The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence.

Louis Haas. The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300-1600.

New York: Sr. Martin's Press, 1998. viii + 319 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 0-312-17563-9.

In this book's introductory chapter, Louis Haas modestly declines to "set out a new paradigm for the study of childhood, especially when we still need to clear away so much wreckage of the old" (9). In particular, the author proclaims his hope to correct "some of our misconceptions about Florentine childhood, since all the works on Florentine childhood suffer from one signal failing. They were all influenced by the model set out by Aries, Shorter, and Stone" (11) 1). This reviewer begs to differ, not only less modestly on the basis of his own work, but also that of Lucia Sandri, Giulia Calvi, Ottavia Niccoli, and Konrad Eisenbichler, all of whom over the past decade have departed significantly from exclusive focus on the parent-child relationship in Italian Renaissance history, and who have looked at the wider context of the treatment of children in the workshop, the extended family, the school, and in both legal and social institutions.

Nor would this reviewer automatically gather under a single rubric the work of Shorter, Stone, and Aries, especially given the latter's contention that the Renaissance period, loosely defined, marks the origins of European attentiveness to childhood as a distinct phase of human life. Even if James Schultz's study of medieval Germanic literature in The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100-1350 has undermined Aries's view that the Middle Ages had no conception of childhood, Aries's insights into the nature and scope of Renaissance pedagogy surely anticipate much more recent work on the importance of pedagogy to confessionalization and social discipline. Haas's thesis, briefly stated, is that for Florentine children there was no Renaissance; both attitudes and practice remained unchanged from 1300 to 1600. Moreover, Haas finds few differences among medieval, Renaissance, and modern treatment of and attitudes toward children, thus following in the tradition of Linda Pollock and others, who have suggested comparable continuity based on similar sources in different places.

Once the reader negotiates the introduction, much of Haas's account of early childhood in Renaissance Florence is accessible, extensively researched, and methodologically sophisticated. At its best, Haas's account is as readable and as touching as Iris Origo's portrait of Francesco Datini in The Merchant of Prato -- no small praise. Haas's evidence comes mostly from diaries and extended account books of the Florentine merchant elite, and the author is fully aware of the limitations imposed by using this one type of source. Yet from that vein the author is able to mine riches that help us understand not only the history of sentiment, but also variations in everyday practice. Haas has organized the book according to stages in the life cycle, from analyzing decisions to have children, to conception, pregnancy, birth ritual, godparenthood, wet-nursing, early childhood, and, as happened all too often, the death of relatively young children. His use of literary as well as archival sources is perceptive and sensiti ve, and his study of ritual kinship and godparents shows that much can still be gained from training anthropological methodology on historical subjects.

In his zeal to show that sensitive Florentine fathers would have been equally at home supervising the play group, the barbecue grill, and the public forum, Haas sometimes overstates his case concerning the similarity between our age and the Renaissance past. Although Haas persuasively shows, as have others before him, that Florentines employed wet-nursing to maximize the fertility of biological mothers, and not as a deadly substitute for abortion, one might well want to stop short of his blanket characterization of wet-nursing as premodern day care. The imprecision of such an analogy reveals the deeper truth that activities and even sentiments only superficially resemble our own more modern structures, and that to isolate parent-child relations from the larger context of Renaissance demands of land and lineage does nearly as much violence to the experience of premodern childhood as the more egregiously erroneous position that Renaissance Florentines thought of their children only as heirs.

One would also wish greater care from author and publisher in the editing of the text. Errors of spelling and syntax are sufficiently numerous to be distracting. Several years ago, the late David Herlihy barely managed to rescue this reviewer from reattributing Book III of Alberti's Della Famiglia to Agnolo Pandolfini, but the irrepressible Agnolo rises again in Haas's book to reclaim paternity. Despite these flaws, there is enough painstaking research and vivid recreation of the trials, tribulations, and joys of Renaissance parenting to keep nagging doubts at bay. With some editing, a reissue of this book in paperback would make a welcome addition to undergraduate reading lists, while continuing to profit graduate students and other scholars.