A Theban once came to abba Sisoes, wanting to become a monk. The old man asked him whether he had anyone in the world. He said, ‘I have a son.’ The old man said to him, ‘Go, throw him into the river, and then you shall be a monk.’ When he went off to throw him in, the old man sent a brother to stop him. The brother said, ‘Stop: what are you doing?’ He said, ‘The abba told me to throw him in.’ So the brother said, ‘But now he has told you not to.’ He left him and went to the old man, and he became a proven monk because of his obedience.

There is little direct evidence about the education of girls in classical times and Late Antiquity. Our conception of what provision was available has to be based chiefly on an examination of the material relating to the education of adult women and to the early training of little girls of four or five years of age. For the second half of the fourth century we are fortunate in possessing the testimony of three Christian writers on the subject of the education of mature women: Palladius, Gerontius of Jerusalem, and Jerome. Nevertheless, we need to be aware of their limitations. All three writers deal with women of a narrow social class, members of the wealthy Roman aristocracy, who were attempting to live a disciplined and austere monastic life, the majority of them against the incongruous background of their family mansions on the Aventine Hill, which was then a fashionable residential district. They were perhaps in the tradition of those earlier learned and cultivated aristocratic Roman ladies, recalled by Cicero, and exemplified by the daughter of his friend Atticus, who provided her with a tutor even after her marriage, and by Hortensia, the daughter of the orator Hortensius, who was trained by her father in public speaking, and who even made a speech in the Forum against a tax assessment. For information about the early training of little girls in fourth-century Rome we are indebted to the letters of Jerome, but this evidence, as we shall see, has certain limitations.

Two difficulties confront us when we examine the evidence provided by our three Christian writers: in the first place, none of them describes the educational process by which these ladies achieved so high a degree of cultivation and learning; secondly, the advice which Jerome gives about the training and education of little girls is intended for child oblates, consecrated to God even before their birth, and is, in any case, suspect, because much of it has been culled from an earlier writer.

The writings of the Early Church concerning childhood are not extensive, but in the works of a number of Eastern Christian authors of the second to fourth centuries it is possible to discern some ideas about childhood which raise important problems of Christian theology and theological anthropology. The theological problem is that of the question posed for theodicy by the sufferings and deaths of infants. It is harder to give a brief definition of the anthropological problem, but it is important to do so because to define the problem as the Eastern Fathers saw it is also to identify the set of conceptual tools—the anthropological paradigm—which they used to answer it. These are not, naturally, the concepts of modern anthropology and psychology. Applied to patristic thought, these terms usually refer to speculations about the composition and functioning of the human person or the human soul which belong to a discourse which is recognizably philosophical and metaphysical—by which is meant that it is (though influenced by other sources, such as the Bible) the discourse of a tradition descending ultimately from the anthropological terminology of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Patristic anthropology seeks to account for the history and experiences of the human person as a created being—fhe experience of sin and mortality in the present life, but also of eternal salvation and advancement to perfection in the image of God.

The handbooks for confessors known as penitentials are, I shall argue, an important source for our knowledge of early medieval attitudes on the part of churchmen and others towards children. These texts, basically lists of sins with the prescription of an appropriate penance for each iniquity, can be said to reflect widespread practices and ideas. They originated in the Irish and British Churches in the sixth century and spread from there over all of Western Europe, where they remained in use until the twelfth century.

It has long been recognized that medieval representations of the Holy Innocents are much concerned with the horrendous cruelty of their passion. They are often cited as evidence that the Church, putting a high priority on loving parenthood, attempted to raise the standard of Christian child-care, and it is indeed clear that their rhetoric depends upon a degree of sympathy for suffering children. This paper aims to suggest, however, that the history of this theme shows how the construction of their sanctity was influenced by the changing place of childhood in matters of theology and spirituality. It will show, I hope, that the emphasis on the Innocents’ suffering needs to be seen in the context of the Origenist controversy, that there was an erosion of this theme’s importance in later representations of the infants, and that this shift reflected a desire on the part of monastic authors to adapt the now established cult of the Innocents to new-found spiritual needs.

The titles of Ecclesiastical History Society conferences have sometimes presented the Church as part of a pair that carries more than a hint of contradiction: the Church and War; the Church and Wealth. Well now: the Church and Childhood? Ecclesiastical Historians and Childhood? I can’t help recalling Heloise’s rhetorical question: ‘What harmony can there be between pupils and nursemaids, desks and cradles?’ Last year we reminded ourselves that the blood of the martyrs is the life of the Church: this year and, more fortunately placed than Heloise, I’m confident that we’ll show the multifarious ways in which flesh-and-blood children have been part of that life. ‘The Church’ is shorthand: not only do we have to speak of many churches, but of many varieties of ecclesiastical attitude, of conflicts of ecclesiastical interest, of juxtapositions and negotiations between clerical and lay (for parents, too, are members of the Church), and, in all the above, of change. Equally subject to change and variety is the other element in this year’s pair. Although the stages of a child’s development are biological, physiological, perhaps psychological givens, and genetically programmed, childhood itself is a construct, culturally determined. As historians, it’s our job to historicize it: identify the phases and modes and variations in its construction, its adaptation, and its lived experience.

In the city of the Laodikaians lived a devout, pure, and blameless priest. To this priest one night the local governor came in urgent haste, pressing him to rise up and baptize his child, whose breath was already beginning to fail. Leaping up right away, the priest ran into the church. But while he was preparing the water and the holy oil the child died, before it could be baptized.

Taking the child, the priest placed it in front of the font and said to the attendant angel, ‘To you, my fellow servant, angel of God, I say: by the authority that Christ gave us to bind and loose in heaven and upon earth, restore the soul of the child in the body until I shall baptize it, lest it depart unenlightened into that age. For my Master and yours knows that I was not careless, but when I was called, I ran straight away.’ When the priest had spoken, the child returned to life. He then baptized it, kissed it, and said, ‘Go, child, into the kingdom of heaven.’ And immediately the child fell back asleep in the Lord.

The practice of oblation, the giving of children to a religious community to be brought up and educated, is as old as monasticism itself. Oblation was a means by which parents were able to dispose of unwanted offspring and be fairly confident that they would be cared for by others. However, there were never any clear guidelines laid down by the Church with respect to oblation, and the confusion over the status of an oblate was never to be satisfactorily settled. Even the great effort put into removing ambiguities in canon law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries failed to clarify the technicalities of oblation. This was because there was no agreement on the nature of oblation from the start.

The practice of the Eastern Church with respect to oblation is best summed up by St Basil the Great, in his Regulae Fusius Tractatae. He took oblation for granted, noting that a child was easily moulded to the religious life, and stipulated no minimum age at which a child should be received, but he did insist that those under the care of their parents were to be received before witnesses. More importantly, Basil was anxious that a child oblate should be questioned strictly when he reached the age of sixteen or seventeen as to whether he wished to be professed. He then had to demonstrate perseverance in the religious life and was only to be professed after much pleading. This final profession was irrevocable. Clearly the tradition of the Church was in favour of the oblation of children, but the giving of a child was not considered a definitive act. Certainly with St Basil we can see that the abbot of a community was to have the final say as to whether or not a child oblate should be professed when he came of age. This was very much in the spirit of early monasticism. The abbot was not to be forced to retain unsuitable monks in his monastery.

In his De civitate Dei, Augustine stated that anyone who wants to lead a good and Christian life must necessarily have lived in sin in his life up to then. It is quite conceivable that Augustine had his own course of life in mind when writing these words; he never made a secret of his own sinful youth, as is clear from the Confessiones. None the less, his statement is expressed in the form of a general rule.

Many medieval saints’ lives seem to accord with Augustine’s statement. The saint repents after a life of sin and henceforth leads a model Christian life until the day of his death. Thus the eventual victory of Christianity over the forces of evil was demonstrated.

However, there are also many vitae that follow a different pattern. The saint is sometimes supposed to have been perfect in every respect from childhood onward. He was born a saint rather than becoming one through a process of ‘spiritual maturation’. Stories about such precocious saints have not escaped notice in modern scholarship. Following E. R. Curtius, the phrase puer senex is sometimes used to denote the topos; in hagiography, expressions such as as quasi senex and cor gerens senile are used.

Innocent III, a proud and learned Roman pope, was well acquainted with the history and literature of the Rome of earlier days. He would have been aware of the prophecy given by Virgil in the Aeneid that when the foaming Tiber appeared to run as a river of blood disaster was foretold. In his own day the River Tiber gave him a clear message of a real disaster actually taking place. Far too frequently the fishermen of Rome drew in their nets only to find not a harvest of fish, but the tiny corpses of babies. These had been thrown naked to meet their deaths in the waters of the Tiber. Rome, of course, was by no means a stranger to the problem of abandoned babies. The great legend of the City’s origins with the suckling of the babes who were to become its eventual founders was given a daily reminder since, under the portico of the Lateran Palace, was the famous bronze statue of the Lupa or She-Wolf. In spite of the serious damage caused by a thunderbolt in Antiquity, which had left the Wolf’s feet broken and destroyed the group of the twins, the ‘Mother of the Romans’, as she was known, had come to represent papal jurisdiction over Rome, as well as the nourishing of its children. The River Tiber had always been available for the disposal of the many unwanted infants. Why, then, should the macabre catch of the fishermen of his time have been received by Innocent III as a matter in need of his most urgent attention? It might have been that there were more babies than usual. Population pressure was affecting Rome, and, as elsewhere, social problems were increasing with consequent effects on newborn children. What evidence then can be found to link Innocent with Rome’s Baby Box as a way of remedying such a dreadful situation?

In 1535 the monks of Norwich Cathedral Priory made the following report:

At some time in the 1320s, the Sienese master Simone Martini painted an altar-piece celebrating the Hermit friar Agostino Novello. Agostino, who had died at the convent of San Leonardo al Lago, near Siena, in 1309, is shown surrounded by illustrations of four of his posthumous miracles (see plates 1 and 2, pp. 198 and 200, below). Of these, three were performed on behalf of children. The exception, at upper right, shows the deliverance of a knight who, riding in a desolate mountainous landscape, has fallen beneath his horse. Top left, we see the rescue of a child from mauling by what is presumably a wolf. Below, a child falls into the street from a wooden balcony when one of its slats gives way; not only does he suffer no injury from the fall, but Agostino seizes the falling slat in mid-air and prevents it from hurting him. Bottom right, an infant suffers head injuries when he falls from his cradle, but his aunt kneels to make a vow to Agostino, and in the lower register we see the fulfilment of the vow: robed as a little Augustinian friar and carrying a taper, the child is carried by his nurse to give thanks, followed by his mother and his aunt, who carries another taper.

THE subject of this paper is the child in art about the year 1300. Some years ago, while studying the Tuscan painter Simone Martini (active c. 1310-44), I noticed that he painted what seemed to be an unusually large number of scenes involving children; and I was curious to know whether this was as special or as interesting as at first appeared. As my knowledge increased, the subject broadened to involve the more general issue of change. Around 1300, images of children become more lively, more human, and more probable. Simone’s painting forms a part of that change; and the question was ‘What happened and why?’ Other scholars have commented on this general problem; but although it is possible to criticize their approaches, the issue of ‘change’ remains. Moreover, although the analysis and explanation of change are exercises common to all historians, the special problem of the visual arts is the integration of the world recorded by texts and documents with that recorded by the visual sources. The connections are often obscure; and, in order to clarify the issues, this paper will begin with some description.

It has come to our knowledge, not without grievous amazement and displeasure of heart [Bishop Grandisson wrote to the clergy of Exeter Cathedral and of other collegiate churches in his diocese before Christmas 1360] that for these past years and some years preceding, at the most holy solemnities of Christ’s Nativity, and the feasts of St Stephen, St John the Apostle and Evangelist, and the Innocents, when all faithful Christians are bound to busy themselves the more devoutly and quietly in praise of God and in Church Services, certain Ministers of our aforesaid Church, together with the boys, not only at Matins and Vespers and other hours, but also (which is more detestable) during the solemnity of the Mass have rashly presumed, putting the fear of God behind them, after the pernicious example of certain Churches, to associate together within the Church itself and play certain foolish and noxious games, unbecoming to clerical honesty.

THE main sources for the boy bishop’s feast are available in print. These include sections in ceremonial- and service-books, cathedral statutes, councils’ decrees, compotus, that is, accounts of the gifts and offerings of money the boy bishop received, as well as his expenses, household books that include registrations of the expenses for the annual entertainment of the boy bishop and his retinue, as well as two sermons the boy bishop delivered. Chambers, in his Medieval Stage, first published in 1903, dedicated a detailed description to the feast. A short reference to the feast appears in most research works on medieval schools and a number of articles have also been published on the subject. I’ll thus refer to the origins of the feast, but describe it only briefly, disregarding variations between places, and then turn to the subject of my paper: the boy bishop’s feast, as reflecting the image of childhood, attitudes towards childhood, and medieval educational conceptions. These are expressed in the feast itself and more clearly in the sermons written by adults to be delivered by the boy bishop.

The great interest generated by the theme of this year’s conference reflects the central importance of children in the history of the Christian Church, yet at the same time their omission from much of historical writing. For all but the recent past this is largely the result of the difficulties with the source material itself, and this is certainly true for historians of the Church during the medieval and Reformation periods. The main concern of the administrative records of the Catholic Church was with adults and, in particular, ordained men. It is to the schools that we must look for the most useful references to children and, more specifically, to the choir schools for evidence of the role of boys in the liturgy.