Children’s Emotions in Europe, 1500–1900

This latest extensive study by Jeroen Dekker adds to his phenomenal body of work across four decades. The early 1980s saw his engagement with historical anthropology as ‘a new science?’ and exploring relationships between theoretical and historical pedagogy (Dekker, 1981). In 1985 he turned his attention to moral education (Dekker, 1985), followed by re-education as cultural coercion and consumption (Dekker, 1987). These methodological and philosophical considerations have led to a consistent and moving focus on ‘childhood’, the children we raise in society, and ‘education’, the informal and formal ways we support their development. His research spans centuries from the Renaissance to the present day, perspectives of time and space, and relations between educational sciences and history. He has regularly drawn on the arts for cultural context and visual sources and on philosophy and philosophers for their critical contributions to our understanding of change over these epochs. Willem Frijhoff and Johannes Westberg lead the list of cultural historians whom he credits.

Just seven years ago, in 2017, Dekker and his colleague Frank Simon marked the first 50 years of the journal Paedagogica Historica that stimulated so much interest, activity and dialogue amongst historians of education and their national societies and journals worldwide. In the following year he and a colleague addressed a neglected and challenging topic in ‘The embodiment of teaching the regulation of emotions in early modern Europe’ (Dekker and Wichgers, 2018).

Now, in a substantial text of 200 pages, Dekker has followed up with a reflective account of ‘Children’s Emotions in Europe’ through four centuries. His concerns for children’s welfare are deeply felt, reflected not only in dedication of the book to his grandchildren, with credits to his children and children-in-law, but also in the range of issues he confronts. Parenting and morality come within his scope, as do children at risk, those in need of care, protection and re-education. Prefacing his narrative with a historiographical discussion of education and emotions, concepts and theories that evolve over time, he identifies a ‘psychological category in historical research’, referring to idiographic and nomothetic approaches. An essential distinction is drawn between life sciences (biology, psychology and evolution theory), and humanities (anthropology and history) that focus on the individual and the unique. The reader is treated to a full-page image, a brilliant drawing by Rembrandt of ‘The Naughty Boy’ evoking an ‘historical sensation in bringing us almost face to face’ (2) with a toddler’s emotion of rage and his mother’s struggle to restrain them. Tugging at our response with the use of visual sources, Dekker introduces his multidisciplinary approach, combining ‘history of education and history of emotions with art history and intellectual history’ (3).

The study sits at a crossing between history of education and childhood on the one hand, and history of emotions, both fields developed strongly in the past 50 years. Children’s emotions are studied for two aspects, identified psychologically as ‘formation’ and ‘regulation’, in practice ‘bodily expression’ and ‘learning emotional literacy’. Changing concepts and theories about children’s emotions across time are discussed, alongside the role of artists perceiving and recording those changes. The ‘educational turn’ is attributed to two spiritual movements, Christian humanism and the Reformation: Augustine’s view of the passions informing Luther’s reforms and the humanism of Erasmus. Both movements shared a theological foundation, and belief in the need to educate emotional literacy. These ideas and practices are expounded by Dekker in great detail.

This text is richly illustrated as a ‘visual history’, its narrative and analysis supported by 64 illustrations, 14 drawings, prints and engravings, and 50 paintings. In 1328 Simone Martini portrayed the miraculous rescue of a child from danger (68), while Jan van Eyck’s depiction of the Virgin and child in 1436 depicted ‘the future passion and resurrection of Christ’, ‘Striking … in the humanization of the relationship between’ mother and son (72).

From the sacred to the secular, in 1517 a prestigious patrician of Augsburg commissioned a portrait of his family genealogy with eight devout children; in heaven above appear babies who pre-deceased them, while the mother who had also passed away is not portrayed (59); the surviving children appear quite impassive, while about the same time, but in marked contrast, the artist Matthias Grünewald observed in an emotional sketch the head of a crying child (98).

Rembrandt’s drawing (c.1635) already mentioned above, ‘shows an educational situation … contemporary and timeless at the same time’, that:

brings together the two aspects of children’s emotions … the representation of its bodily expression by showing the extreme emotion of a toddler, and the mother’s controlled behaviour and emotions in in coping with and channelling the emotions of her child, which is the first stage of teaching emotional literacy. (3)

Chardin’s Boy with a Spinning-Top (1738) (130) brings us into the eighteenth century, while this magnetic and thought-provoking range of art leads on to impressionist and post-impressionist paintings where youth and babies proliferate in Degas’ Young Spartans exercising (c.1860) (212) and Gauguin’s Bathing Breton Boys (1888) (187), Monet’s The Cradle (1867) (170) and Berthe Morisot’s work of the same title (1872) (202), followed by van Gogh’s portrait of baby Marcelle Roulin (1888) (178).

Having laid the ground of historical and psychological theory, along with the art of visual interpretation, the core of Dekker’s narrative is then structured in two long sections. Part 1 concerns ‘Belief in the Child as Animal Educandum: Children’s Emotions in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation’. Part 2 is entitled ‘Between Child and Education: Children’s Emotions in the Age of Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Science’. Each of these periods is explored in three chapters addressing dialogue and discussion of education and emotions, expression of children’s emotions, and ‘education’ or ‘training’ in emotional literacy. These chapters are studiously supported by 50 pages of detailed notes, and 40 pages of bibliography.

A reader might well begin with Chapter 1, and proceed direct to the Conclusion, before indulging in the rich (and entertaining) arguments of the core sections. The two discourses (or ‘Big Talks’ as Dekker labels them) are on the one hand ‘observational’ and on the other hand ‘missionary’, transitions in the visualization of children’s emotions that went in two directions, each linked, but by no means exclusively, to two historical periods. However one chooses to share Jeroen Dekker’s impressive research journey and enjoy his captivating presentation, this work will live on in the mind.