Children Remembered - by Robert Woods (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Children Remembered discusses the relationship between parents and children in the past. It focuses on the ways in which adults responded to the untimely deaths of children, whether and how they expressed their grief. The study engages with the hypothesis of 'parental indifference' associated with the French cultural historian Philippe Ariès by analysing the changing risk of mortality since the sixteenth century and assessing its consequences. It uses paintings and poems to describe feelings and emotions in ways that are not only highly original, but also challenge traditional disciplinary conventions. The circumstances of infant and child mortality are considered for France and England, while example portraits and poems are selected from England and America. While the work is firmly grounded in demography, it is especially concerned with current debates in social and cultural history, with the history of childhood, the way pictorial images can be 'read', and the use as historical evidence to which literature may be put. This is a wide- ranging and ambitions multi-disciplinary study that will add significantly to our understanding of demographic structures; the ways in which they have conditioned attitudes and behaviour in the past.

Review Quotes

This is an exceptional book.
Richard M. Smith

Children Remembered is a valuable contribution to the historiography of childhood, death, grief, and emotions and will surely be appreciated for its ambitious aims and interesting observations.-- "Medieval History, 53 (2)"

This is an ambitious mult-disciplinary approach to charting change over tome in responses to childrens death from roughly the 16th to the 20th century. ..this is a handsome book with excellent resources for undergraduate historians in the shape of art, poetry and surveys of the state of debate in several disciplines.-- "Continuity and Change, Volume 23/2"

About the Author

Robert Woods is the John Rankin Professor of Geography at the University of Liverpool and a fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of An Atlas of Victorian Mortalityand The Demography of Victorian England and Wales, the former published by Liverpool University Press.