A History of Young People in the West, Volume I, Ancient and Medieval Rites of Passage

Childhood, like death and taxes, is an inescapable fact of life. Everyone goes through it, and as any parent of a teenager will tell you, sometimes it seems to go on forever. But what is childhood, exactly? What are its parameters? When does one cease to be a youth and become an adult? In ancient Egypt, 9-year-old Tutankhamen became Pharaoh, married the same year, and fathered two stillborn children before his death at age 18. In medieval times, girls regularly married at 12 or 13 and were mothers several times over by the time they were 20. Obviously, the youth of previous ages had a far different experience of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood than their counterparts today. In A History of Young People in the West, Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt have put together a collection of writing and illustrations that span the ages in an effort to explicate the changing role of children throughout history.

Though this history is a bit patchy--Volume 1 jumps from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Europe, leaving a gap of 1,300 years--what's here is quite interesting. And reading about the lives of children in previous eras is almost guaranteed to make you feel better about your own.