Historical Anthropology of the Child-rearing Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

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This study was promoted under the theme of"The Historical Anthropology of Child-rearing Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe"in order firstly to explore the changing process of child-rearing practice in the Medieval and Early Modern Europe, by focusing on the materials about child-rearing in these periods, and also by revisioning the developmental implications inherent in the child-rearing practices themselves. And secondly, methodologically, the conventional implications viewing from the point of modern progressive rationalism in the general history of education and economy and politics will be differed from the implications by historical anthropology.In these transitional period from Medieval to Modern, the practice of infant caring, bringing-up, and discipline by parents or adult generations in each stages of life-cycles--conception and delivery of child, periods of weaning and toilet-training, walking training, infant, boyhood and girlhood, puberty, and adolescence--are dramatically changed, especially in the era of modern. One of the most fundamental and drastic criticism was proposed by Jean Jacques Rousseau who has refuted the traditional practices of swaddling and wet-nursing. This refute enlarged the new horizon of understanding childhood, but at the same time, this critic promoted another new ideology of"enclosing"childhood in protective sphere.