'Are They Not Human?': Childhood, Gender and Child Abuse in Later Medieval England

This thesis explores medieval ideas about childhood and gender and how these related to the abuse of children in later medieval England. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining sources and methodologies from historical and literary studies as well as new theoretical insights from sociology, anthropology and psychology. The thesis makes four key arguments: firstly, ideas about childhood and narratives of development fulfilled important discursive functions in late-medieval culture which have hitherto not been recognised, demarcating the boundaries of social categories such as the human, the animal, the monstrous, the sacred, and the pure. Secondly, ideas of childhood were highly gendered in medieval discourse: boys were thought to be ‘born bad’ and to require training and physical correction; girls tended to be seen as pure and innocent but to be subject to moral decline during adolescence and adulthood. Thirdly, these conceptualisations of childhood maintained children’s subordination to adults and meant that children were too often dehumanised and abused in medieval society. Finally, the form that this maltreatment took also varied by gender: girls were more often treated as desirable objects and were more likely to be subjected to extreme forms of control as well as rape and sexual violence. Boys were more likely to be subjected to physical abuse in the process of ‘correcting’ their supposed deviance. This thesis draws on ecological systems theory to understand the ways in which individual, familial, community and socio-cultural factors interacted to produce child abuse. Chapters 1 and 3 examine discourses of male and female childhood in medieval culture, drawing on romance, conduct literature, ages of man texts and philosophical and medical treatises. Chapter 2 deals with the abuse of boys in grammar schools via an analysis of children’s schoolbooks. Chapter 4 assesses the prevalence and gendered nature of child abuse in medieval court records.