Moving on from the legacy of Aris, these essays address evidence for childhood and youth from the sixth century to the sixteenth, but with particular emphasis on later medieval England. The contents include the idea of childhood in the writing of Gregory of Tours, skaldic verse narratives and their implications for the understanding of kingship, Jewish communities of Northern Europe for whom children represented the continuity of a persecuted faith, children in the records of the northern Italian Humiliati, the meaning of romance narratives centred around the departure of the hero or heroine...

-Rites of passage- is a term and concept more used than considered. Here, for the first time, its implications are applied and tested in the field of medieval studies: medievalists from a range of disciplines consider the various theoretical models - folklorist, anthropological, psychoanalytical - that can be used to analyse cultures of transition in the history and literature of fourteenth-century Europe. Ranging over a wide variety of texts, from chronicles to romances, from priests' manuals to courtesy books, from state records to the writings of Chaucer, Gower and Froissart, the...