Cultural History of Youth in the Age of Enlightenment

This fourth volume of A Cultural History of Youth explores the connections between youth and Enlightenment as times of transition: between childhood and adulthood and from the premodern to the modern world. The long eighteenth century was a truly global era, as the different regions of the world were integrated into a single (yet extremely unequal) economy, the struggle for colonial empires intensified, and exchange and communication networks, international mobility, and cross-cultural interactions multiplied. Ideas about youth, the experiences of young people, and youth as an individual or collective identity were profoundly affected by population and urban growth, commercial expansion, new educational opportunities, a thriving print culture, and early industrialization. Youth embodied values cherished by the Enlightenment movement: nature, spontaneity, possibility, individuality. But the Enlightenment was an age of contrasts, and definitions and lived experiences of youth varied across regions and cultures and were always modulated by differences in gender, social rank, and ethnicity.

Written by an expert team of scholars and richly illustrated, this volume covers the themes of Concepts of Youth; Spaces and Places; Education and Work; Leisure and Play; Emotions; Gender, Sexuality, and the Body; Belief and Ideology; Authority and Agency; War and Conflict; and Towards a Global History.

Adriana Benzaquén is Associate Professor of History at Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada. She is the author of Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (2006) and of many articles on the history of children and youth.