Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050-1300): Constructions and Realities in a European Context by Matthew B. Koval (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050-1300): Constructions and Realities in a European Context by Matthew B. Koval Emily Joan Ward Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050-1300): Constructions and Realities in a European Context. By Matthew B. Koval. Leiden: Brill, 2021. viii + 222 pp. Cloth €114, e-book €114. Anglophone scholarship on medieval childhood has tended to linger within relatively narrow geographical and chronological perimeters. It is only recently that attention has turned away from late medieval western Europe, especially England and France in the centuries after 1300, to consider aspects of childhood in other regions and in earlier periods, for instance in the collections edited by Shannon Lewis-Simpson (Youth and Age in the Medieval North, 2008), Despoina Ariantzi (Coming of Age in Byzantium: Adolescence and Society, 2018), and Susan E. Irvine and Winfried Rudolf (Childhood and Adolescence in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture, 2018). Matthew Koval's Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050–1300): Constructions and Realities in a European Context therefore fits within this broader trend, both in its focus on eastern Europe and in the decision to foreground sources from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. As the book's subtitle suggests, Koval is interested in the dichotomy between how writers in Poland constructed stories about children and childhood and the realities of young people's lived experiences. Ultimately, narrative constructions receive much greater attention than practical realities, in part because the book's structure encourages separate treatment of the two topics. Childhood in Medieval Poland is divided into seven chapters, the first of which introduces the book's aims, arguments, and historiographical framework. The following five chapters each take a particular source or genre of evidence as the starting point for exploring aspects of medieval childhood. Chapters 2 and 3 show how children became crucial metaphors and rhetorical tools within two important chronicles for Polish history, respectively the twelfth-century gesta attributed to Gallus Anonymous and the chronicle completed by Vincent Kadłubek early in the thirteenth century. The fourth chapter centers on a far more unusual source, the Henryków Book, and argues that the text's purpose was fundamentally a response to the perceived future threat children could pose to Henryków [End Page 499] monastery's landholdings. Chapter 5 is less original in foregrounding medieval hagiography. Scholars of childhood have long mined the lives and miracles of saints to understand idealized tropes of "childish" behavior or analyze instances of childhood infirmity in the Middle Ages, although the Polish material is a welcome addition in both respects, nonetheless. Turning from textual analysis, Chapter 6 embraces a very different form of enquiry to embark upon the ambitious goal of uniting text and archaeology in conversation. The intention is laudable, but there is little overlap between what has gone before and the quantitative engagement here, with topics such as the incidence of child burials, grave goods, and the placing of children's graves. Although the final chapter attempts to draw together some overarching conclusions and comparisons, the overall impression is less a dynamic dialogue across sources than several interesting soliloquies. Two editorial points are worth highlighting because they compromise the text's accessibility to a wider audience. The index, which contains precisely six headings and sixteen subheadings, is brief to the point of insufficiency. Readers must abandon all hope of receiving direction from this quarter to relevant themes, case studies, or even named individuals. Equally discouraging was the array of typographical errors—missing prepositions or adverbs, repeated words, odd plurals, problems with tenses—which sometimes impeded the narrative's clarity. The publisher should have spotted and corrected such errors at the proofing stage, especially considering the book's cost, and it would be a shame if these editorial matters discouraged engagement with Koval's ideas. Where Childhood in Medieval Poland undoubtedly succeeds is in introducing a broad range of Polish material to a wider, Anglophone audience. The book is replete with examples reflecting the vibrancy of medieval engagement with childhood, from the tale of a noble father giving his children a bath to the youth who inscribed his father's name on a golden necklace, or the cases of animal fangs appearing as amulets in infant graves...