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I Have Been Dying to Tell You: Early Modern Advice Books for Children

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2005.0010

1080-6563

Judith Gero John,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

There are few activities more human than the desire to offer advice. Whether it is teacherly advice for young children, such as "let me show you the best way to tie your shoelace," or more practical advice for teenagers like "tie your shoe or you will trip and break your neck," most of us think we know the best way to accomplish a particular task and are usually willing to advise anyone—whether they listen or not. Some advice is particular to our families. For example, few parents have probably had to advise a child, as we did, not to use powdered sugar for talcum powder. Some advice is homespun and has been handed down through the ages and become clichéd: "Don't count your chickens before they hatch." It is not surprising, then, to discover that one of the most common forms of literature for the young is the "advice book." During the Renaissance, when advice books first developed their modern form, such texts typically began as letters or "handmade" books for a specific, personal audience, often the author's child or another family member. Even in works not originally intended for publication, advice books imply that the advisor has more wisdom, more education, and more insight than the advisee. Regardless of the specific audience, they establish a parent-child, teacher-student relationship. As a result of this relationship, it is not surprising that the most common audience for advice books, handmade or published, continues to be children and young adults. From the medieval book of manners, The Babees Book,1 to the more modern children's advice book by Judge Judy Sheindlin, You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover: Cool Rules for School (2001), adults feel obligated to instruct. Parents especially want to offer advice to help their children achieve success—whether that success is interpreted as wealth, happiness, respect, or heaven. [End Page 52] Although modern advice books are often written with an eye towards publication, early advice books were more "handmade," in both their form and their intention. The need to advise the young grew out of a struggle to come to grips with changing conceptions of childhood and an attempt to more clearly articulate the roles of parents and adults in nurturing the young. Most authors of the early advice books did not intend or even imagine a wide audience. Typically they dispensed their advice orally, but also wrote it down in letters or journals. The earliest of these books were intended as guides for individual children; it is interesting to note that mothers and fathers of the period often spoke with different and distinct voices, frequently assuming different roles in advising their children. The distinct nature of parental advice was clearly established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when advice books became especially popular because of the rise of the middle class, the changing nature of the family, and the early death of many parents, especially mothers. From the earliest times, from Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae (AD 523) to The Exeter Book (ca. 1046), to The Dictes or Sayings of the Philosophers (1477),2 the English valued advice books, both published and private. The advice manuals by these early writers were the de facto textbooks of early schooling in Britain. The rise of the middle class, however, created a new demand for published advice books. There was an outpouring of books about raising and educating children; suddenly, children were important to the middle-class merchants, who were themselves becoming important to England's growth as an economic and world power. The expansion of the middle class in both size and power had a profound effect on English culture, but nowhere was this more obvious than in printed books. Louis B. Wright, in Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935), sees the rise of the middle class as key...