When we study history, we tend to focus on the lives of the famous figures, primarily starting at adolescence until their deaths. We tend to forget that before a person became an adolescent, they had to go from birth to the height of puberty. This area of life tends to be left behind because the farther back you go, the less documentation there is about this stage of life. We have a bit more documentation during the 16th century, which was the time of the Tudors in England, so what can we learn about childhood during this period of the past? Nicholas Orme explores childhood in 16th-century England in his latest book, “Tudor Children.”
I am always looking for a new aspect of the past, so the idea of a book dedicated to the topic of childhood was intriguing to me. Obviously, with the time travel/guides to the past, this topic is touched upon, but to have an entire nonfiction book is rare, so I knew I wanted to read it and see what new insights Orme could bring to the past.
To examine a topic like childhood, Orme breaks his book into seven chapters, plus the reflections. The chapters focus on birth and infancy, childhood at home, play, religion, school, speech, songs and stories, and growing up. Orme provides a great amount of detail about a child’s life from the moment they are born to the time when they could get a job. While we think that we can only understand the past from documents about the nobility and royalty, Orme proves his readers wrong by including information about children from all walks of life and how the constantly changing religious environment affected raising children. He also includes a plethora of images depicting stages of childhood to give his readers a bit more depth to this book, which was quite lovely.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and learning a lot about Tudor childhood. It gave me a better appreciation for the past, 16th-century England, and raising children. It was well researched and easy to follow, which is impressive for an academic book. While the ways of the past may seem foreign to us, there is also a familiarity in teaching children the ways of the world. If you are interested in learning about what it was like to be a child or raise a child in
16th-century England, I highly recommend you read “Tudor Children” by Nicholas Orme.
The year is 1485, and the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, is dead. The young man whose army defeated the king is Henry Tudor, and he is about to start a dynasty that will reshape world history forever. Henry Tudor, now King Henry VII, married the daughter of King Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, Elizabeth of York. Their marriage and their children would lay the foundation for the Tudor dynasty, but what was life like for the children who were the first generation of this remarkable dynasty? Aimee Fleming explores the lives of these royal siblings in her latest book, “Tudor Princes and Princesses: The Early Lives of the Children of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.”