Cruel attitude to children in the Middle Ages

Childhood is a traditionaland one of the most important objects of social and anthropological research of past and present cultures. It represents a problemthe solution of which belongs to the sphere of interdisciplinary research. As anthropological and archaeological researches show a primitiveman and a contemporary man do not have biological differences. The difference in life of primitive and contemporary man is observedat the social level. For historians it is apparent that the phenomenon of childhood had different historical and psychological contentin various cultures. In the present article an attempt is made to examine the attitude to children in Western Europe and reveal thereasons of historical peculiarity of parents' attitude to their offsprings, which we try to show through the comparison of childhood inWestern Europe and Russia. In the present article we will base on the idea that cruelty is behaviour, which oversteps the limits of usingforce in the scope, which contravenes vitality of social system's existence. In the Middle Ages the attitude to children was not similar tothe modern one and there was a certain stereotype of attitude to children. Passionate love to children combined with fatalism, resignationto fate, and passivity in overcoming misfortune threatening a child. In many respects it was connected with the lack of development ofrational and intellectual tooling of consciousness of the medieval man, with narrow-mindedness of the inner world, which was expressedin misunderstanding the specificity of children's behaviour, particularly physical and psychological features of childhood and adolescence.It was also important that frequent childbirth and high children's death rate prevented parents from becoming attached to a newbornchild and feeling it the continuation of their own ego strongly enough. The material of historical and cultural character accumulatedby science allows us to say that social-psychological structure of medieval personality had an authoritarian character with expressedneurotic traits that the then image of pedagogical practice reveals. Beating and hurting were main elements of cruel (from the modernpoint of view) pedagogic methods. The limit of confidential intimacy in relations of kin was noticeably lower in comparison with moderntime. In many respects this fact was the psychological base for reproduction of structure of authoritarian medieval character whererelations were based on obedience, unconditional authority of the older in a clan, a family. In Europe in the Middle Ages new practicesof attitude to children appeared (we did not find the same changes in Russia in this period). We suppose that earlier transformation ofthe authoritarian structure of consciousness, and, therefore, elimination of cruelty regarding children was connected with more dynamicdevelopment of Western Europe, which received "the antique inoculation".

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