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SUMMARY:Coming of Age When Winter is Coming: the Stark Choices of Late Med
 ieval and Early Modern Youth - Laura Tisdall (Kings)
DTSTART:20131127T173000Z
DTEND:20131127T190000Z
UID:TALK49123@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Gui Xi Young
DESCRIPTION:The six Stark children share one common feature – they are a
 ll still young\, and perceived as such by the society in which they live. 
 Perceptions of youth mutated from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in
  England\, but common features included an emphasis on youth’s pliabilit
 y\, its temptations and struggles\, and hence its importance as ‘the cho
 osing time’ between salvation or damnation. This dualistic idea was bols
 tered by the Protestant Reformation\, emphasising that to have any chance 
 of attaining heaven one had to repent\, and swiftly.\n\nAlthough medieval 
 and early modern youth was characteristically long\, shifting and ill-defi
 ned for both sexes\, boys tended both to leave childhood earlier as appren
 tices or pages\, and to take longer to prove themselves as men. Maester Ae
 mon tells Jon Snow that ‘Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy and let 
 the man be born\,’ but both Jon and Robb\, like stereotypical medieval y
 outh\, struggle to choose manly reason above boyish passion. When Robb\, t
 hrough lust and short-sightedness\, fails to ‘kill the boy’\, Walder F
 rey does it for him. Jon also fails to take Aemon’s advice\, as we see a
 fter he risks everything to save his ‘sister’\, although it seems poss
 ible he may be able to redeem himself if he is resurrected.\n\nFor girls\,
  youth was tied much more tightly to the dictates of biology\, beginning w
 ith puberty and ending upon marriage with the loss of virginity\, as demon
 strated by Sansa’s uncertain status. Still not quite a woman\, Sansa has
  to choose between truth and lies. It’s possible that\, under Littlefing
 er’s tutelage\, she could become too cold and calculating\, ‘killing t
 he girl’ – her former self – and becoming Alayne Stone\, a name whic
 h echoes the merciless persona of her undead mother\, Lady Stoneheart. As 
 for Arya\, Martin shows us how her desire for justice can be distorted int
 o a desire for vengeance\, when life becomes too cruel for mercy. Unlike S
 ansa\, her danger is not ‘killing the girl’ but ‘killing the woman
 ’. Her 36-year old companion in the House of Black and White\, the ‘wa
 if’\, is still a child\; if Arya continues to train as an assassin\, she
  too\, it is implied\, will have to give up her adult future.\n\nAs in med
 ieval and early modern models of the ‘ages of man’\, which related lif
 e-stages to the seasons\, youth is represented as a brief ‘autumn’ in 
 A Song of Ice and Fire. All of the Stark children are associated with summ
 er\; either born in the long summer\, like Arya\, Bran and Rickon\, or see
 n as green boys with ‘the smell of summer’ on them\, like Robb and Jon
 \, or enchanted with the knights of summer\, like Sansa. At this point in 
 the series\, summer is over\, but winter is not yet here\, which is analog
 ous to the medieval Christian idea that Judgement Day was continually clos
 e at hand. If winter symbolises the resurrection of the dead and God’s f
 inal judgement\, we are entering autumn\, the ‘choosing time’ – and 
 all the living Starks have choices to make. 
LOCATION:Deighton Room\, Trinity 
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