Escape to Privacy

CENTURIES OF CHILDHOOD (447 pp.)--Philippe Aries--Knopf ($8.50).

A man of the Middle Ages, dropped into the modern world, might gape at the jets and TV sets. But what would really set him back on his heels is the attitude of the modern family toward its children.

For if no culture in history has been so child-centered as the Spock-marked society of contemporary America, few have been so careless of their children as that of medieval Europe. How Western man moved from then to now is the subject of this rich piece of French scholarship by Social Historian Philippe Aries.

Sex for the Innocent. In medieval France, painters were so ignorant of what a child was that they had no idea how to paint him. A 12th century miniature depicting the New Testament scene in which Jesus says, "Suffer little children ... to come unto me," shows Jesus surrounded by eight small men; newborn infants were commonly painted with the musculature of grownups, their age indicated only by their size. The reason, says Scholar Aries, is that during the Middle Ages, and for a long time afterward among the lower classes, children were thrown into the adult world at the age of six or seven, not long after their long-postponed weaning and as soon as they could get along without their mothers or nurses. Until the 17th century, they wore the same clothes as grownups.

Medieval society made no attempt to shield its children from sex. Adults commonly carried on sexual relations in front of them and thought their children's own forms of sexual play were enormously amusing. "There were two reasons for this," writes Aries. "In the first place, the child under the age of puberty was believed to be unaware of or indifferent to sex . . . Secondly, the idea did not yet exist that references to sexual matters . . . could soil childish innocence; nobody thought that this innocence really existed." Blackboard Jungle. But toward the close of the 15th century, a new attitude arose among the pedagogues: first, that children were innocent, and their innocence should be protected; second, that they had character, which should be strengthened and formed.

At the same time, says Historian Aries, another process had been going on--the development of the family. Family life in medieval Europe was submerged in the moiling world of society as a whole. Even in the 17th century, it was an extremely public thing. Houses flowed with people; visitors might arrive at any hour of the day or night, and the interconnecting rooms--except for the kitchens--were completely unspecialized. Beds were set up anywhere and everywhere, four or more to a room; they were collapsible and were often taken down and moved after being slept in. Meals were eaten on any table that happened to be handy, and in any room at practically any time a couple or two might be sleeping, another group eating, and a third entertaining visitors and dancing.

The Beginning of Comfort. But in the 18th century, the family began to push back the intruders and seek privacy. The interior arrangement of the houses changed; rooms began to open on corridors, so that someone going from one end of the house to the other did not have to traipse through every room in between.

As the family became more and more of a private unit, it was increasingly preoccupied with the child, immuring him for his own good in the highly disciplined boarding school of the 18th and 19th centuries. Writes Aries: "The solicitude of family, church, moralists and administrators deprived the child of the freedom he had hitherto enjoyed among adults. It inflicted on him the birch, the prison cell--in a word, the punishments usually reserved for convicts from the lowest strata of society. But this severity was the expression of a very different feeling from the old indifference: an obsessive love which was to dominate society from the 18th century on."

Many a modern parent and pedagogue who reads this book will have moments of yearning for the indifferent old days.

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