‘Unripe’ Bodies: Children and Sex in Early Modern England

Abstract

Although the history of children and childhood has burgeoned since the publication in 1960 of Philippe Ariès’s L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, translated into English and published in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood, few historians have, until very recently, taken up the question of how early modern people might have thought about the sexual knowledge and behaviour of children. Lloyd de Mause asserted in the late 1970s that ‘The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused.’1 De Mause’s pessimistic view of childhood, and his ‘psychogenic’ approach to its history, has since been criticized and generally rejected by historians, but I quote him here as it is his assertion of the widespread incidence of the sexual abuse of children that has only begun to be addressed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, perhaps prompted by the prominence of concern about this issue in today’s society.2 However, it is not the issue of sexual abuse that I will investigate in this chapter — although it is certainly a subject that needs more extensive examination for this period of history (and part of the evidence scrutinized in this chapter will consist of some court cases for rapes and sexual assaults committed on children in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries). Rather, my starting point is a slightly later essay (1982) on ‘The History of Childhood Sexuality’ by Sterling Fishman in which he argued that ‘prior to 1700 little regard was paid to childhood sexuality even by those whom one might expect to be most concerned’ and ‘In general, seventeenth-century physicians ignored childhood sexuality.’3