Children’s Emotions in Europe, 1500 – 1900

This book gives you the historical sensation of coming face to face with the expression and regulation of children's emotions over time. The study does this by encouraging you to look through the eyes of well-known artists, like Hans Holbein the Elder, Jan Steen, and Rembrandt in the Renaissance, Jean-Siméon Chardin, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki and Willem Bartel van der Kooi in the Enlightenment, and Bernard Blommers and Max Liebermann in the late 19th century. These sources as supplemented by works from less-famous artists, as well as popular emblem books, advice and conduct books, observations from the emerging child sciences, and personal documents.

Jeroen J. H. Dekker observes children's emotions within clear educational settings like the family, the school, and the workplace, and connects them with history's ongoing, underlying discourse on education and the emotions. This discourse was developed by theologians, philosophers, and moralists like Erasmus, Descartes, Jacob Cats, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Romantic educationalists like Friedrich Fröbel and adherents of Progressive Education like Ellen Key and Edouard Claparède, and finally by scientists like Charles Darwin and William James who emphasized the biological fundament of children's emotions.

The story of children's emotions is told in the context of cultural movements like the Renaissance, Humanism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the start of the Age of Child Science. Theories on educational regulation in history by authors like Philippe Ariès, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault and on disenchantment with science through Max Weber are critically examined. A Visual History of Children's Emotions in Europe crucially highlights the continuous co-existence of regulation-oriented and child-oriented educational styles on coping with children's emotions.