This book discusses the relationship between parents and children in the past, focusing on the ways in which adults responded to the untimely deaths of children, and whether and how they expressed their grief. It 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. The book uses paintings and poems to describe feelings and emotions in ways that challenge traditional disciplinary conventions. The circumstances of infant and child mo ... More

This book discusses the relationship between parents and children in the past, focusing on the ways in which adults responded to the untimely deaths of children, and whether and how they expressed their grief. It 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. The book uses paintings and poems to describe feelings and emotions in ways that 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 to which literature may be put as historical evidence. This is a wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary study that will add to our understanding both of demographic structures, and the ways in which they have conditioned attitudes and behaviour in the past.