"Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World" explores what it meant to be a child in the Roman world - what were children’s concerns, interests and beliefs - and whether we can find traces of children’s own cultures. By combining different theoretical approaches and source materials, the contributors explore the environments in which children lived, their experience of everyday life, and what the limits were for their agency. The volume brings together scholars of archaeology and material culture, classicists, ancient historians, theologians, and scholars of early Christianity and Judaism, all of whom have long been involved in the study of the social and cultural history of children.
The topics discussed include children's living environments; clothing; childhood care; social relations; leisure and play; health and disability; upbringing and schooling; and children's experiences of death. While the main focus of the volume is on Late Antiquity its coverage begins with the early Roman Empire, and extends to the early ninth century CE. The result is the first book-length scrutiny of the agency and experience of pre-modern children.
Author(s): Christian Laes; Ville Vuolanto (eds.)
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: XIV+390
List of figures viii
List of contributors x
Notes on abbreviations xiv
1. A new paradigm for the social history of childhood and children in Antiquity / Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto 1
2. Experience, agency, and the children in the past: the case of Roman childhood / Ville Vuolanto 11
Part I. Setting the scene: experiences and environments 25
3. Children and the urban environment: agency in Pompeii / Ray Laurence 27
4. Little tunics for little people: the problems of visualising the wardrobe of the Roman child / Mary Harlow 43
5. Touching children in Roman Antiquity: the sentimental discourse and the family / Christian Laes 60
6. Being a niece or nephew: children’s social environment in Roman Oxyrhynchos / April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto 79
Part II. What did the Roman children actually do? 97
7. Leisure as a site of child socialisation, agency and resistance in the Roman empire / Jerry Toner 99
8. Roman girls and boys at play: realities and representations / Fanny Dolansky 116
9. The writing on the wall: age, agency, and material culture in Roman Campania / Katherine V. Huntley 137
10. Why Roman pupils lacked a long vacation / Konrad Vössing 155
11. Becoming a Roman student / W. Martin Bloomer 166
Part III. Religious practices and sacred spaces 177
12. Roman children as religious agents: the cognitive foundations of cult / Jacob L. Mackey 179
13. Jewish childhood in the Roman Galilee: Sabbath in Tiberias (c. 300 CE) / Hagith Sivan 198
14. Resistance and agency in the everyday life of Late Antique children (third–eighth century CE) / Béatrice Caseau 217
15. Children in monastic families in Egypt at the end of Antiquity / Maria Chiara Giorda 232
16. Everyday lives of children in ninth-century Byzantine monasteries / Oana Maria Cojocaru 247
Part IV. A cruel world: accidents, disability and death 265
17. Children’s accidents in the Roman empire: the medical eye on 500 years of mishaps in injured children / Lutz Alexander Graumann 267
18. Listening for the voices of two disabled girls in early Christian literature / Anna Rebecca Solevåg 287
19. Children and the experience of death in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine world / Cornelia Horn 300
Epilogue
20. How close can we get to ancient childhood? Methodological achievements and new advances / Reidar Aasgaard 318
Bibliography 332
Index 383
