Books: The Kindness of Strangers by John Boswell
I'm in the odd position here of recommending a book that I'm personally tapping out on. John Boswell is great. His tone, his erudition, his essential humanity as a writer: I'm a serious fangirl after a book and a half. (I read all of his book "Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe" and half of this one.)
The full title/subtitle of this book is "The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance." I made it through the introduction and the first two, almost three chapters (chapters in this work are lengthy, so that's a couple of hundred pages - sections might be more accurate).
I think this could be a very useful work for people writing fantasy who want to explore family structures, or who are thinking about the world-building they want in a story that foundlings/orphans/children might occupy important places in. And if you're doing something world-building that has a medieval feel and want some deep family structure background, I'm sure this would be really useful. I learned a ton in the first few sections.
But I'm also getting triggered like whoa and I realized I was still reading in big part because I thought "this book could be really useful for someone" and at the moment that someone isn't me. Content warnings for family issues, poverty issues, sexual abuse issues. The problem isn't with the tone or approach of the text in any way, Boswell seems like a really good person as a writer. The content itself is just kind of intense for me. If you're looking for some deep reference for family world-building in a secondary world, this could be a great resource. Now having said that I'm giving myself permission to drop this off at a library donation table and maybe come back to it some other decade.
The full title/subtitle of this book is "The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance." I made it through the introduction and the first two, almost three chapters (chapters in this work are lengthy, so that's a couple of hundred pages - sections might be more accurate).
I think this could be a very useful work for people writing fantasy who want to explore family structures, or who are thinking about the world-building they want in a story that foundlings/orphans/children might occupy important places in. And if you're doing something world-building that has a medieval feel and want some deep family structure background, I'm sure this would be really useful. I learned a ton in the first few sections.
But I'm also getting triggered like whoa and I realized I was still reading in big part because I thought "this book could be really useful for someone" and at the moment that someone isn't me. Content warnings for family issues, poverty issues, sexual abuse issues. The problem isn't with the tone or approach of the text in any way, Boswell seems like a really good person as a writer. The content itself is just kind of intense for me. If you're looking for some deep reference for family world-building in a secondary world, this could be a great resource. Now having said that I'm giving myself permission to drop this off at a library donation table and maybe come back to it some other decade.