Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.08.49
8/31/17, 9)48 AM
BMCR 2017.08.49 on the BMCR blog
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.08.49
Christian Laes, Ville Vuolanto (ed.), Children and Everyday Life in
the Roman and Late Antique World. London; New York: Routledge,
2017. Pp. xiv, 390. ISBN 9781472464804. $149.95.
Reviewed by Anna Lucille Boozer, Baruch College, City University of New York
(anna.boozer@baruch.cuny.edu)
Preview
[The Table of Contents is listed below.]
Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto have collected a group of scholars who have been
steadily reshaping the study of ancient children. The co-editors should be well known
to anyone with wide-ranging interests in social history and, particularly, the ancient
family. Laes has authored numerous articles and books on childhood, often combining
these studies with his expertise on disabilities in antiquity.1 Vuolanto has also written
prolifically on ancient childhood, with a particular focus on the intersections between
childhood and Christianity.2 The current edited book devotes considerable attention to
childhood agency and the overlap between childhood and other aspects of social life
such as gender, religion, disability, and so on, the phenomenon of “intersectionality.”
The volume’s emphasis upon childhood agency and intersectionality is an innovation
found throughout this edited volume, although individual contributions also
experiment with other new approaches to childhood studies.
The volume has four main parts that focus on the settings, activities, religions, and
negative aspects of childhood (see Table of Contents below), but the book begins and
ends with chapters addressing broader themes. The two introductory chapters, by Laes
and Vuolanto, contextualize the volume. The first reviews the history of childhood
studies, explains the volume’s aims, and provides definitions for terminology and
chapter summaries. The second tackles the theme of children’s agency and the
methodological challenges to understanding the motives and experiences of ancient
children. Vuolanto argues fluidly and persuasively that childhood should be
understood as more than a preparatory phase for adulthood and that an agent-centered
approach to the study of childhood enables us to understand children acting
purposefully and making a difference in their worlds (17). Together, these two
introductory chapters demonstrate a strong grasp of the historiography, methodology,
and theory of recent works on children and antiquity.
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Part I contains four chapters that focus on the physical places and objects within
children’s lives. Ray Laurence begins with an agent-centered, embodied exploration of
children living in the urban environment of Pompeii. In particular, he redefines urban
space from the perspective of changing childhood height, exploring routinized action
and interactions with religion and power through altars and statues. In the next chapter
Mary Harlow considers the clothing worn by Roman children, examining the material,
clothing type, and appearance, and asking how the garments would affect movement.
She concludes that the strong gender messages encoded within clothing can influence
social behavior (57). In Chapter 5 Christian Laes looks at the impact of physical
tenderness—manifested, e.g., in breastfeeding, touching, and kissing—on family life
in the Roman Empire. This approach serves as a welcome counterweight to the myriad
studies of child-beating and domestic abuse that have dominated discourse about
physical contact within ancient families.3 April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto complete
Part I with a chapter on the relationships between children and their aunts and uncles
in Roman Oxyrhynchos. They argue convincingly that the demographic household
patterns in Roman Egypt indicate that children had strong relationships with people
other than their parents. Papyrological evidence suggests that fatherless boys, in
particular, relied upon their uncles to help them form links between their own family
and the wider local community.
Part II focuses on children’s activities over the course of five chapters. Jerry Toner
begins this section with a study on leisure as a locus for children’s agency. Toner
carefully nuances his study by discussing disparities in wealth, gender, religion, and
age among children at leisure. He demonstrates convincingly that child-play is a form
of both resistance and socialization, indeed, that the two go hand-in-hand and the
irreconcilable dichotomy is a critical part of childhood experiences. In Chapter 8
Fanny Dolansky draws from visual and archaeological evidence to describe Roman
girls and boys at play. The material she discusses comes from a wide range of regions
and time periods (118), a contrast to the contextual specificity that most of the other
contributors strive for. Nevertheless, her argument that toys might be gender-neutral
and subject to children’s imaginations is worth testing with contextual data. Katherin
V. Huntley explores children’s graffiti at Pompeii and Herculaneum through the lens of
theories of developmental psychology. She argues that most of this graffiti (over 40
per cent) derives from less-formal and less-dangerous rooms in houses (144). Other
graffiti can be found in public areas that adults also used for graffiti. Her evidence,
which indicates that children’s social worlds were not necessarily tied to those of their
adult caregivers, clearly demonstrates both childhood development and agency. In
Chapter 10 Konrad Vössing provides a careful re-examination of misinterpreted texts
to show that there is no evidence of a long vacation in Roman education regimes and
elucidates the social perceptions of education as a privilege. In the final chapter of Part
II W. Martin Bloomer describes how Roman children came to think of themselves as
students and the social meanings attributed to being a student. He collects evidence of
the suffering found in education, but also of a sense of pride among pupils relating to
these difficult experiences.
The five chapters of Part III address the role of children within various religions and
religious settings. Jacob L. Mackey begins with an account of how children exert
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cognitive agency in their religious learning. Children learned both practice and belief
from imitating those around them, participating in rituals and learning choral hymns.
Hagith Sivan provides a sustained example of “faction”—the creation of a narrative
out of historical facts—by vividly bringing to life a Jewish boy, Eleazar, in Roman
Galilee. We follow Eleazar through the Sabbath schedule for children, including his
experiences of public and private places. “Factions” are relatively new to the study of
ancient childhood and the contributions by Sivan and Cojocaru (see below), which
adopt different approaches to this narrative device, are welcome presences in this
volume. In Chapter 14 Béatrice Caseau explores children’s resistance and agency
through hagiographical late antique texts, focusing on how children behave during
church services, how they rebel against decisions made about their future, and how
they relate to food within an ascetic culture. Her final example is a particularly
poignant exploration of how children’s agency intersects with their social worlds and a
powerful reminder that childhood agency can only be understood in context. Maria
Chiara Giorda explores the lives of children within Egyptian monasteries, including
the circumstances that brought them there. Her discussion demonstrates that there was
perpetual tension between the positive and negative aspects of having children within
monasteries among both the children and their caregivers. The final chapter in Part III,
by Oana Maria Cojocaru, provides another example of “faction”. Cojocaru takes a
different approach from Sivan: she interweaves explanations between her short
factions about a boy and a girl living in monasteries. Her “factions” illustrate how
children living in monasteries maintain agency in their habitual activities. She also
demonstrates how monastic life created an abrupt transition between childhood and
adulthood.
Finally, in Part IV, three chapters expose negative experiences during childhood. Lutz
Alexander Graumann’s contribution provides insights into children’s accidents in the
ancient world. As both a medical historian and a pediatric traumatologist, Graumann
provides a vivid account of childhood traumas in the ancient world, which ranged
from trivial to fatal. In Chapter 18 Anna Rebecca Solevåg uses insights from
intersectionality to explore agency among two disabled girls in early Christian
literature. Although her evidence for agency is thin, Solevåg argues that we must
explore the meaning of a text, not simply the words of the text. Her reading allows us
to assume that the two girls from her case studies talked about their experiences with
disability, which is a form of agency. Such imaginative leaps are crucial for opening
up new conversations about antiquity. Solevåg’s careful demarcation between
evidence and supposition is a model for those who would take on similar challenges.
The final chapter in Part IV, by Cornelia Horn, focuses on how adults experienced the
death of children and how children worked through the deaths of people in the world
around them. We know much more about grieving parents than we do about grieving
children.
The epilogue, by Reidar Aasgaard, reviews the volume’s contributions and suggests
directions for future research on ancient childhood. In particular, Aasgaard
underscores that the first step for advancing childhood studies is to take children into
account. This step remains rare in studies of the ancient family, although great strides
have been made over the last twenty years. Aasgaard advocates for interdisciplinarity
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in order to make up for the inherent weakness of the data and for scholarly gaps in
study. Intersectionality, such as Solevåg’s contribution on disabled girls, is also critical
because children’s experiences differed across the vectors of gender, wealth, time,
religion, ability, and location. Aasgaard’s observations underscore the need for more
archaeological, art historical, and paleopathological accounts of ancient childhood to
counterbalance the dominance of literary and documentary approaches. For this
reason, it would have been advantageous for the editors to include a broader suite of
methodological approaches to childhood. This lapse is to some degree due to the
comparative rarity of childhood studies in these other disciplines and should serve as a
call to action for more archaeologists, art historians, and paleopathologists to join
conversations about childhood in the ancient world.
As a whole the contributions to this volume are written in fluid prose with appropriate
illustrations. The book is well edited with few typographical errors. Individual
contributions would be appropriate for upper-level undergraduate teaching and
certainly for graduate teaching and scholarship. The volume advocates forcefully for
an agent-centered approach and, as such, represents a productive new direction for the
study of children in antiquity.
Table of Contents
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 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 socialization, 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
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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, disabilities, 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
Notes:
1. C. Laes (2011). Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders Within Cambridge and
New York, Cambridge University Press, BMCR 2011.10.46.
2. V. Vuolanto (2015). Children and Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Continuity, Family
Dynamics and the Rise of Christianity Farnham, Ashgate.
3. C. Laes (2005). "Child Beating in Roman Antiquity: Some Reconsiderations." In
K. Mustakillio, J. Hanska, H.-L. Sainio and V. Vuolanto, eds., Hoping for Continuity.
Childhood, Education and Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.. Rome, Institutum
Romanum Finlandiae: 75-89; K. Mustakallio and C. Laes, eds. (2011). The Dark Side
of Childhood in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Unwanted, Disabled or Lost.
Oxford, Oxbow; S. M. Wheeler et al. (2013). "Shattered Lives: Evidence for Physical
Child Abuse from Ancient Egypt." International Journal of Paleopathology 3: 71-82.
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