Ville Vuolanto has already established himself as one of the leading scholars on late antique childhood and this latest monograph addresses a complex, apparently paradoxical question: how could the Christian ideal of asceticism, which prima facie seems antithetical to the goals of legitimate marriage and family notoriety — to say nothing of the basic biological need to procreate — find root amongst the élites of late Rome? His answer proves equally complex: that the virtues of asceticism, advocated by the patristic authors of the late fourth and early fifth centuries (c. 375–425 c.e.), were consciously promoted to define the practice both as a means to strengthen family cohesion and to further its reputation. Such a thesis, if true, must be predicated on two basic components: evidence for an argument from theologians that resolved the inherent problems of sexual renunciation and the family's primary raison d’être, and ‘how asceticism actually fitted into the elite culture and mentality’ (14). This is the task that V. sets for himself, attempting to see under what conditions children might commit to a life of chastity. For the first task, he has carefully plotted a clear line and evolution of discourse. This reviewer feels, however, that he has not quite followed through on the second.

Understanding the development of Christian ascetic thought, primarily by western authors upon whom V. is focusing, is hardly a new area of scholarship. And asceticism, of course, included many different forms of privation. V. acknowledges this from the beginning, but his interests primarily focus on family continuity in relation to a life of sexual self-denial. He accordingly explores how Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and others redeployed the language of kin relations, obligations and survival to address élite families’ concerns about (or obsessions with?) lineage and descent. By repurposing concepts like pietas, for example, patristic authors were able to cast the ascetic lifestyle as piety both towards God and the family. Constructing a successful ideology thus depended on co-opting the language of kinship and applying it to the Church. From thence, a social network — a new familia —could be constructed and subsume the needs of the family and indeed the family itself. The virginal and the celibate (an important distinction, not always as clearly delineated as they might be) created and augmented a new notoriety both within the old family and the new. Those who benefited from the ascetics’ faith and good works were their spiritual offspring, as real as any by blood. This was indeed an aristocratic fruitfulness.

Creating the ideological, however, is only the first part of V.’s equation, and the second part of the book attempts to demonstrate how it might be manifest in the minds and actions of those at whom such admonitions were targeted. Here V. is careful to consider a number of factors. These include a penetrating and extended discussion about gender issues (arguing mothers were more inclined to volunteer children to the ascetic life), family size, economic considerations, tension between family desires and those of the individual (that is, parents and their children), and even individual circumstances where the ascetic choice might or might not be viable. What becomes apparent in the delicate balancing act theoretically facing Christians between fame in this world and everlasting life in the next is a series of mitigating circumstances that must have limited the movement's popularity in actuality. By extension, the survival of behaviours conditioned by older traditions and by practical factors must also raise doubts about the degree to which patristic thought in this regard significantly penetrated the mentality of most élites. V.’s conclusion that, by the early fifth century, the virtue of becoming a monk or a nun for ordinary people is undoubtedly true (145); but it does not follow that the social capital potentially gained by the élite made asceticism necessarily more attractive (outside possibly the religious élite, who were interested in promoting familial chastity within a specific venue). To argue more forcefully otherwise, V. might have done more with the topic of raising one's offspring within the late antique élite family — how expectations of boys and girls for adulthood resulted in certain forms of childcare, education and socialization. Despite these concerns, however, V. demonstrates that children remained central to family continuity and he is surely right in arguing that Christian asceticism provided new avenues towards that goal.

Apart from the thesis itself, one of the great strengths of the book in general is the way in which he interprets the voluminous source material. V. is careful to delineate the different kinds of evidence he uses, and in the case of the hagiographic accounts he reads them with a particularly rigorous eye.

In the end, V. has made an effective, indeed compelling, case for a working, nuanced rapprochement between élite family norms and the wholly new phenomenon of voluntary abstinence. From an intellectual and arguably a cultural standpoint, this became a reality, and one that in future centuries would bare fruit. That said, whether this construct translated into any sort of a substantial movement amongst the Roman aristocracy, in the fifth century c.e. at least, is a bit less secure. As the author himself notes in his Introduction: ‘It is a difficult task to access the actual cases and patterns of social interaction, as there is little information left at the grassroots level of negotiations and confrontations’ (17). Just so.