Abstract
Be, being and becoming provide a limit to the analysis of the terms of master-servant childhood because these words make meaning possible by containing none. This is a special problem for the terms of childhood because they are all (ultimately) grounded in being. But, this limit is also the great source of childhood’s ontological and historical significance. The discursive shifts of childhood over time provide important opportunities for gathering a historical sense of the self, gaining insight into the historicity of being human, and making a historical ontology possible. This section offers explorations in this direction through literary, philosophical, and theological analysis of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the Boy Bishop, apocryphal and canonical texts, and the Lives of Saints, among other texts — ancient, medieval and modern.
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Notes
Foucault did not emphasize the phrase “historical ontology,” yet its assumptions developed in his later works, especially Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1990).
For a helpful introduction to the ontological shape of Foucault’s works see especially, Todd May, The Philosophy of Foucault (Montreal, QB: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
The concept of historical ontology has been further developed in Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1970): 92–104.
The analysis of historical syntax poses this question in an alternative way, not explored here. See Mats Ryden and Sverker Brorstom (eds), The Be/Have Variation with Intransitives in English, with Special Reference to the Late Modern Period (Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987)
Merja Kyto, “Be vs. Have with Intrasitives in Early Modern English,” in English Historical Linguistics 1992: Papers from the 7th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Valencia 22–26 Sept. 1992 edited by Fernandez Francisco, Miguel Fuster, and Juan Jose Calvo, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory vol. 113 (1994).
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1978): 54.
Angel R. Colon, A History of Children: A Socio-Cultural Survey across Millennium (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2001): 87.
Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 83.
Hugh Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood (London, UK: BBC Books, 2006): 31.
Patricia Healy Wasyliw, Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic: Child Saints and their Cults in Medieval Europe (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2008): 2.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, NY: Scribner, 1971): 109, 124–125, 728, 731–732.
Bob Meens, “Children and Confession in the Early Middle Ages,” in The Church and Childhood edited by Diana Wood (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1994): 62–63.
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Alters (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1992): 266–298.
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Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe (New York, NY: Habledon and London, 2000).
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989): 127–142.
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Also see, Ruth apRoberts, “Old Testament Poetry: The Translatable Structure,” PMLA vol. 92, no. 5 (October 1977): 987–1004.
Warren W. Wooden, Children’s Literature of the English Renaissance (Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press, 1986): 26–28.
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1978): 32–33.
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Janet Nelson, “Parents, Children, and Church in the earlier Middle Ages,” in The Church and Childhood edited by Diane Wood (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1994): 89
Shulamith Shahar, “The Boy Bishop’s Feast: A Case-study of Church Attitudes towards Children in the High and Late Middle Ages,” in The Church and Childhood edited by Diane Wood (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1994): 244.
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Davis, cited above, reviews Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969).
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On the baby Jesus within the Eucharist see Leah Sinanoglou, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays;” Speculum vol. 48, no. 3 (My 1973): 491–509.
On ritual murder see John M. McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth,” Speculum vol. 72, no. 3 (July 1997): 698–740.
On Christ-plays see Mary Dzon, “Joseph and the Amazing Christ-Child of Late-Medieval Legend,” in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality (New York, NY: Walter De Gruyter, 2005): 135–158
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James K. Elliott, The Apocryphal Jesus: Legends of the Early Church (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996)
James K. Elliott (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993).
An excellent summary of these themes appears in W.M. Temple, “The Weeping Rachel,” Medium Aevum vol. 28, no. 2 (1959): 81–86.
The translation is from Temple, “The Weeping Rachel,” 86, and is drawn from Benjamin Thorpe, ed., The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church vol. 1 (London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1844–6): 81–84.
Karl Young, Ordo Rachelis (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 1919).
Jean E. Jost, “Loving Parents in Middle English Literature,” in Childhood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality edited by Albrecht Classen (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005): 320–321.
William Braswell, “Accuser of the Diety,” in Melville’s Religious Thought: An Essay in Interpretation (New York, NY: Pageant Books, 1958): 57–73.
Lawrence Thompson, Melville’s Quarrell with God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1952).
Ilana Pardes, “Rachel’s Inconsolable Cry: The Rise of Women’s Bibles,” chapter 5 in Melville’s Bibles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008): 123–147.
See Chapter 128 and the Epilogue in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale (New York, NY: Harper, 1851).
Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1985).
The Venerable Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, trans. J.A. Giles (London: J.M. Dent; New York: E.E Dutton, 1910): 288.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself orig. publ. 1845 (New York: Penguin Books, 1982): 47.
The larger point was made in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Classic Slave Narratives (New York: New American Library, 2002): 1–14.
Wasyliw, Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic, 1–3; Graham Gould, The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Edward James, “Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages,” in Youth in the Middle Ages edited by P.J.P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press, 2004): 17–18. Psalms 8:2; Matt. 21:16.
Cynthia Hahn, “Speaking without Tongues: The Martyr Romanus and Augustine’s Theory of Language in Illustrations of Bern Burgerbibliohek Codex 264,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991): 161–80. Bede, Ecclesiastical History, 288–289.
John Anthony Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988): 95–99; Nelson, “Parents, Children, and Church,” 88–89
Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 19–47.
Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, UK: Claredon Press, 1968): 144.
Phyllis Gaffney, Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011): 7, 53.
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© 2013 Patrick Joseph Ryan
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Ryan, P.J. (2013). The Master-Servant Sense of Being in Time. In: Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364791_6
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