Preliminary Programme

This paper will address the role of early-modern (1550-1800) English servants in the training and education of the children residing in the households in which these servants worked. Some resident servants were employed primarily, if not solely, to educate the children of their masters and mistresses. These tutors, governesses, and chaplains are more visible to the historian than their ubiquitous fellow servants and apprentices, who also played an important, if more obscure, role in the education and training of children.

The duties of both servants and apprentices, who to their contemporaries were another form of servant, were seldom recorded. Instruction that such servants provided was certainly only one of their many functions. Evidence for their teaching role appears incidentally in diaries, letters, and other personal accounts, few of which servants themselves wrote.

The paper will discuss the two groups of resident servants: the relatively small group of professional teachers and and the much larger group of servants who were occasional teachers and whose educative function was reported sporadically in both pre-literate and literate English society. (Show less)

The aim of this paper is to comment, first of all, the principles of the educational model suggested to the young noble Poles. It emphasizes the importance which one attaches to the education during the analyzed period and describes the most significant changes that were taking place in the pedagogical methods.
Then, the role of the private tutors in the realization of the educational program is analyzed. The author discusses their professional competencies and the duties imposed on them.
Finally, the place occupied by private tutors is compared with that of other servants employed in the noble families in Old Poland. (Show less)

The paper aims at analysing the role of domestic personnel in the upbringing and education of the master’s children, focussing on Italy and France between the 16th and 20th century. The first part of the paper will review the exiting historical literature on the theme, while the second part will analyse how servants were represented in Italian and French behavioural texts for parents and masters. These texts usually stress the negative influence that servants were likely to have on the children. Therefore they suggest choosing very carefully the servants who had to look after the children. Wet nurses, governesses and other domestics are often represented as a threat for the physical health and psychological welfare of the babies, girls and boys. In part this is due to the cultural distance between masters and servants; in this sense the popular culture of the lower classes is seen as a danger for middle and upper class families. This will allow us to discuss the role of domestic personnel as cultural mediator between different classes and cultures. Some final remarks will be devoted to the role of migrant domestic workers in the education of children in Western societies at present times. (Show less)