Abstract

Ariès's Centuries of Childhood initially was largely ignored by scholars and scholarly journals who could not locate the book within traditional disciplines. But the influence of the book grew steadily, and it has played a formative role in the history of the family and the histoire des mentalités. Ariès had three theses: that childhood was invented in the seventeenth century; that the invention of childhood arose from the dual impulses of parents to coddle their children and, along with schoolmasters, to pay greater attention to forming the children's characters through education; and that the concept of childhood led to an intense and pri~,atized mode of parent-child relations. The first thesis is the most dubious, but in the light of new research none of them seems likely to endure. A new interpretative framework will be required. Nonetheless, Ariès's work will endure in the history of historiography because he established the history of childhood as a field