The Ages of Children: An Examination and Contextualization of Youth in Medieval Literature

Abstract

There has been little scholarship addressing the characterization and understanding of children in medieval English literature, especially in conjuncture with medieval conceptions of the Ages of Man and with modern developmental schemes for growth. In an effort to fill this gap, I use both medieval and contemporary paradigms of human growth and development to analyze and contextualize infant, child, and young adult characters in selected Old and Middle English works. I use Aristotle’s biological three-stages, Pythagoras’s physiological four-stages, Bede’s four-stages microcosm, Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s aspects of men, Dante Alighieri’s arch of ages, Augustine of Hippo’s biblical six ages, Ptolemy’s seven astrological ages, Jean Piaget’s four operational stages, Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning, and Mary Helen Immodino-Yang and Kurt Fischer’s theory of neuroconstructivism as the bases of analysis of these characters. After first establishing the consistencies among the stages of growth expressed in both medieval and contemporary paradigms of mental, physical, psychological, and moral growth, I then use these paradigms to situate and compare the characterizations of children and young adult characters in medieval English literature. The young characters in Beowulf, the Dream of the Rood, the “Christ I” lyric, one of Grimestone’s lyrics, Geoffery Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Pearl-poet’s Pearl, illustrate both secular and religious characterizations of children (including the Christ Child), allowing me to draw conclusions about consistencies across time and region, while also pointing out important irregularities in representation. This study reveals that the authors of these various works, when they deviated from the medieval and modern paradigms in their depiction of children and young adults, did so with specific intentions.