To aim to write a history of infanticide in Britain over four centuries is an ambitious task but Ann-Marie Kilday has certainly achieved this. The author draws upon her expertise in Scottish history and broadens out to encompass England and Wales. The study seeks to explore the enduring and persistent nature of this crime in the context of profound shifts in the social, medical and legal background to infanticide.

Kilday starts in chapter 1 with the criminalisation of infanticide in the seventeenth century (1624 in England, 1690 in Scotland) and its links with illegitimacy (laws of affiliation in 1576, 1610). It was difficult to prosecute this crime before these statutes due to the rules of evidence, under which it had to be proved that the infant was born alive and murdered. In 1624 concealment of death provided evidence of guilt in England, while in 1690 in Scotland concealment of birth provided such evidence. Following the passing of these laws there was a substantial increase in the number of cases.

The book has six further substantive chapters which provide an analysis of infanticide chronologically. Chapter 2 considers the early modern ‘archetype’ of infanticide: the unmarried female domestic servant and the unreliable evidence and unpredictable outcomes of the courtroom. These common elements were largely a product of the law of infanticide itself: ‘the specific components of the seventeenth-century legislation relating to new-born child murder meant that it was very difficult for anyone other than an unmarried mother to be accused of the offence in the first place’ (p. 26, Kilday's italics). A smattering of men and married women did, however, find themselves in the dock. Religion remained more important in Scotland and this influenced sentencing practices: as an alternative to corporal punishment, imprisonment or execution, those convicted could be banished for 14 years or less, or for life. Judicial attitudes softened towards infanticide after circa 1760 and this trend continued, although it did not go unchallenged. The chapter presents very useful graphs which compare indictments and convictions for infanticide at the Old Bailey in London (as a proxy for England), Wales and Scotland.

Chapter 3 discusses the difficulties in identifying pregnancy and childbirth in a period when all pregnancies were largely a private matter. Nonetheless, the bodies and behaviour of unmarried women were often subject to the surveillance of other women. Since many of those accused of infanticide had concealed their deliveries, they had not enjoyed the ‘ceremony of childbirth’ described by other early modern historians. There could be accomplices to child-murder, such as other women and putative fathers. Chapter 4 is not for the faint-hearted as it describes the various methods of disposal of infant bodies, from abortion, exposure, abandonment and baby farming, to drowning, smothering, neglect, strangulation, battery, wounding, poisoning and burning. The extent of resort to each approach varied between Scotland, England and Wales. The provision of acceptable medical evidence of infanticide in court contributed towards the professionalisation of medicine. Forensic pathology was used to determine the cause of death and medical ‘experts’ were called upon in court. Medical men (physicians, surgeons, male midwives) commented upon the state of infants' bodies while midwives remarked upon whether the woman's body showed evidence of birth and breast milk.

Kilday returns to shifting attitudes in chapter 5, together with the important changes in the law of concealment of birth in England and Wales (1803) and Scotland (1809). A major focus of the chapter is the moral panic over baby farming and the perceived increase in infanticide in Victorian Britain, with a peak of infanticide and concealment cases in the 1860s. Thereafter there was increased leniency in England and Wales, but this was less in evidence in Scotland. The nineteenth century was characterised by the dichotomy between moral panic and leniency. Motives for child murder are assessed in chapter 6, which others believed to range from shame, isolation and poverty, to malicious intent, ignorance of methods of delivery, and psychosocial reasons such as puerperal insanity. In the early modern period, Kilday argues, shame was the most popular explanation. This changed to insanity in the Victorian period, and then back to shame and poverty after 1900, as evidenced from court cases, newspapers and debates in parliament. The actual motives of the mothers are almost impossible to recover.

The final chapter brings us up to the present day. During the twentieth century infanticide was more specifically delineated, with further significant changes in legislation in England and Wales (1922) and Scotland (1938). The century witnessed a downward trend in infanticide and concealment owing largely to the increased availability of contraception. Nevertheless, Kilday suggests that there has been a stubborn persistence of the crime since circa 1975, and more evidence of male involvement in cases of concealment.

This is a comprehensive analysis of infanticide in Britain since 1600. I have just two niggles. The first is that it was not always clear when the evidence was non-British (of which there was a great deal) and to obtain an answer took careful unpicking from the footnotes, relegated by Palgrave to the back of the book. This meant that although there was careful analysis of the differences between Scotland, England and Wales, there was also, at times, an unhelpful conflation of the British experience with that of the European and North American. I also found the footnotes and bibliography difficult to use in general; shortened footnotes required frequent looking up in a bibliography which unnecessarily divided secondary works into books, journal articles and chapters in edited books, instead of one alphabetical list. Nevertheless, this book is relevant to scholars in many fields of the discipline. The history of infanticide is not just the history of a particular crime but tells a much wider story in terms of the history of law, medicine, gender, religion and morality.