Theories of ParenthoodAs is the case with manuals on nursing or infant care, no instruction manuals on
parenthood were composed in medieval Ashkenaz. Moreover, since parenting
has few medical aspects, there are no instructions concerning parenting in med-
ical manuscripts. As we saw in chapter 4, even the few instructions that were
recorded in the Jewish sources concerning care for infants are usually concerned
with the employment of wet nurses and do not provide instructions to parents.
Perhaps the assumption was that women, who were the main caregivers of young
children, instinctively knew what they were supposed to do and did not need fur-
ther instruction, while men, who employed wet nurses, needed advice.
As noted above, some manuals of this sort existed in Christian society, al-
though such compositions were more plentiful in the late Middle Ages.^1 Books
that were written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries such as Bartholo-
meaus Anglicus’s (d. 1250) Liber de Proprietatibus Rerum; Phillipe de No-
varre’s (1195–1265) Les quatres ages de l’homme, and Konrad v. Megenburg’s
(1309–1374) Das Buch der Natur, all devoted attention to parental roles; there
is no equivalent of these compositions in medieval Ashkenazic culture. In ad-
dition, information about parenting can also be gleaned from stories about
saints’ lives and from instructional letters written by parents for their children
and by husbands for their wives.^2 These sources, which have no direct paral-
lels in medieval Jewish society, also discuss parenting relatively briefly and
seem to share the assumption of some of the Jewish texts, namely, that parents
know naturally how to raise their children. Hence, the lack of attention devoted
to parenting in both the Jewish and Christian sources does not necessarily in-
dicate that these issues were unimportant, but it does pose a challenge for his-
torians who wish to describe and analyze these issues.
We will start our investigation with a common source, which was interpreted
and commented on by both medieval Jews and Christians—the fifth com-
mandment: “Honor your father and your mother” (Exod. 20:12) and other re-
lated verses. Most commentators write about the main focus of the com-
mandment—the obligations of children toward their parents, and do not
discuss the responsibilities of parents toward their children, which is the flip
side of this commandment. In specifying the obligations of children toward
their parents, the verse in Lev. (19:5) is frequently quoted as well: “You shall
each revere his mother and his father.” A variety of topics emerge from the dis-
cussion of these verses: children’s obligations to obey and honor their parents,
to support them in their old age and fulfill their wishes, and their duty to bury
their parents after their death.^3 Most of these duties become relevant when par-
ents reach old age and can no longer fend for themselves.^4
Some commentators also discuss what parents do for their children, at times
in the context of an explanation of why children must honor and tend to their
parents. R. Joseph Bekhor Shor (twelfth century) explains: