Notes about childrens portraits

Abstract

By highlighting the polysemic character of the word child, this paper questions such polysemy in past times. The paper asserts that the word child has many times been substituted by others with the purpose of designating more properly the phases of the child development. By doing that, the classic study by Philippe Ariès about the feeling of childhood during the Middle Age is questioned. The analyses start from a re-reading of the Chronicle of D. João I, by Fernão Lopes, and it traces in the authors text the words used to denote child in its current meaning. The papers objective was to investigate one of the works of this great author of the Portuguese language in the period studied. Besides Lopes work, some other pages of the literature that present the child in different situations were also examined. The analyses allowed the reconstruction of various representations of children that revealed significant facets of the Portuguese pedagogical thinking as regards ways of conceiving the childhood. The paper concludes by arguing for the need of a plural understanding of the term childhood. The plurality would signal to various profiles that this historical, social and psychological category allows. The study also calls attention to the fact that the portraits of children have not come directly from the children themselves but they have been made by those that were no longer children.