New Beginnings. For most boys and girls, any opportunities for school attendance came when they were quite young and ended before they reached adolescence, which brought both sexual maturity and the beginnings of their life as a working person. It was a period when young people, particularly girls, were expected to begin settling down, not a time of "finding themselves" or "exploring their potential."

Changes. The onset of menstruation, termed menarche in modern English and "the flowers" in the sixteenth century, provided a girl with the clearest signal of bodily changes leading to adulthood. The average age at menarche has declined in the Western world, from about 15.5 in the 1890s to less than 13 at the end of the twentieth century, but it is not clear that the average age in the Renaissance and Reformation period was significantly higher...