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1. Introduction: Reading Childhood Through Literature: Naomi Miller and Diane Purkiss -- 2. Adult Ideologies in Late-Medieval Advisory Literature: Anna Caughey -- 3. Learning to Talk: Colloquies and the Formation of Childhood Monastic Identity in Late Anglo-Saxon England: Rebecca King Cerling -- 4. Children Bewitched – Children Possessed: Three Early Modern Examples: Gerhild Williams -- 5. The Tudor Schoolroom, Antique Fables, and Fairy Toys: Catherine Belsey -- 6. Valuing New England Childhood through the Joyful Deaths of Cotton Mather’s A Token for the Children of New England: Ivy Linton Stabell -- 7. Changeling Stories: The Child Substitution Motif in the Chester Mystery Cycle: Rose Alice Sawyer -- 8. Inducting Childhood: The Scripted Spontaneity of Self-Referential Child Players: Bethany Packard -- 9. The Child on Display in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair: Anna-Claire Simpson -- 10. “The King shall live without an heir”: Child Loss, Grief, and Recovery in Shakespeare’s Late Romances: Kathryn M. Moncrief -- 11. Figural Agency: Reading the Child in Amis and Amoloun: Julie Nelson Couch -- 12. Writing Girls in Early Modern England: Jennifer Higginbotham -- 13. Other Maids: Religion, Race, and Relationships between Girls in Early Modern London: Kate Chedgzoy -- 14. The Philosophy and Literature of Childhood Cognition: John Milton and Margaret Cavendish: Lisa Walters -- 15. Children’s Literary Cultures in Early Modern England (1500-1740): Margaret Reeves -- 16. Without a trace? Archaeology, Literature, and the Life and Death of Children in 5th – 11th century England: Kirsty E. Squires -- 17. A Mother’s Guilt: Female Responses to Child Death in High and Late Medieval England: Danielle Griego -- 18. ‘How fair, how beautiful and great a prince’: Royal Children in the Tudor Chronicles: Carole Levin and Andrea Nichols -- 19. ‘My absent child’: Ageless and Missing Offspring in Early Modern Literature”: Sheila Cavanagh -- 20. Literary Legacies: Children’s Reading and Writing in the Montagu Archive: Patricia Phillippy -- 21. Coming of Age as a Viking: Historical Children’s Books and Gender: Katherine Langrish -- 22. Warm pants and wild places: domestic anxieties in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King: Elly McCausland -- 23. Through the Mists of Time: Reflections on Recreating Medieval and Early Modern Texts for Modern Children: Marcia Williams -- 24. Ballad Land: Ellen Kushner -- 25. Sewing the Nettle Shirt, Pulling the Sword: Jane Yolen Building on recent critical work, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of the nature and forms of medieval and early modern childhoods, viewed through literary cultures. Its five groups of thematic essays range across a spectrum of disciplines, periods, and locations, from cultural anthropology and folklore to performance studies and the history of science, and from Anglo-Saxon burial sites to colonial America. Contributors include several renowned writers for children. The opening group of essays, Educating Children, explores what is perhaps the most powerful social engine for the shaping of a child. Performing Childhood addresses children at work and the role of play in the development of social imitation and learning. Literatures of Childhood examines texts written for children that reveal alternative conceptions of parent/child relations. In Legacies of Childhood, expressions of grief at the loss of a child offer a window into the family’s conceptions and values. Finally, Fictionalizing Literary Cultures for Children considers the real, material child versus the fantasy of the child as a subject
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