EUI - Working Youth in Early Modern Europe

Most adolescence and youth in early modern Europe did not, as today, attend school or university on a full-time basis, but worked. I would like to examine the work experiences, work tasks and workload of this age specific group; young people between child hood and marriage, approximately aged 15 to 30. They were servants, apprentices and journeymen, often living outside the parental household. Did these age groups have specific youth cultures, disctinct from the rest of the society? And how did their exper ience differ from region to region, for men and women and from city and town to countryside? Young and unwed they were subject to the authority of their employer, the master. Their experiences may therefore be interpreted in two ostensibly contradicting w ays: Liberation from paternal control and towards independence, or merely the replacement of one authority figure; the parent, for another; the master.