6.4.1 Generations and Lifecycles in Early Modern History (ca. 1500–1800)

Feike Dietz (with Stefan B. Kirmse)

Introduction

In the early modern period, life stages—the age ranges into which a human life is divided—were approached as natural rather than social phenomena, which determined the qualities and behaviour that could be expected from people of different ages. A particular interest in the life stages of childhood and youth developed from the sixteenth century onwards. How were young people and their progression from infancy to adulthood imagined, and what behaviour was expected of them? What did these expectations have to do with existing power relations in early modern society? In addition to answering these questions, this chapter also suggests that older (particularly male and upper-class) youths possessed some space to make their own subculture—which sometimes caused generational conflicts with people at different stages of life.

The ‘Ladder of Life’

In 1658, the Moravian educator Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670) published his work Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures). This popular schoolbook—first issued in Latin and German, and widely translated into many European languages—innovatively incorporated visual images in language education. One of the images in the book was a staircase representing the seven ages of men and women, accompanied by the following words:

A man is first an Infant, then a Boy, then a Youth, then a Young-man, then a Man, after that, an Elderly-man and at last, a decrepid old Man, So also in the other Sex, there are, a Girle, A Damosel, A Maid, A Woman, an Elderly Woman, and a decrepid old Woman. (Jan Amos Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus; Omnium fundamentalium in mundo rerum & in vita actionum, pictura & nomenclatura; Picture and nomenclature of all the chief things that are in the world; Visible world, London: J. Kirton, 1659, p. 77)

In the middle of the seventeenth century, it was not a new idea to depict life as a staircase: many versions of the ‘ladder of life’ circulated in the early modern period, based on life-stage theories that were rooted in the ancient period (e.g., in the work by Ptolemeaus and Hippocrates), and were frequently repeated and further developed afterwards (by, for example, Augustinus, Dante, or Lemnius). Many of these life-stage theories were collected in reference books such as Silva de varia lección (1542) by the Spanish humanist Pedro Mexia (1497–1551) and the Iconologia (1593) by the Italian iconographer Cesare Ripa (1560–1622), published in Spanish and Italian respectively, but translated into several languages throughout Europe. As the collections of Maxia and Ripa demonstrate, life-stage theories differed in the particular number of stages that they delineated (between three and twelve—but often seven) and the length of each stage (which was sometimes fixed, but was in other cases represented as rather fluid), among other distinguishing factors.

What these theories share, however, was the idea that the stages of life are and should be distinguishable from each other, as they all have their own typical characteristics. Moreover, the theorists all started from the assumption that age differentiation had a natural (as opposed to social) basis. They often took their inspiration from the theory of the four humours, developed by the physicians Hippocrates (460–370 BC) and Galenus (129–199), and which experienced huge popularity throughout the medieval and early modern periods, especially as a medical theory. The general idea was that the human body consists of four humours—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—that directly correspond to the four elements with their own qualities: air (hot and moist), fire (hot and dry), earth (cold and dry), water (cold and moist). The mixture of the four humours within the human body influenced an individual’s health (disease was considered to signify an imbalance between the four humours), as well as their temperament: for example, someone with too much black bile in the body had a melancholic temperament. However, the desired balance between the humours varied according to changing circumstances, including age. The dominance of cold and dryness was characteristic for older people, who were thus allowed to be slightly melancholic. A young person’s temperament, on the other hand, was naturally dominated by heat and moisture, and could therefore be characterised as sanguine.

This system of thought shaped views of age differentiation as a natural phenomenon: it was considered a natural, even physical, process that compelled elderly people to display different behaviour than the young, and which granted the aged qualities that youths were still unable to possess (and vice versa). Thus the idea of a fixed life cycle functioned as a disciplinary instrument: it assigned people ineluctable qualities, and demanded that they show the behaviour and talents appropriate to their age.

Many literary texts and images circulating in the early modern period reflected these ideas of natural age differentiation and helped to popularise these theories. The Dutch author Jacob Cats (1577–1660), whose literary works reached a huge amount of literate people in the Dutch Republic, organised his book of emblems Zinne- en minnebeelden (Sense and Love Images, 1627) according to the ages of different reader groups: he suggested that young readers should pursue each other romantically, according to their natural temperaments, while offering older readers more reflexive and serious texts with recurrent themes such as religion and death. In another of his books, Houwelick (Marriage, 1625), Cats represented women’s life as a development in seven stages, each having their specific qualities and tasks. Moreover, Cats contributed to the popular Schat der gesondtheyt (Treasure of Health, 1636), a medical handbook written by the Dutch physician Johan van Beverwijck (1595–1647), in which people were urged to adapt their behaviour and diet to their age. Old people were advised to consume hot and moist food, such as chicken, honey, and well-risen bread, because—according to Cats’ accompanying poem:

The human body is cold and dry during his old days,

That’s why it cannot lack hot and moist things.

De mensch is kout en droog ontrent den ouden dagh,

Soo dat hy heet en vocht niet meer ontbeeren magh.

(Johan van Beverwijck, Schat der gesontheyt, from: Alle de wercken, Amsterdam: Ian Iacobsz Schipper, 1660, p. 199)

As the earlier example of Comenius’ Orbis Sensualim Pictus illustrates, the idea of age differentiation was also explicitly transmitted to children. Following the widespread traditional image of life as a staircase, Comenius invited young people to approach their future life as a succession of distinct, identifiable stages. Through the image of the stairs, these pupils learnt to understand their own life as a process of ascending and descending, of progression and decline. This process involved a hierarchy between people at different life stages: adults were at the top, children were at the bottom. The naturalised division between ages was thus, at the same time, a social system of power relations.

The Discovery of Children?

Given the fact that children were situated as ‘lower’ people at the bottom of the social hierarchy, it is worth considering the extent to which they were considered fully as ‘people’. How were they valued in society? Several historians have raised this question and provided different answers to it. In his groundbreaking L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (1960)—known in English as Centuries of Childhood (1962)—Philippe Ariès argued that Europe had long viewed children as incomplete adults, and had ‘discovered’ the child only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when painters started to express the emerging emotional relationship between adults and children. Although several historians traced the discovery of childhood back to the Middle Ages or the ancient world, and many historians rightly questioned the idea of a sudden birth of childhood, the early modern period did witness several pivotal events that spurred the interest in children and child education. Among these events were the rise of print, humanism, and the Reformation.

The German theologian Martin Luther (1483–1546) was one of the people who explicitly argued that religious and social change depended on the education of new generations. His view of children was, however, not very optimistic: he assumed that children had a natural propensity for doing the wrong thing. But by firmly drumming the right ideas and knowledge into children from their first years onwards, people were able to suppress negative tendencies and to develop positive alternatives. What they learned during their childhood, Luther argued, determined the way they were able to act, behave, and believe as grown-up adults.

This trust in child education was a driving force behind the rise of schools and home education, as well as print materials that supported the educational practice. A genre that also emerged during this period was the household manual, including instructions and (heavily gendered) guidance for parents. The Domostroy (Domestic Order), that came to be circulated and read widely in Muscovite Russia in the 1550s, is a curious example of such a manual. It presents the upper-class Muscovite family as a harmonious miniature kingdom, led by a good-natured patriarch and his supportive wife. The latter was certainly imagined as an awe-inspiring authority: “The wife should […] teach her servants and children in goodly and valiant fashion,” it told its readers. “If someone fails to heed her scoldings, she must strike him.” On the whole, though, the book reflected the values of Muscovite merchants and clergy, rather than those of warriors (who otherwise played a dominant role in society under Ivan IV, 1547–1584). In matters of child-rearing, for example, it emphasised the role of both mothers and fathers very strongly, which was less pronounced in some Western European contexts at the time:

If God sends anyone children, be they sons or daughters, then it is up to the father and mother to care for, to protect their children, to raise them to be learned in the good. The parents must teach them to fear God, must instruct them in wisdom and all forms of piety. According to the child’s abilities and age and to the time available, the mother should teach her daughters female crafts and the father should teach his sons whatever trade they can learn. (Carolyn Johnston Pouncy (ed.), “The Domostroi”: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, Ithaca, N.Y., 1994, p. 93)

Compared to the age of Reformation, the Enlightenment developed a more positive view of childhood. In his book Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) viewed the child as a tabula rasa, which should be inscribed with empirical and physical experiences, and guided by strict but tender educators. In a more radical way, the Genevese writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in his Émile ou De l’éducation (1762) prompted the ideal of natural education, grounded in the child’s own exploration of their rural environment. What these Enlightenment voices share is a plea for an educational style that encouraged children to learn on the basis of their own observations and curiosity. This plea should be viewed against the backdrop of the optimistic, Enlightened conviction that society could be ‘engineered’, and that mankind as such would improve when new generations were granted a pathway to intellectual and moral progress. In the second half of the eighteenth century, teachers, authors, and publishers helped to realise this Enlightenment programme by developing new types of schools and innovative children’s books that stimulated young readers to interact with their surroundings. The rapidly expanding children’s book market was defined by its transnational character: for instance, bestselling children’s books written by German philanthropists like Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818) and Christian Felix Weisse (1726–1804) were widely translated throughout western and northern Europe. The commercial character of the market is similarly striking: the Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) by the English publisher John Newbery (1713–1767), for example, came with a ball for boys and a pincushion for girls, to attract young consumers. This example clearly illustrates that children—as well as their parents—were being taken seriously as a commercial group with its own desires and needs. The creation of child-targeted books and toys demonstrates that children were increasingly granted their own life and a distinctive ‘children’s culture’, characterised by cheerfulness and a carefree atmosphere. While they were thus taken more and more seriously as a social group with its own identity, however, they also became even more excluded from the real world. In short, they experienced a process of both emancipation and exclusion during the early modern period.