Childrens Emotions in Europe, 1500 1900: A Visual History

(Paperback)

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This book gives you the historical sensation of coming face to face with the bodily expression and regulation of childrens emotions over time. The study does this by encouraging you to look through the eyes of well-known artists, like Albrecht Drer, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Jan Steen, Antony van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Titian in early modern Europe, and Jean-Baptiste Simon Chardin, Thomas Lawrence,Jean-Honor Fragonard, Philipp Otto Runge, Willem Bartel van der Kooi, Paul Gauguin, Auguste Renoir, and Jozef Israls in the late 18th and 19th centuries. These sources are supplemented by works from less-famous artists, as well as popular emblem books, child-advice manuals, observations from the emerging child sciences, and personal documents.

Jeroen Dekker observes childrens emotions mainly in the childs world and in the domestic emotional space, and connects them with historys ongoing, underlying discourse on education and the emotions. This discourse was developed by theologians, philosophers, and moralists like Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Descartes, Jacob Cats, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Romantic educationalists like Friedrich Frbel and Ellen Key, and by scientists like Charles Darwin and William James who emphasized the biological instead of the moral fundament of childrens emotions.

The story of childrens emotions is told in the context of cultural movements like the Renaissance, Humanism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the starting Age of Child Science. Childrens Emotions in Europe, 1500 1900 crucially highlights the continuous co-existence of regulation-oriented and child-oriented educational views on childrens emotions.

Reviews

This is a key contribution to the history of childrens emotions. Seamlessly integrating disciplineshistory of education, childhood, emotions, art, and intellectual historyit unveils a compelling narrative of continuity and change spanning 400 years. A remarkable foundation for further explorations into the intricate interplay of childhood, culture and emotions. - Johannes Westberg, full professor in Theory and History of Education, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
Dekker has written an intriguing history of thinking about passions in early modern and modern Europe, well-illustrated with drawings and paintings of children displaying rage, happiness, misery, and love for family. - James Albisetti, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Kentucky, USA.
This latest extensive study by Jeroen Dekker adds to his phenomenal body of work across four decades ... However one chooses to share Jeroen Dekkers impressive research journey and enjoy his captivating presentation, this work will live on in the mind. * British Journal of Educational Studies *

Author Bio

Jeroen J. H. Dekker is Honorary Professor of History and Philosophy of Education at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin), Columbia University (New York), and the European University Institute (Florence), and is honorary editor of Paedagogica Historica, the (co-)author of fourteen books including The Will to Change the Child (2001), Educational Ambitions in History (2010), and the editor of numerous volumes, such as A Cultural History of Education in the Renaissance (2020).