Concepts of childhood: what we know and where we might go. From: Renaissance Quarterly | Date: June 22, 2007| Author: King, Margaret L. | COPYRIGHT 2007 The Renaissance Society of America. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

The publication some forty years ago of the landmark work by Philippe Aries, entitled Centuries of Childhood in its widely-read English translation, unleashed decades of scholarly investigation of that once-neglected target, the child. Since then, historians have uncovered the traces of attitudes toward children--were they neglected, exploited, abused, cherished?--and patterns of child-rearing. They have explored such issues, among others, as the varieties of European household structure; d...