Childhood and Emotions: A Study Day

Image: Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Holy Kinship with a Self-Portrait, 1510–12. Held at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (Vienna, Austria). Photographed by Frans Vandewalle. Some rights reserved. The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800) presents: Childhood and Emotions Date: Friday 22 September 2017 Time: 9.00–17.00 Venue: Matthaei Room, University House, Professors Walk, The University of Melbourne This is a free event, but registration is essential Registration: [email protected] Convenors: Professor Stephanie Trigg and Dr Melissa Raine Study Day Childhood and Emotions: A Study Day program 9.00–9.30 Registration, coffee, welcome and Acknowledgement of Country 9.30–10.10 ‘Animals, Abduction, Incest, Inheritance: Children’s Emotional Adventures in Middle English Romance’ Stephen Knight (The University of Melbourne) Preparation (provided): Octovian, synopsis. 10.10–10.50 ‘Emotion and Child Maltreatment in Bevis of Hampton’ Robert Grout (University of York) 10.50–11.20 Morning Tea 11.20–12.00 ‘Medieval Didactic Literature for Children and Emotional Intelligence: Is There any Connection?’ Juanita Feros Ruys (The University of Sydney) Preparation (provided): B. Mesquita and M.Boiger, ‘Emotions in Context: A Sociodynamic Model of Emotions’, Emotion Review 6 (2014): 298–302. 12.00–12.40 ‘Childhood and Emotional Regulation Past and Present’ Melissa Raine (Independent Scholar) Preparation, optional (provided): S. Shanker, ‘Emotion Regulation Through the Ages’, in Moving Ourselves, Moving Others: Motion and Emotion in Intersubjectivity, Consciousness and Language, edited by A. Foolen et al., (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), pp. 105–38. 12.40–13.40 Lunch 13.40–14.20 ‘Loving the Illegitimate Child’ Katie Barclay (The University of Adelaide) 14.20–15.00 ‘“In great feares, frights and hideous distractions”: Emotion, Children and War in Early Modern Ireland’ Dianne Hall (Victoria University) 15.00–15.20 Afternoon Tea 15.20–16.00 ‘Making the Middle Ages in Histories of England Written for Children’ Andrew Lynch (The University of Western Australia) Preparation, optional: 1) Oliver Goldsmith, An History of England (1764): volume 1, letter 2. Available at: http://ota.ox.ac. uk/text/5342.html; 2) Charles Dickens, A Child’s History of England (1853): Reigns of Alfred, Edward the Confessor, William 1, Henry 1, George III. Available at: http://www.dickens-online.info/a-childs-history-of-england.html; 3) John Ruskin, ‘Our Fathers Have Told Us’: Sketches of the History of Christendom for Boys and Girls Who Have Been Held at its Fonts (1880-1882): Preface and Chapter 1. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24428; 4) H. E. Marshall, Our Island Story: A History of England for Boys and Girls (London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1905): Front Matter. Available at: http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=marshall&book=island&story=_contents 16.00–16.40 ‘The Little Hours: Medievalist Farce, Clerical Sex and Victim Testimony’ Louise D’Arcens (Macquarie University) Preparation: 1) The Little Hours, directed by Jeff Baena (2017), based on Tale 1, Day 3 of Boccaccio’s Decameron. The ilm is currently unavailable in Australia, but the trailer is accessible on YouTube; 2) Pier Paolo Pasolini’s version of Tale 1, Day 3 in The Decameron (1971): 22:19–36:11; 3) Spotlight (2015), available on DVD or iTunes; 4) Documents from the website of the Royal Commission will be discussed: http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/ 16.40–17.00 Final Comments 17.00 Drinks, University House Bar ABSTRACTS Loving the Illegitimate Child Katie Barclay (The University of Adelaide) The question at the heart of this paper is what did it mean to experience love as an illegitimate child in the medieval and early modern world, and particularly the love provided by parent-like igures, ‘maternal love’? I will not rehearse the large historiography of maternal love here, other than to note that, despite this work, how the love and care provided to children was inlected by their status has not been much discussed. It has long been acknowledged that child-rearing practices have been shaped by gender, class and race. That parents often had ‘favourites’, particularly sons in the early modern period or daughters in the nineteenth century, or conversely, that they subjected a speciic child to abuse, is well known. Yet that love itself might be refracted differently for particular categories of children, and how that shaped social practice has been given less attention. Indeed, even whilst we acknowledge that what love meant for different cultures varied in its application, we have often judged love as something that was applied or not, that was found or absent. And this has meant that we’ve read, say, the mother who abandoned her child but enquired into its health as ‘loving’, and those who walked away as not. Yet, perhaps it might be more fruitful to think of love as something offered in degrees, as a social and cultural practice that was highly contextual and situational, and that its situatedness meant that the experience of love could vary enormously across individuals. This paper explores how illegitimate children were loved and cared for in medieval and early modern Europe to think through what it tells us about the emotional practices of love and how they were informed by ideas of children, childhood and their complex and intersecting identities. KATIE BARCLAY is a Senior Research Fellow in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800) and the Department of History at The University of Adelaide. She is the author of Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester University Press, 2011) and a number of works on emotion and family life. With Kimberley Reynolds and Ciara Rawnsley, she recently edited Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). abstracts response to his physical abuse and abandonment and the consequences this has for his future development. Finally, it will discuss the extent to which texts like Bevis may provide a window into the emotional lives of medieval children. ROB GROUT is a PhD candidate at the University of York, working under the supervision of Jeremy Goldberg and Nicola McDonald. His thesis investigates child maltreatment in late medieval England. The Little Hours: Medievalist Farce, Clerical Sex and Victim Testimony “In great feares, frights and hideous distractions”: Emotion, Children and War in Early Modern Ireland Louise D’Arcens (Macquarie University) Dianne Hall (Victoria University) The Little Hours, a 2017 medievalist comedy ilm, is based on Tale 1 of Day 3 in Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which the nuns of a respected abbey have sexual relations with the gardener, Masetto da Lamporecchio, whom they mistakenly believe to be a deaf mute. In this paper I wish to explore the ilm’s unstable and even contradictory approach to the institutional and interpersonal power dynamics shaping clerical sex. In particular, I will examine how its sympathetic, feminist-inlected libertarian approach to the question of clerical sexuality leads it to represent the uneasy power relations underlying Masetto’s treatment by the nuns, who initiate sex with him on the pretext that his deafness makes it impossible for him to give testimony. As part of my discussion, I wish to meditate on the experience of viewing this ilm and its handling of testimony at a time when the Catholic Church is being exposed internationally for its ongoing sexual abuse of children, with increasing attention also being given to the mistreatment of the disabled. My discussion of the ilm will bring it into conversation not only with Boccaccio, but also Pier Paolo Pasolini’s version of the same tale in his ilm The Decameron (1971), the recent ilm Spotlight (2015) about the exposé of child sexual abuse in the US Catholic Church, and some key documents from the Australian government’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse. The title quote is how Alice Wandesworth, daughter of the late Lord Deputy of Ireland, described her emotional state as Irish rebels rose against English settlers in Ireland in October 1641. In the turmoil of the civil wars that racked Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century, the voices of children and youths are often only whispers. In this paper, I will explore sources for children’s voices and then amplify them with an analysis of the emotional resonances in descriptions of children in war by the adults around them. Many adults described the fate of children using emotional scripts that emphasised political ideologies – Protestant witnesses described their own children suffering their fate with pious resignation while describing Irish Catholic children revelling in deviant joy at the destruction of all around them. The paper will then analyse the emotional after-effects on perpetrators who had physically harmed children. Children are hard to hear during the Irish wars, but careful analysis of the available sources can bring them closer to the surface. LOUISE D’ARCENS is Professor of English at Macquarie University. Her publications include Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840–1910 (Brepols, 2011), Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages (D.S. Brewer, 2014), and the edited volumes The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (Cambridge University press, 2016), International Medievalism and Popular Culture (Cambria Press, 2014) and Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars (Brepols, 2004). She is currently writing World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Global Textual Cultures (forthcoming 2018). She has also published chapters on medievalism and articles in journals such as Representations, Screening the Past, Studies in Medievalism and postmedieval. Emotion and Child Maltreatment in Bevis of Hampton Robert Grout (University of York) The fourteenth-century romance Bevis of Hampton is notable for its focus on the protagonist’s early childhood. Aged seven, the young hero is violently beaten by his mother, deprived of his inheritance and sold to Saracen merchants. This paper will explore the ways in which the text portrays emotion as both a cause of and a reaction to child maltreatment. Beginning with the emotional context in which this maltreatment takes place, the paper will go on to examine the child Bevis’s emotional DIANNE HALL is Senior Lecturer in History at Victoria University. She has published widely on histories of violence, gender and religion, particularly in medieval and early modern Ireland and the nineteenthcentury Irish diaspora. She is currently working on a long-term project with Elizabeth Malcolm on gender and violence in Irish history. Animals, Abduction, Incest, Inheritance: Children’s Emotional Adventures in Middle English Romance Stephen Knight (The University of Melbourne) Medieval English romances have usually only been noticed for the masculinist heroics of those stories where some noble youth without property (Yvain) or even identity (Lybeaus Desconus) becomes, through his power to kill and sexually attract, a lord of mighty power. This gratifying establishment of feudal authority creates a family of possessioners, but there are other, largely undiscussed, romances which realise familial problems, often focusing emotionally on the children who should be taking forward the land-rich kinship. These disrupted family romances link back to folktale and mythic predecessors. Nature is a complex force: giants can be troublesome, but animals tend to represent benign nature – the son and heir can vanish in the paws of an ape or a leopard, even a unicorn, but will survive (though griffons are more of a problem). A noble mother can herself be abducted, usually by foreigners or enemies, and her son then disappear elsewhere – which may even lead to a potentially Oedipal re-meeting, but a recognition scene, often by the husband and father, will restore familial order. Somehow the animals and enemies will yield up the affectively tormented youthful agents of future feudal inheritance, and the family will inally re-convene in emotive prosperity, with restored status. Some dark romances show paternal brutality or maternal over-sexuality (hyperactive versions of required noble attributes) that cause a family’s fall from prosperity, but these usually lack child-centred emotionality. This paper explores the socially oriented emotivity of children in feudal romance. It will focus on Octovian, which offers many of the motifs discussed. The paper will also consider Sir Eglamour, Emaré and Sir Ysumbras for additional aspects of the childfocused emotive dramas offered in these socially dynamic and long-overlooked texts. STEPHEN KNIGHT is Honorary Research Professor in Literature at The University of Melbourne. He has long been interested in popular literature and its concerns, from the late Middle Ages (e.g. Robin Hood) to the present (e.g. crime iction). He feels the popular romances and ballads of the late medieval period have a lot to tell us about socio-cultural issues, anxieties and aspirations, including emotionalities focused on the young. Making the Middle Ages in Histories of England Written for Children Andrew Lynch (The University of Western Australia) From John Newbery in 1759 to Henrietta Marshall in 1905 there was a boom in histories of England written for children, with an inluence that continues today. Many major writers were involved, including Oliver Goldsmith, Jane Austen, William Godwin, Charles Dickens and John Ruskin. Teaching children what to think and feel about the Middle Ages was emotionally linked to contemporary notions of English cultural identity and national destiny, involving writers and readers in intense questions of religion, art, ethnicity, class, gender, war and power. Addressing a work of history to a child implied not only the advice of age to youth, but the right to speak with the authority of a father (in Ruskin’s case a godfather), the care of a mother, or at least in loco parentis. As part of that tutelage, the inculcation of correct feelings about the Middle Ages assumed both a moral and a political importance. These histories also offer insight into changes in what Peter Hollindale calls ‘childness’: ‘the varied behaviour associated with being a child, and the sense of what is appropriate behaviour for a given age, of behavioural standards’. Andrew Lynch is Professor in English and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia, and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800). He has written extensively on the medieval literature of war and peace and its modern afterlives. His recent publications include Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), edited with Stephanie Downes and Katrina O¹Loughlin, and Understanding Emotions in Early Europe (Brepols, 2015), edited with Michael Champion. He is co-editor of the journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society. Childhood and Emotional Regulation Past and Present Melissa Raine (Independent Scholar) Historically oriented research into childhood implicitly negotiates contemporary models for understanding children’s emotions. I’d like to promote a more direct discussion of this relationship, beginning with the simple question of how contemporary theories of child development and emotion inform our research into children from past periods, and abstracts vice-versa. Potential answers are to some extent dependent on the theoretical framework that is being utilised, as well as the desired outcomes of the research. My case study will be the work of philosopher, psychologist and neuroscientist Stuart Shanker. In ‘Emotion Regulation Through the Ages’, Shanker argues that ‘Plato’s constricting view of emotions as “wild horses” that need to be controlled by a cold faculty of reason’ has been pervasive in Western culture. The resulting paradigm of ‘self control’ (emotional control) that is ‘taught’ to children is not supported by contemporary research into emotions and childhood, and further has developed damaging moralising implications. Shanker’s concern is to change contemporary thinking about the role of emotions in child development, but the broad sweep of this argument does not conform to the detailed enquiries into periodisation that are favoured within contemporary historical research. I would like to use this example of disjunction to look further into the criteria through which we assess the utility, or indeed validity, of statements about childhood in the past to support claims about the present. MELISSA RAINE is an Honorary Associate Investigator with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800). She continues to work on her project, ‘The Child’s Voice in Middle English Narrative’, as well as on outcomes from the ‘Children’s Voices in Contemporary Australia’ symposium in 2016. This was an interdisciplinary event that explored how we support children to have meaningful voices, including the development of innovative models for productive interdisciplinary engagement. Medieval Didactic Literature for Children and Emotional Intelligence: Is There any Connection? Juanita Feros Ruys (The University of Sydney) Medieval didactic literature for children has been characterised as dry, prescriptive and paradigmatic. It might be the last place we would expect to ind analyses and advice intended to develop the emotional character of young and adolescent children. Yet this paper argues that if we suspend our Eurocentric understandings of emotions as the internal experiences of an individual (a concept that can be traced back particularly to Thomas Aquinas’s passiones animae), and look past popular word-histories of emotions terms as a way of uncovering historical emotions theories (as exempliied in the work of Barbara Rosenwein), we can indeed ind medieval parents providing both insightful and concrete advice on emotional formation to their children. To argue so, this paper draws on theories of ecology of feeling, which understand emotions as social constructs in which individuals participate, and on the technologies of emotional control and emotional intelligence currently at play in school environments (which in one sense have their basis in virtue ethics and the concept of habitus that goes back to Aristotle). It illustrates its thesis with reference to a number of medieval parental advice-texts, beginning with that of the Frankish noblewoman Dhuoda, before considering a range of English texts, particularly James VI and I’s Basilikon Doron. JUANITA FEROS RUYS is Director of The University of Sydney node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800). She works in medieval intellectual history with particular interests in medieval demonology, the medieval language of emotions and medieval didactic literature, particularly from parents to children. She is author of The Repentant Abelard (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which includes a Latin edition, irst-time English translation and commentary on Peter Abelard’s poem of advice for his son, and Demons in the Middle Ages (Arc Humanities Press, 2017). She is currently co-editing a volume on emotions terminology, 400–1800, for Routledge and curating a themed issue of Emotions: History, Culture, Society on the alternative history of empathy.