“Philippe Ariès and the Consequences: History of Childhood, Family Relations, and Personal Emotions: Where do we stand today?”, Professor Albrecht Classen (University of Arizona)

Date: Thursday 17 March 2016
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern seminar room 1.33, 1st floor, Arts Building, The University of Western Australia
Registration: All welcome. However, as space is limited, please register your attendance with Katrina Tap (katrina.tap@uwa.edu.au).

No other topic proves to be as relevant in the history of emotions as ‘children’. Huge debates have raged over the question whether the pre-modern world had a clear idea about and sentiments regarding children, following Philippe Ariès’s famous thesis (1960). Recent years have witnessed, however, a paradigm shift, with much new evidence confirming the highly positive approach toward children already well before 1800. This talk will examine a wide selection of literary texts from the European Middle Ages to underscore that, contrary to previous expectations, children mattered greatly, not as ‘little adults’, but as ‘children in their own rights’.

Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of German Studies at The University of Arizona, USA. In 83 scholarly books and more than 600 articles, he has covered a wide range of topics concerning the Middle Ages up to the seventeenth century, including eighteenth-century Jesuit history in Arizona/Sonora. In 2015 he published his 3-volume Handbook of Medieval Culture, his latest monograph The Forest in Medieval German Literature, and his ninth volume of his own poetry, Sonora: Harsh Words. He is the editor of the journals Mediaevistik and Humanities Open Access. He is visiting Australia as part of a collaboration between CHE and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS).