Between the Rod and the Rood

Childhood and Monastic Formation in England, c.950-1200.

Author: Dr Steven G. Hodgson

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This captivating study, based on original research undertaken at The University of Oxford, offers fascinating insight into the lives of a group of children in Early Medieval England who were called "oblates". This term, meaning "sacrificed" describes the status of boys and girls who were given up by their parents, offered to monastic houses, and raised "Between the Rod and the Rood" - or "the cane and the cross" - to live the rest of their lives in prayer and study.

Scouring much of the surviving evidence, and demonstrating both the challenges and possibilities for historians, the author carefully leads readers through contemporary sources to reach compelling understandings of their life courses. He not only provides the first comparative study of its kind on contemporary gender categories of boys and girls, but explores in rich detail how their horizons were shaped: across time, geographical space, and by a tumultuous historical background - of European intellectual renaissance, of religious reform, and of conquest, in the newly emerged Kingdom of England.