The past few decades have seen increasing scholarly interest in the study of childhood in antiquity (e.g. P. Ariès, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Regime [1960]; M. Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens [1990]; A. Ellis Hanson, The Roman Family [1999]). As the first monograph on Roman girls, a group that appears only fleetingly in our sources, C.’s volume thus fills a gap in the literature (although see now S. Moraw and A. Kieburg [edd.], Mädchen im Altertum / Girls in Antiquity [2014]). A prominent theme that has emerged in this scholarship is that childhood is a culturally constructed phenomenon: when we speak about boys or girls in antiquity, we are not simply describing naturally occurring biological categories, but the complex sets of meanings that are attached to these (for an overview see L. Beaumont, Childhood in Ancient Athens: Iconography and Social History [2012]). It is therefore necessary that the author of a study of ‘girlhood’ take the time to set out what precisely is meant by this term. In the introduction, C. argues that a Roman girl's wedding, marking the end of girlhood (an argument elaborated in Chapter 5), was not the sole point of transition from girlhood to adult womanhood. Rather, there existed a series of transitional moments occurring over an extended period of time (pp. 9–10). Therefore, C. reasons, what we should look to is the period broadly defined as adolescence: ‘the formative second decade of Roman girls’ lives’ (p. 10). The reader is warned not to take the fact that there was ‘no life-stage for Roman girls that corresponds to modern adolescence’ as a methodological obstacle. However, they are left puzzled when told that, instead of identifying a ‘protracted period of adolescence’ (p. 10), we instead need to investigate the ‘reasons and consequences of the close timing of physical maturation, sexual initiation, marriage, and childbearing’ (p. 10). The inherent contradictions in this argument can be laid out simply. Marriage marks the end of girlhood, but there is little (if any) time between puberty and adulthood because Roman girls were still children when they became wives. Nevertheless, we are to look to a girl's teenage years, to her adolescence (something that we have been warned does not exist), to find a transitional period of girlhood, even though (according to C.) the elite girls she is studying would have been married – and therefore women – by this point. This methodological problem has consequences for the rest of the work.

The main body of the monograph is divided into five short chapters. The emphasis is on girls from elite families, ‘who were the focus of Augustan marriage legislation’ (p. 6), and C. draws mainly on literary and legal sources from the first century b.c. to the fourth century a.d.

Chapter 1 treats formal education and informal processes of socialisation. Using Musonius Rufus and Pliny, C. argues that the benefits of the former were largely imagined to be moral: formal education taught girls chastity and courage. Unlike the education of elite boys, which served to prepare them for entry into public life, the end goal of a girl's education was the proper performance of her roles as wife and mother. Exemplary storytelling also played an important role in informal education. C. sees Livy's Cloelia as a model of exemplary girlhood; by protecting her own virtue Cloelia ensures both her own marriageability and also helps to keep the whole community stable. Chapter 2 examines the safeguarding of premarital virginity. She draws out the tension between legalistic approaches, which made a girl's virginity a public issue, and the role of more private forms of paternal authority, stressed by Valerius Maximus and the authors of controversiae. Chapter 3 discusses medical sources, in particular Rufus of Ephesus and Soranus. C. describes how their recommendations for delaying the age of first marriage came up against the social forces that drove elite families to marry off their daughters very young. The regimes of diet and exercise prescribed by Rufus fitted into broader social norms of gender and were aimed at creating a pleasing feminine appearance and curbing sexual urges (p. 87). Chapter 4 returns to legal texts, where C. shows that jurists took pains to legally accommodate the cohabitation of very young girls with men. While the law placed the legal age of marriage at twelve, jurists did not seek to curtail the power that fathers had to form profitable alliances by finding matches for their daughters. Chapter 5 examines ‘The Wedding and the End of Girlhood’. C. is not concerned with setting out the details of the ceremony itself, but with the way literary texts figure the bride's ‘transition from pre-sexual to sexual status’ (p. 135). The texts used range in date from Catullus to Ausonius. In place of a conclusion there is a brief epilogue. Curiously, a Greek funerary epigram from the Fayum, mourning the death of a 21-year-old named Lysandre, is used to end this discussion of Roman girlhood.

Putting aside my methodological concerns, the arguments C. presents are frequently undermined by the selective and largely descriptive treatment of the evidence. For example, at the end of Chapter 4 C. turns to the way that young girls are depicted as precociously mature on funerary monuments (p. 124). She argues that this tendency aligns with broader ways of viewing girls as mature beyond their years. However, the fact that, once dead, girls were made to look like little women cannot be taken as straightforward evidence that very young girls were understood as sexually mature and nubile. Young children and infants of both sexes were often portrayed as little adults in funerary art: Hateria Superba, who died after only a year and a half, is shown standing tall and dressed in a tunic and a toga; Quintus Fabius Proculus, dead before his tenth month, is shown as much older and wearing a soldier's chlamys (D. Kleiner, Roman Imperial Funerary Altars with Portraits [1987], nos 58 and 67). J. Huskinson has sensibly argued that the surprising maturity of children in funerary memorials is an expression of parental grief over promise unfulfilled (J. Huskinson, ‘Constructing Childhood on Roman Funerary Monuments’, in A. Cohen and J. Rutter [edd.], Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy [2007], pp. 323–38).

When it comes to the textual sources, literary and generic questions go unexplored. To give some examples: in Chapter 1, Ovid's Perilla is seen as embodying concerns about how education could disrupt the transition to full adult femininity. Unfortunately, C.’s reading ignores Wyke's persuasive argument that women in Latin elegy are poetic fictions, scriptae puellae, used to reflect on the poetic programmes of their authors (M. Wyke, The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations [2002]; see also J. Ingleheart, ‘Ovid's ‘Scripta Puella’: Perilla as Poetic and Political Fiction in Tristia 3.7’, CQ 62 [2012], 227–41). In Chapter 5, the question of the Greek models for Catullus 61 and 62 is almost entirely ignored (it is only hinted at in two footnotes: p. 181 n. 21, p. 143 n. 30). In Chapter 3, C. points to Philoumenus’ description of clitoridectomy amongst the Egyptians as evidence of attempts to curb the sexual appetites of girls, but seems to be unaware that one of her main sources in this chapter, Soranus (as preserved by Caelius Aurelianus, Mustio and Paul of Aegina), also prescribed clitoridectomy, seemingly without marking it as a foreign practice (B.J. Brooten, Love between Women [1996], p. 162).

On a more general level, it would have been very useful if the publisher had included an index locorum or images of at least some of the funerary monuments discussed.