographers wrote more and differently about their early years, and developed new memory strategies. Autobiographical texts are discussed within a wider cultural setting, using paintings, poetry, pedagogical tracts and novels. This book makes clear how changes in autobiographical style, the concept of childhood and the working of human memory are connected.

The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World provides an important overview of the main themes surrounding the history of childhood in the West from antiquity to the present day. By broadly incorporating the research in the field of Childhood Studies, the book explores the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades in this crucial field.

A Cultural History of Education in the Renaissance presents essays that examine the following key themes of the period: church, religion and morality; knowledge, media and communications; children and childhood; family, community and sociability; learners and learning; teachers and teaching; literacies; and life histories. Education was the fuel for the communication and knowledge society of the Renaissance. This period saw increasing investments in educational institutions to meet the growing demand for literacy in the context of a religiously divided Europe with growing cities and emerging central governments. An essential resource for researchers, scholars, and students in history, literature, culture, and education.

How do we understand, imagine and remember childhood? In what ways do cultural representations and scientific discourses meet in their ways of portraying children? Childhood, Literature and Science aims to answer these questions by tracing how images of childhood(s) and children in Western modernity are entangled with notions of innocence and fragility, but also with sin and evilness. Indeed, this interdisciplinary collection investigates how different child figures emerge or disappear in imaginative and social representations, in the memories of adult selves, and in expert knowledge. Questions about childhood in Western modernity, culture and science are also addressed through insightful analysis of a variety of materials from the Enlightenment age to the present day – such as fiction, life narratives, visual images, scientific texts and public writings. Analysing childhood as a discursive construction, Childhood, Literature and Science will appeal to scholars as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Childhood Studies, History, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Sociology of the Family.

This book aims to demonstrate how scholars in recent times have been utilizing egodocuments from various angles and providing an opening for the multivocality of the sources to be fully appreciated. The first part of the book is concerned with the significance of egodocuments, both for the individual him/herself who creates such documents, and also for the other, who receives them. The author approaches the subject on the basis of his own personal experience, and goes on to discuss the importance of such documents for the academic world, emphasizing more general questions and issues within the fields of historiography, philosophy of history, microhistory, and memory studies. The second part of the book is based upon a photographic collection – an archive – that belonged to the author’s grandfather, who over decades accumulated photographs of vagabonds and outsiders. This part seeks to explore what kind of knowledge can be applied when a single source – an archive, document, letter, illustration, etc. – is examined, and whether the knowledge derived may not be quite as good in its own context as in the broader perspective.

This invaluable introduction to the history of childhood in both Western and Eastern Europe between c.1700 and 2000 seeks to give a voice to children as well as adults, wherever possible. The work is divided into three parts, covering in turn, childhood in rural village societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in the towns during the Industrial Revolution period (c.1750–1870); and in society generally during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each part has a succinct introduction to a number of key topics, such as conceptions of childhood; infant and child mortality; the material conditions of children; their cultural life; the welfare facilities available to them from charities and the state; and the balance of work and schooling. Combining a chronological with a thematic approach, this book will be of particular interest to students and academics in a number of disciplines, including history, sociology, anthropology, geography, literature and education.

Children Remembered discusses the relationship between parents and children in the past. It focuses on the ways in which adults responded to the untimely deaths of children, whether and how they expressed their grief. The study engages with the hypothesis of ‘parental indifference’ associated with the French cultural historian Philippe Ariès by analysing the changing risk of mortality since the sixteenth century and assessing its consequences. It uses paintings and poems to describe feelings and emotions in ways that are not only highly original, but also challenge traditional disciplinary conventions. The circumstances of infant and child mortality are considered for France and England, while example portraits and poems are selected from England and America. While the work is firmly grounded in demography, it is especially concerned with current debates in social and cultural history, with the history of childhood, the way pictorial images can be ‘read’, and the use as historical evidence to which literature may be put. This is a wide- ranging and ambitions multi-disciplinary study that will add significantly to our understanding of demographic structures; the ways in which they have conditioned attitudes and behaviour in the past.

This collection asks new questions about the household, examining the kinds of positive and negative emotional scope available to household members drawn together by shared economic, social and biological needs rather than by blood ties.

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.

With the memoir boom, life storytelling has become ubiquitous and emerged as a distinct field of study. Reading Autobiography, originally published in 2001, was the first comprehensive critical introduction to life writing in all its forms. Widely adopted for undergraduate and graduate-level courses, it is an essential guide for students and scholars reading and interpreting autobiographical texts and methods across the humanities, social sciences, and visual and performing arts. Thoroughly updated, the second edition of Reading Autobiography is the most complete assessment of life narrative in its myriad forms. It lays out a sophisticated, theoretical approach to life writing and the components of autobiographical acts, including memory, experience, identity, embodiment, space, and agency. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore these components, review the history of life writing and the foundations of autobiographical subjectivity, and provide a toolkit for working with twenty-three key concepts. Their survey of innovative forms of life writing, such as autographics and installation self-portraiture, charts recent shifts in autobiographical practice. Especially useful for courses are the appendices: a glossary covering dozens of distinct genres of life writing, proposals for group and classroom projects, and an extensive bibliography.