In Search of Adolescence: A New Look at an Old Idea

Is adolescence really a modern cultural construct, as many have claimed? Author and veteran youth worker Crystal Kirgiss began her journey into the history of adolescence when the fourteenth-century Squire of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales caught her eye. Not a boy, not yet a man—the Squire’s classic hallmarks of adolescent attitudes and behaviors pushed her to search further and further into historical literature and documents in search of adolescence. Here Kirgiss offers youth workers a glimpse into the rich history of adolescence from the tenth through the eighteenth century, walking readers through exactly what many deep thinkers, artistic creators, impassioned preachers, and other influencers had to say about this life stage, long before our modern and postmodern incarnations of youth and youth ministry existed.