From the epistemological point of view, the field of history of education has always been one of the most challenging for scholarship to define.The roots of such a difficulty are multilayered and have barely emerged over time, but they have kept their grasp on the potential development of a field that could make an enormous contribution to the global understanding of one of the core practices of every human society.In this chapter, we will dig into these roots, cutting across epistemological and geo-cultural perspectives, in order to provide a scenario that might overcome the impasse that impedes the global recognition of the scholarly and academic field of the history of education, and put forward a tentative outline of an approach that could pave the way for such recognition. This approach is based on the comparative method. It is not anything new, as it dwells in the Enlightened attitude toward universalism and comparativism for global literature, historiography, philosophy, and so on. But it has paradoxically found very few chances so far to be applied in the literature of the history of education.This chapter will inquire into the reasons for this neglect, and outline an epistemology of a comparative method that might illustrate new ways of thinking about production for the future of the history of education.

In the Italian landscape, the dissemination of scholarly research on children's literature is influenced by the fact that the disciplinary division of academic knowledge generally considers children's literature as a branch of History of Education, more rarely as one of Philosophy of Education and, when dealing with children aged 3-5, as a part of Early Childhood Education. For this reason, essays on books and writings for young people often appear in journals mainly devoted to the alleged "major" pedagogical subjects, with some notable exceptions. As a whole, children's literature today is a well-developed academic field in Italy, with regular international exchanges on the subject matter. Such academic divisions influence the very field of publications devoted to children's literature: it is represented by academic journals that include children's literature in a broader research scope, and specialized journals, often initiated outside the academic world and addressed to a larger audience of readers, parents, educators, and those who express their interest in the subject matter.Among the academic journals, the official bulletin of the SIPED Association (Italian Pedagogical Society), Pedagogia Oggi ("Pedagogy today"), which publishes articles both in Italian and English, hosts articles in all areas of educational studies and therefore also prints research on children's literature. This subject also appears often in the online journal Nuova Secondaria Ricerca ("New High School Research"), which is the academic branch of Nuova Secondaria ("New High School"), a professional journal for high school teachers and administrators. Another publication, Bambini ("Children"), which is

À quelle fêtes du Printemps vert nous faudra-t-il laver ce doigt souillé aux poudres des archives? (At what rites of green spring Must we clean this finger, soiled With the dust of archives?) -Saint-John Perse.

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