#philippe aries

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

Too evident sorrow does not inspire pity but repugnance, it is the sign of mental instability or of bad manners: it is morbid...One only has the right to cry if no one else can see or hear. Solitary and shameful mourning is the only recourse, like a sort of masturbation.

In 1960 the French historian Philippe Aries published Centuries of Childhood, a book whose once-controversial thesis—that in medieval society “the idea of childhood did not exist”—took aim at every piety regarding the unique status of children. Writing in that inimitable—though frequently imitated—”she mates, she kills” style of high French theory, Aries argued that, up until roughly the 15th century, childhood was not perceived as a distinct phase of human life; instead, children were perceived as little more than Mini-Me’s. To us moderns, with our nuclear, bourgeois, and sentimental family values, Aries’ medieval home appears almost totally alien. Children intermingled fully with adults, wore the same clothes, played the same games. They were not regarded as sexually innocent and thus psychologically delicate and were never segregated away from the adult pupils more common in French schools at the time. Parents did not bond deeply with young children, as so many died in infancy or soon after, and by the time their children hit 8 or so, parents often fostered them in other people’s homes to work as domestic servants. Aries’ most famous evidence is the iconography of the Middle Ages, which depicts children as adults, only smaller. In our own world of mass marketing, universal schooling, and hypervigilant parenting, we’ve come to isolate virtually every six-month span in a child’s life as a separate and unique epoch, each with its own set of tastes and developmental milestones.

«Te falta una sola persona y ya ves el mundo

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty, but one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

유아의 관념 변화와 유아용품의 시작

“Death,” he [Philippe Ariès] wrote, “so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.”