1. There has been a great deal of interest in medieval children in recent decades. For bibliography see Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001),
2. and the introduction and individual essays in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005) (which was brought to my attention by George Rousseau at a very late stage in the writing of this essay).
3. There is also a useful survey in Barbara Hanawalt, ‘Medievalists and the Study of Childhood’, Speculum, 77 (2002): 440–60.
4. Jean-Charles Payen, ‘L’ Enfance occultée: note sur un problème de typologie littéraire an Moyen-Age, in L’Enfant au Moyen-Age’, Senefiance 9 (Provence: CUERMA, 1980), pp. 179–200; see also Classen, Childhood, pp. 10–11 and 12–20.
5. For more extended discussion see the chapter on medieval incest law in Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 9–52.