The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150-1650.

Konrad Eisenbichler, ed. The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150-1650.

Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2002. xii + 350 pp. index. illus. $39.95. ISBN: 0-7727-2018-5.

Ilaria Taddei. Fanciulli e giovani: crescere a Firenze nel Rinascimento.

Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001. vi + 370 pp. + 2 col. pls. index. append. bibl. [euro] 33.57. ISBN: 88-222-4986-0.

Since Philippe Aries's now-classic Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life reached the English-speaking audience in 1962, historians on both sides of the Atlantic have poured out studies of the family and of children that have tangled with his remarkably provocative hypotheses. Many of these studies have addressed the issue of sentiment: did parents care about children, or did they do so in a way we would recognize, prior to modern times? Less attention has been given to the more fundamental question Aries raised: was there a concept of childhood? These two volumes further that inquiry in different ways.

Konrad Eisenbichler has performed a great service to those interested in the society of premodern Europe by assembling seventeen studies on early modern teenagers--a group often overlooked even by experts on childhood or on group behavior. Forty years ago, Aries inquired about the existence of a concept of childhood. Now we are invited to think about the existence of adolescence as a specific stage of development among the peoples of the premodern West.

The seventeen English and Italian contributions to The Premodern Teenager address the issue from a variety of perspectives. Ilaria Taddei parses the conceptions of infancy (or childhood proper), adolescence, and youth in Renaissance Florence in a discussion that also forms part of her book Fanciulli e giovani, discussed below. Ludovica Sebregondi, still focusing on Florence, describes the distinctive dress of the adolescent. Roni Weinstein focuses on Jewish youth in Italian Renaissance cities, noting that a shared experience of adolescence transcended even a deep cultural divide. Ottavia Niccoli tracks adolescent misbehavior ranging from stone-throwing to unsanctioned public kissing in post-Tridentine Bologna, while Christopher Carlsmith uncovers cases of adolescent student miscreancy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bergamo. Carol Lansing identifies cases of female adolescent rebellion or dysfunction in late-medieval Bologna, while Ursula Potter focuses on the malady of "greensickness," suffered famously by Romeo's Juliet, specific to female adolescents. John Carmi Parsons, in contrast, notes the fluidity of age boundaries for medieval aristocratic female adolescents. Fiona Harris Stoertz explores how sexual matters expressed themselves quite differently in the lives of four groups of medieval adolescents: monks, aristocrats, apprentices, and university students. Philip D. Collington explores the theme of cuckoldry among the unmarried adolescent characters of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, and John Leland studies the reverse migration of teen domestic workers from city to country in fourteenth-century England. Several other contributions (Virginia A. Cole, Robert Zajkowski, Mark H. Lawborn, Marion Rothstein, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Kelly DeVries) focus on knightly and royal teens.

Adolescents, then, there were, at least in Italy, France, and England; and adolescence, as well, a stage of life sitting between childhood (pueritia), an age extending to anywhere between ten and fourteen, and youth (iuventus), an age commencing in the early to mid-twenties. Especially characteristic of the age, for boys, was violence and sexual excess (traits that will surprise moderns); for girls, sexual victimization, conformity to parental and dynastic mandates, and psychogenic illness. As in many other eras, for early modern teens it was better to be male than female.

Among the many stimulating discussions raised in the Eisenbichler collection, the following seem to be especially noteworthy. The first, already noted, is the importance of gender difference, which is, of course, more important in adolescence even than in childhood or youth because of the incipience of sexual activity. Male and female experience are sharply divided among these premodern teens, even when, as in the case of Joan of Arc, the young person attempts to deny that difference. The second is the gulf between the rural world, dominated by aristocratic warlords, and an urban world of merchants, artisans, and the underclasses. The Black Prince, the royal son who fought brilliantly at Crecy in 1346, was the contemporary of languid Florentine adolescents who wore tight hose and short doublets as they strolled about in packs and often engaged in homosexual activity--teens from wholly different contexts. The royal or knightly teen was already forging a career as warrior and master; the urban teen was awaiting a long-delayed entry, if a child of the bourgeoisie, into adult professional and governing circles, and if an artisan apprentice, into the independent pursuit of a craft. Related to the rural-urban divide is the third issue of training. If adolescence for knightly teens is the age for winning spurs--military training occurred even earlier, in childhood--it is for the children of urban patricians the age of going to school and postponing adult activity. Teens at school, and to a lesser extent apprentices, exist in a limbo that can extend a full decade; a dangerous age, prone to violence and license.

It is in Florence, uniquely, that a specific social institution developed to accommodate urban teenagers and negotiate their impulses towards desirable civic ends. That institution is the youth confraternity, to one of which, that of the Archangel Raphael, Konrad Eisenbichler, editor of the first of the two volumes reviewed here, dedicated a monograph. Ilaria Taddei, a contributor to Eisenbichler's volume, considers the Florentine youth confraternity (also studied by Richard Trexler and Ronald Weissman) in the second part of her exhaustively-researched monograph Fanciulli e giovani, while she details in its first part the Florentine system of age-group identification. That system, based on medieval tradition, Roman and canon law, and communal practice, defined certain ages as critical. The years seven, twelve, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty, and twenty-five constituted the overlayered borders distinguishing infancy, childhood, adolescence, and "youth," as the still-later marker of age thirty constituted the age of "political maturity."

Of these ages, infancy and childhood had special meaning for Florentines. Childhood innocence had sacral power, lending strength to the city and its citizens. It is perhaps that special innocence of children that inspired the pedagogical theories of both the humanists and later religious reformers, with their novel and particular concern for the moral and intellectual nurturing of the very young.

The Florentine experience of adolescence was also distinctive. It was characterized by youth cohort sodalities, and especially by the youth confraternity. The banding of youth in abbayes (abbeys) and brigate (gangs or clubs) occurred generally in premodern Europe. In Florence, these organizations took on a formal organization, with constitutions and a hierarchy of officers, and were informed by the assumption that the city as a whole benefited from the moral guidance and proper public and ritual behavior of its youth. Ten of these organizations had taken form by the end of the fifteenth century. Why Florence took this path remains mysterious. It is somehow related to the city's lead role in the creation of Renaissance humanism and art; indeed, humanist educational theory and the Florentine valorization of youth, as Taddei argues, are linked. Certainly, the attempt made by Florentines centuries ago to corral the passions of adolescence for the welfare of the community is a monitory lesson for all who turn to the history of the premodern teenager--or who are concerned with their postmodern descendants.

MARGARET L. KING

Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York