Parents, Children, and the Church in the Earlier Middle Ages (Presidential Address)

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.