Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- King John and Gerald of Wales
- Why did the Number of Knights in France and England Fall in the Thirteenth Century?
- Provinces, Policies, and Popes: Comparing Polish and English Episcopal Elections Over the Long Thirteenth Century
- Magnate Counsel and Parliament in the Late-Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: English Exceptionalism or a Common Theme?
- Ugolino of the Gherardesca and the ‘Enigma’ of Simon de Montfort
- Breaking the Ties: The Cross-Channel Baronage and the Separation of England and Normandy in 1204
- A Typical Periphery: England in Late Twelfth- and Thirteenth-century Cistercian Texts from the Continent
- ‘A Star Lit by God’: Boy Kings, Childish Innocence, and English Exceptionalism during Henry III’s Minority, c. 1216–c. 1227
- Twilight of the Overkings: Edward I’s Superior Lordship of Scotland as Paradox
- Exceptional Flanders? The First Strikes and Collective Actions of Craftsmen in North-Western Europe around the Middle of the Thirteenth Century
- Social Hierarchies and Networks in the Thirteenth-Century London Jewry
- Albion Adrift: The English Presence in Paris and its Environs after 1204
‘A Star Lit by God’: Boy Kings, Childish Innocence, and English Exceptionalism during Henry III’s Minority, c. 1216–c. 1227
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- King John and Gerald of Wales
- Why did the Number of Knights in France and England Fall in the Thirteenth Century?
- Provinces, Policies, and Popes: Comparing Polish and English Episcopal Elections Over the Long Thirteenth Century
- Magnate Counsel and Parliament in the Late-Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: English Exceptionalism or a Common Theme?
- Ugolino of the Gherardesca and the ‘Enigma’ of Simon de Montfort
- Breaking the Ties: The Cross-Channel Baronage and the Separation of England and Normandy in 1204
- A Typical Periphery: England in Late Twelfth- and Thirteenth-century Cistercian Texts from the Continent
- ‘A Star Lit by God’: Boy Kings, Childish Innocence, and English Exceptionalism during Henry III’s Minority, c. 1216–c. 1227
- Twilight of the Overkings: Edward I’s Superior Lordship of Scotland as Paradox
- Exceptional Flanders? The First Strikes and Collective Actions of Craftsmen in North-Western Europe around the Middle of the Thirteenth Century
- Social Hierarchies and Networks in the Thirteenth-Century London Jewry
- Albion Adrift: The English Presence in Paris and its Environs after 1204
Summary
Innocence is one of the dominant paradigms of modern childhood, yet obsolete claims regarding how medieval society viewed childish innocence persist. Misrepresentations of the historical interrelationship between the concepts of innocence and childhood, especially in modern media, can reinforce erroneous teleology. One egregious example asserts:
In the two millennia from antiquity to the 17th century children were mostly seen as imperfect adults … For much of that time newborns were considered intrinsically evil, burdened with original sin from which they had to be redeemed through instruction and education. That changed in the 17th century, when children instead began to be seen as innocents who must be protected from harm and corruption by the adult world.
Childhood and innocence belong within a far longer and more complicated framework than such inaccurate imaginings of a premodern past imply. Those writing in the Middle Ages firmly situated the motif of childish innocence within a broader context of original sin, but they drew on a variety of conflicting biblical and patristic perspectives in which sinfulness, and especially sin's inherited nature, was a contested topic. ‘[N]o man of himself is innocent before the Lord; who renders the iniquity of the fathers to the children, and to the grandchildren, unto the third and fourth generation’, declared Moses when he received God's commandments on Mount Sinai. Later in the Old Testament, God espoused a different approach, conveying a prophecy to Ezekiel which called for the people of Israel to abandon their collective system of judgement, in which the inherited stain of sin tarnished future generations. Ezekiel introduced a new custom: ‘The soul that sins, the same shall die: the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, and the father shall not bear the iniquity of the son’. Henceforth, the Lord would individually judge each person for their own transgressions. Even though, in the Latin Vulgate, these conflicting verses from Exodus and Ezekiel both use the term filius (‘son’ or the less gendered ‘offspring’) rather than vocabulary specifi-cally associated with young children, the ideas they convey became part of later theological discussions of sin and childhood.
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- Thirteenth Century England XVIIIProceedings of the Cambridge Conference, 2019, pp. 125 - 146Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2023