In the distant past, no less than today, childhood and adolescence
comprised distinctive phases in the life cycle with their own
particular characteristics and modes of behaviour. These two
volumes bring together a team of 19 experts to illuminate the
histories of both adult attitudes to juveniles and the experiences
of young people across 3000 years of western history. The first
volume ranges from discussions of youth in ancient Greece and Rome,
to the perception, depiction and culture of youngsters in various
medieval and early modern contexts. The second includes analyses of
child labour in industrializing France, the Hitler Youth movement
in Nazi Germany and the development of teenage culture in 1950s
America. Between them the contributors demonstrate the huge efforts
made by those in authority in all periods, be in it through Church,
State or household, to control the activities of the young. Nowhere
does a society reveal its most basic values, priorities and
prejudices than in such efforts. (Kirkus UK)
However swiftly it passes, youth is always with us, a perpetual
passing phase, an apprenticeship to the myriad ways of the world,
subject of panegyrics and diatribes, romances and cautionary tales
from antiquity to our day. This two-volume history is the first to
present a comprehensive account of what youth has been in the West
and what it has meant through the ages. Brought together by
Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, a company of gifted
historians and social scientists traces the changing character and
status of young people from the gymnasia of ancient Greece to the
lycees of modern France, from the sweatshops of the industrial
revolution to the crucibles of Nazi youth. Monumental in its scope,
minute in its attention to detail, A History of Young People takes
us into the sensational rituals surrounding youth in Roman
antiquity (such as the Lupercalia, with its nudity and whipping)
and into the chivalric trials awaiting the privileged young of the
Middle Ages. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Michel Pastoureau explore
the elusive question of what defines youth, a concept that over
time has reached from infancy to the age of forty. Elliott Horowitz
and Renata Ago consider the young in the context of the
family--within the different worlds of European Judaism and
Catholicism through the Renaissance. Sabina Loriga takes us through
three centuries of military experience to temper and complicate our
assumptions about the youthful face of war. Michelle Perrot focuses
on working-class youth, and Jean-Claude Caron on the young at
school. The obedient and the rebellious are here, the cherished and
the sacrificed, the children catapulted into adult responsibility,
the adults who have yet to forsake the protections of childhood.
What emerges in this history as never before is a vast, richly
textured picture of youth as a changing constant of culture,
society, economics, politics, and art, and as a uniquely complex
experience of acculturation in every life.
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