Overview

However swiftly it passes, youth is always with us, a perpetual passing phase, an apprenticeship to the myriad ways of the world, subject of panegyrics and diatribes, romances and cautionary tales from antiquity to our day. This two-volume history is the first to present a comprehensive account of what youth has been in the West and what it has meant through the ages. Brought together by Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, a company of gifted historians and social scientists traces the changing character and status of young people from the gymnasia of ancient Greece to the lycées of modern France, from the sweatshops of the industrial revolution to the crucibles of Nazi youth. Monumental in its scope, minute in its attention to detail, A History of Young People takes us into the sensational rituals surrounding youth in Roman antiquity (such as the Lupercalia, with its nudity and whipping) and into the chivalric trials awaiting the privileged young of the Middle Ages. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Michel Pastoureau explore the elusive question of what defines youth, a concept that over time has reached from infancy to the age of forty. Elliott Horowitz and Renata Ago consider the young in the context of the family--within the different worlds of European Judaism and Catholicism through the Renaissance. Sabina Loriga takes us through three centuries of military experience to temper and complicate our assumptions about the youthful face of war. Michelle Perrot focuses on working-class youth, and Jean-Claude Caron on the young at school. The obedient and the rebellious are here, the cherished and the sacrificed, the children catapulted into adult responsibility, the adults who have yet to forsake the protections of childhood. What emerges in this history as never before is a vast, richly textured picture of youth as a changing constant of culture, society, economics, politics, and art, and as a uniquely complex experience of acculturation in every life.

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9780674404083

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Reviews

One of the most fascinating features of the 17 essays, and introduction, that make up these two volumes is the predominance of that anxiety, from ancient Greece to Fifties American culture, to bring the young within the ideological embrace of the polis , or state. -- Seamus Deane The Observer

In the distant past, no less than today, childhood and adolescence comprised distinctive phases in the life cycle with their own particular characteristics and modes of behaviour. These two volumes bring together a team of 19 experts to illuminate the histories of both adult attitudes to juveniles and the experiences of young people across 3000 years of western history. The first volume ranges from discussions of youth in ancient Greece and Rome, to the perception, depiction and culture of youngsters in various medieval and early modern contexts. The second includes analyses of child labour in industrializing France, the Hitler Youth movement in Nazi Germany and the development of teenage culture in 1950s America. Between them the contributors demonstrate the huge efforts made by those in authority in all periods, be in it through Church, State or household, to control the activities of the young. Nowhere does a society reveal its most basic values, priorities and prejudices than in such efforts. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Giovanni Levi is Professor of Economic History at the University of Venice. Jean-Claude Schmitt is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

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