Being a teenager is tough in any era. But at least the Renaissance era was an interesting
time to annoy adults and become one yourself. This is how teens during the Renaissance really lived.
For much of recorded history, people didn't have a concept of the
"teenager." According to MEL Magazine, our modern idea of teens didn't emerge
until well into the 20th century. The broader concept of adolescence,
spanning the period of time after puberty and into young adulthood, has a bit longer history.
People in the Renaissance understood that everyone went through different life stages.
As ThoughtCo argues, Shakespeare himself drew on widely accepted beliefs when he wrote
about the seven ages of man, which included adolescent lovers "sighing like a furnace."
Renaissance ideas like this were based on earlier medieval views, where people were understood to
transition from dependent childhood to independent adulthood. According to Medieval Children,
even newly minted adults were expected to get right into grown-up things like getting married
and making their confession to the local priest. Still, some speed bumps were expected even then,
as The Early Modern Child in Art and History explains that teens were seen as
ambiguous young adults, often ready to go wild with hormones and crazy ideas.
"Youths!"
Adults throughout history have often liked to make hackneyed jokes about how teens are such
trouble that it would be nice, on occasion, to simply send them away. In a healthy modern family,
it would simply end as a joke, but Renaissance society took it further.
According to The BBC, this hurrying along of teens was often part of a larger apprenticeship
tradition. In England, one Italian ambassador's assistant wrote that he was a bit shocked to see
that British folks sent their children out at the tender age of seven or nine,
for terms that lasted up to nine years. The English told him that it was all for the best,
as the kids would gain important skills through their work that could raise their station in
life. The ambassador, meanwhile, wrote that he thought the situation arose because it was easier
for adults to make someone else's children work harder and eat less than they would their own.
Some teens, released into independent or quasi-independent lives with all
of their youthful vim and vigor, seemed duty-bound to cause trouble.
Surprisingly, this trouble often had a structure. According to The BBC,
some European teenagers teamed up to create what were essentially social clubs of hell-raisers,
who occasionally got together long enough to elect a leader called the "King of Youth." The
king and his rowdy fellows got the most press during topsy-turvy times of year, like annual
carnivals and markets. Apprentices also joined forces to wreak havoc throughout their towns.
Rowdy young adults oftentimes convinced themselves that they had more of a
purpose than merely infecting their community with chaos. Some groups,
having determined that a person in the town had violated the social code, decided to grace them
with a noisy serenade. This tradition, which Past & Present reports has been called charivari or
"rough music," was essentially a public shaming. The teens might gather beneath someone's window,
banging pots and pans, playing trumpets, and carting around yowling cats to make
the point that whomever was targeted should be embarrassed of themselves.
As the Renaissance era unfolded, education became more widespread, but it wasn't available to
everyone. Things like a university education were accessible to only a privileged few.
Lower-class teens might be expected to have already completed basic schooling at places
like dame schools. Dame schools, according to the British Journal of Educational Studies,
were small, privately run schools that taught youngsters the alphabet,
a few Bible passages, and how to manage household chores. Once they were done with the dame schools,
or whatever other option they had, their formal education was over.
British teenagers and young adults who did make it into the classroom for an extended period of time
likely benefited from the work of the English humanists. According to Britannica, humanistic
education focused on students' choice of their studies and a holistic approach to education,
all of which arguably have their roots in 15th-century England.
Though there certainly wasn't comprehensive sex education in most Renaissance communities,
neither were teens of the era totally in the dark. Some parents even allowed them to get surprisingly
close to one another. Of course, truly libertine parents were rare, so it wasn't as if communities
were letting amorous youths run wild. They often got to indulge in a romantic middle ground,
however, with courting practices that included full-body cloth sacks to keep everyone honest.
This practice, often called "bundling", dates back at least to the Middle Ages and,
according to ThoughtCo, was well-known by the Renaissance era. Essentially, courting couples
were allowed to share a bed, so long as they kept their clothes on. For extra security, they might
have a "bundling board" strapped between them, or a cloth bag secured over their legs or body to
keep wandering hands out of the picture. The idea was that the pair could get to know one another
without risking the social censure generated by, for example, a secret meeting in the hay barn.
Depending on the time of year, this was also a way to learn more about your beau and also stay warm.
During the Renaissance, some people were able to wait for marriage.
As per Internet Shakespeare Editions, the average age for 17th-century English
couples at marriage tended to be 23 for women and 26 for men. However,
the age of consent for boys was 14 and only 12 for girls. Meanwhile, the Victoria & Albert Museum
reports that girls in 15th-century Florence typically married between ages 15 and 19.
You may think that this is a case of peasants with nothing better to do,
but it appears that they had the most choice of all. Having money did not always make things
easier for Renaissance teenagers. Some noble families hurried their teens off to weddings
at early ages in order to secure alliances with other families. According to the Folger
Shakespeare Library, upper-class girls were more subject to arranged marriages,
even while more and more people were talking about this new concept of marrying for love.
If all this variation in age and social standing isn't enough to make
you question whether or not teen marriage regularly happened during the Renaissance,
some scholars wonder if we should trust records in the first place.
Renaissance Quarterly notes that records from Florence indicate that people were almost
certainly rounding their ages up and down. This confusion about a person's age wasn't so much
about vanity as it was about the fact that few people at the time knew their exact birthdate.
If there is anything consistent in the history of teenagers,
it's adults complaining about them. What could have caused the
obligatory finger-wagging during the Renaissance? Long hair, apparently.
According to The Premodern Teenager, 15th-century Italian youths liked to wear their hair long,
even curling the ends for extra social credit. As this was a style distinct to young folks, it
was often derided, with one preacher admonishing boys to "keep your hair a proper length." This was
echoed almost word-for-word in the 1960s and 1970s, according to West Virginia University,
when lengthening hair styles for young men once again caused much gnashing of teeth.
Some young men might have cropped their hair short but got pretty racy otherwise with tight-fitting
clothing. Yes, teenage fashion trends of the Renaissance included the rise of the codpiece.
As per The New Yorker, the codpiece began as a simple triangle of cloth connecting one
stocking to another. Over time, people seized on the opportunity to show off,
and the original cloth gusset became larger, more decorative, and generally harder to ignore.
In the interest of fairness, however, we can't pin this trend entirely on
teenagers. Even kings, like England's bombastic Henry VIII,
sported codpieces in their portraits long after their own adolescences had abandoned them.
Although teenage boys might have been handed a pamphlet or two by a well-meaning adult,
teenage girls in the Renaissance seem to have borne the brunt of advice for teens.
At least, it appears that they were expected to quietly follow that advice while the teen
boys were out and about spreading misrule and flashy new fashions.
Part of the rise in rule-setting conduct literature came about thanks to the growing
tide of humanism sweeping across Renaissance Europe. Part of the humanist philosophy
maintained that a good education would produce someone with high moral standards.
Hence, middle- and upper-class students who took part were often instructed in ethics,
learning to comport themselves as upstanding human beings and productive members of society.
Perhaps it's unsurprising, then, to learn that girls and women were the
targets of conduct literature. Authors who claimed to have authority on these matters,
but who didn't always prove their expertise, told girls to be quiet and not to make a fuss.
They were to follow the leads of their fathers and husbands and to guard their chastity. Who
presumed to have an insight into the lives of teen girls and women and tell them what to do?
As it turns out, the great majority of conduct literature writers were men.
"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong."
Though many like to point to the massive achievements of the Renaissance age,
from breathtaking art to the emergence of humanism, the era has its dark side.
Everyday people indulged in some less-than-savory ideas, especially when it came to interacting with
people who were different from them. Even their neighbors could be subject to abuse, especially
if they were Jewish. Anti-Semitism during the Renaissance was rampant throughout Europe,
fueled by long-standing prejudices built up during the Middle Ages.
Jewish people were often barred from full participation in civic life, kept from entering
some professions, and frequently sequestered in segregated neighborhoods called ghettos.
For Renaissance teens, this presented a serious problem. Many wanted to establish
their own independence and explore the world, much like modern teens,
but societal prejudices held them back. However, according to The Premodern Teenager,
they at least managed to echo their Gentile counterparts by forming their own rowdy groups
and a distinct Jewish youth culture. Others weren't even given that small amount of fun.
Haaretz reports that one 16th-century Jewish teen was forced to convert to Christianity along
with the rest of her family, eventually becoming a nun known as Sister Teodora.
In England, youths were connected to the growing tide of Protestantism, especially if they were
smart-aleck types at universities. The Catholic Sir Thomas More, who would later lose his head
by order of King Henry VIII, blamed "lewde laddys" for the religious upset, according
to the journal Past & Present. He believed that these youths took part in a widespread conspiracy
to topple the old religious ways and bring in the English Reformation and its Protestant beliefs.
More may not have been totally off, for about half of the population of England
at the time would have been under 20. Combined with the prevailing thought that all teens were
fundamentally wild and destructive unless properly corralled, and it's
easy to understand how he blamed the religious upset tormenting his nation on upstart youths.
He wasn't the only writer pinning charges of heresy on teens. Adolescence and Youth in Early
Modern England notes that this was a common complaint, with commentators fretting that
the young folks were spreading dangerous heresies throughout the land. Indeed, it appears that many
of the most fervent members of religious movements were young people, though it's hard to get exact
numbers out of some historic sources. Puritans, Presbyterians, and other nonconformists of the
Renaissance and later eras owed much of their growing ranks to religious dissenting teens.
Teenagers in noble and royal households might have looked set for life,
but the reality of their lives was complicated. When it came to marriage,
they were often little more than pawns in a high-stakes game of dynastic chess.
Take Mary, Queen of Scots, best remembered today as a political rival to England's Queen Elizabeth
I. Long before she lost her head by order of Elizabeth, Mary was already part of the political
landscape of 16th-century Europe. She became Queen of Scots after the death of her father, King James
V, when she was a mere six days old. Mary was only 15 years old when she was married to Francis II,
soon to become the king of France. When he died of a fever, she became a widow at 18.
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