History of Childhood refers to the theory including views on children, children’s lives, and child-rearing practices as well as environments and surroundings changing over time (from past to present). Paintings could help us to go through the interpretations of Childhood and the world of children. The research focuses on the interdisciplinary aspects, the methods of the analysis and the thematic aspects of the selected pictures.

To look into the Renaissance paintings, manuscripts, old-prints and wooden-block prints – using my iconographic method, we could see conceptions of the childhood of the Renaissance era. However children were much more vulnerable than today, they learned to live with this problem. Using microhistorical perspectives we could understand more several situations, and aspects of everyday life and mentality.

According to Colin Heywood there is a possible definition on childhood – it is an abstraction, referring to a particular stage of life, which changes over time and varies between social and ethnic groups within any society. Historians wish to recreate the day-to-day experiences of children in the past. This is the social history of children. (Heywood 2001) We must not compare present childhood conceptions to the past ones using the modern perspective. We have to accept the mentality of the time, e.g medical practices of the specific era. Sociologists James and Prout (James and Prout 1997) published their theory about childhood as a social construction. The new paradigm is potentially fruitful for historians. If we analyse paintings with iconographic methods we  can  see children as social actors. Paintings could help us to go through the interpretations of Childhood and the world of children.

To conclude this theoretical schema we could declare that the narrative of childhood can be seen in many different ways, we could have our specific conception of childhood. We can not state a global conception of childhood. (Szabolcs 2004)

The goals of the research:

1.To introduce possible visual analysing methods for qualitative research methodology. 2. To introduce new sources for History of Childhood and Education- such as old-prints, woodenblock-prints and illuminated manuscripts. 3. To understand Conceptions of Childhood within a special Era, Late Renaissance narratives about Childhood

Why we should consider part of the Late Renaissance  (1455-1517) as a possible  era of such research?

• We wished to understand how the inventions of printing and the reformation affected the way of thinking about child rearing practices.
• The importance of these decades in the Art History is also considered very high: Painters such as Mantegna or Dürer used special viewpont, analysed the human body, observed anatomy, applied golden section, used new colors, technics.
• In the cristian canon the theories changed from Christ as a Human to a Child.
• There is a gap in the secondary sources of History of Childhood regarding the following theoretics works: Shahar, Pollock, Alexandre-Bidon, Closson, Heywood, Cunningham, Németh, Szabolcs.
• Some of the secondary sources end the Renaissance era in 1500. Is 1500 the Real starting point of the Modern History?

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