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Did medieval people love their children?  - Works in Progress Magazine

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Is it really plausible that children survived the hardship of medieval life without devoted parents?

Growing up, I acquired a vague idea that medieval people did not view childhood as we do. I was told they saw children merely as defective or incomplete adults, and that they did not love their children as we love ours, perhaps as a way of coping with high infant mortality. As I grew older, I came to associate this idea with the name of Philippe Ariès, a French historian who argued in the 1960s that medieval childhood was profoundly remote in these ways. Ariès’s work never attained complete acceptance in academia, but it was vastly influential on the wider public. As it turns out, however, Ari

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