The Child and Childhood in Older Croatian Literature

The paper, starting out from universally spread and inveterate views that the child and childhood in the Middle Ages and the early Modern Period did not attract any special attention from writers, endeavours to show that the child as concrete, individual being, a being sui generis was nevertheless presented in some parts of older Croatian literature, for example in the autobiographical texts of J. Panonius and D. Zlatarić and in the epic of Gundulić. Particular attention is devoted to the analysis of Držić’s pastorals in the wish to show that this writer too shaped the figure of the child or adolescent as a being sui generis realistically, with psychological conviction and on the basis of empirical observation