Miracles and Misadventures: Childhood and Public Health in the Late Medieval Low Countries

Abstract

Administrative sources and miracle accounts from six Netherlandish urban shrine cults help to explore the interests of inhabitants and urban institutions in intervening in children’s safety, behaviour, and upbringing. Care for children was much more central to the politics of communal well-being in the late Medieval Netherlands than often assumed. Various agents, including both lay and religious authorities, participated in what we call the biopolitics of childhood: a type of power negotiation in which knowledge of health was employed in local politics and as part of the broader governance of a population. This approach offers new directions in both the study of public health and medieval childhood, as it emphasises the complex meaning and function of caring for children and the social-political interests involved in such acts.