_Childhood_ is an ancient word in English. The _OED_ takes as its earliest example for _cildhad_ a tenth-century gloss between the lines of the Lindisfarne Gospels: “soð he cuoeð from cildhad” (Mark 9:21). A father explains to Jesus that fits had wracked his son’s body since the earliest years of his life. The miraculous cure Jesus performs stands as a test of prayer. The gathered crowd, the disciples, and generations of interpreters since have voiced many questions about the meaning of this scene, but no one questions the meaning of childhood. This confident unanimity over the meaning of childhood is perhaps the most potent, and indeed dangerous, thing about this keyword. We have, it seems, a miraculous faith in childhood itself. Young children everywhere must be fed, carried, taught to speak, and prepared to function appropriately within their particular social worlds (Stearns 2009). Conceptions of childhood all harken back to this trajectory from dependency toward autonomy, but there the consensus ends: Is the mewling infant darling or bestial, the roaming youth a crusader or a scamp, the laboring child valued or abused, the child reader virtuous, imaginative, or indolent? Childhood may be widely recognized as a life stage that stretches...