PHILIPPE ARIES, A CONTROVERSIAL HISTORIAN OF CHILDHOOD
Abstract
The history of childhood, as a new branch, emerged when children, like other marginalized social categories, such as women, captured the attention of society. the evolutionary direction in the history of childhood started from the book of Philippe AriËs, L'enfant et la vie familiale (1960), and has been developing ever since. Although some critics contested the ideas of this amateur historian, they
ultimately reached similar conclusions - that only in the modern world has the concept of "childhood" come to be truly understood. Philippe AriËs argued that the notion of "childhood" was a product of the 17th century and that medieval societies lacked an awareness of the specific nature of the concept, whereby a clear distinction could be made between child (or even youth) and adult (AriËs 1962: 128). The
historian did not wish to claim that individual medieval families did not show love for their offspring, but that this notion was not considered a distinct phase of life, and the separation between adult and child status was less significant in medieval society than has been shown to be later. "Childhood" was presented as a relatively new concept that appeared with the decrease in infant mortality, with the changes in the European educational system, but also with the stratification of classes and
the gradual withdrawal of the family from a wider network of social relations. In this way, a territory considered intangible until then was recovered, with the means specific to history. This concept was not only explored in the literature, but methodological borrowings from certain related disciplines such as historical demography, psychology, biology, anthropology, sociology, interdisciplinarity and
even transdisciplinarity contributed to notable results in this investigation of considerable proportions. Although many claims presented by AriËs did not stand up to further research and his hypotheses were either enthusiastically accepted by some researchers or categorically rejected by others, this work became and has remained a reference text, a fundamental landmark in the study of the history of childhood.
