Assess the Main Features of the Concept of Childhood in Early Modern England.

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Assess the main features of the concept of childhood in early modern England. The notion of childhood is a fairly modern debate. Not until Aries published his ‘Centuries of Childhood’ (translated into English in 1962) was there much written or discussed about the notion of childhood in this period, and even then, Aries focused on the premise that no clear concept of childhood existed. His arguments relied on visual representation, and medical knowledge, and Aries concluded from these that children around this time were merely miniature adults, who dressed and acted the same as their mothers, fathers or masters. By determining that children had no clear costume of their own, and aspired to be smaller versions of their parents, left commentators of the master narrative, Aries and Stone in particular, to deduce that children had no individual characteristics aside from that of their gender. Aries evidence was also based on a small sample of diaries between the 16th and 18th Centuries, and from these also deduced that there was a lack of parental love for children. He says in Centuries on Childhood that parents rarely even knew how old their children were, and gives the example of Sancho Paza who, in his diary, writes about his daughter “she may be fifteen, or two years older or younger”. This, he explains, illustrates a lack of parental affection for their children. Lawrence Stone agreed with Aries that there was there was a lack of parental affection, and early modern childhood rested upon discipline and strict patriarchal regime. Stone explains in his book The Family, Sex and Marriage 1500-1800 that “younger sons, and particularly daughters, were often unwanted and might be regarded as no more than a tiresome drain on the economic resources of the family”. Stone adds that parents were reluctant to invest emotional capital in their children because of
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