At a time when the Church's approach to children, not least to unborn infants, raises unprecedented levels of controversy, it is perhaps surprising to find a book such as this, billed as the first comprehensive history of child saints and their cults from late antiquity to the end of the fifteenth century, appearing in the most unattractive of formats, in what appears to be an exercise in desk-top publishing. Patricia Wasyliw has compiled an impressive list of child saints, and a relentless narrative of their lives and posthumous cults. As a simple gazetteer of such cults, this book has much to recommend it, albeit that it is entirely without illustrations and therefore cannot investigate the often fascinating visual and artistic aspects of the subject. A glance at the end notes, none the less, should alert the reader to the fact that whilst being rather more than an amateur enquiry, this is rather less than a full-scale academic monograph. In particular, the author is over-dependent upon synthetic and encyclopedic literature – some admirable, such as the Bibliotheca sanctorum, much of it, such as Butler or Baring-Gould's Lives of the saints, more than showing its age. Having cited the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum as if these represented the latest thinking on the texts, rather than pursuing her enquiry into the underlying substrata of the primary sources and their modern commentators, Wasyliw is too ready to accept the testimony of a series of generally Anglophone and not always reliable modern authorities. Even such standard works as Bede or Gregory of Tours are cited from Penguin Classics translations, rather then from their definitive scholarly editions. Recent studies on the role of children in miracle stories, such as Ronald Finucane's The rescue of the innocents (1997), or Didier Lett's L'Enfant des miracles (1997), are entirely ignored. To cite only a handful amongst many potential examples of the difficulties that can arise from placing too great a confidence in secondary authorities, Wasyliw's account of the cult of Wistan (alias Wigstan) of Mercia would have benefited from even the briefest glance at the bibliography to Jane Sayers and Leslie Watkiss's new edition of Thomas of Marlborough (Oxford 2003). Her references to a cult of St Kenelm at ‘Faversham, Hampshire’, although referenced to Butler's Lives and to Christina Hole's (less than scholarly) Saints in folklore, entirely ignores the recent edition of Kenelm's life and miracles by Rosalind Love (Oxford 1997). Faversham, of course, lies in Kent, and seems to have no claim whatsoever to possess relics, let alone the body, of Kenelm. These are blemishes. Overall, however, they should not entirely obscure the merits of this survey. Although there is more of simple listing here than there is of analysis or comparative enquiry, Wasyliw does draws attention to a number of themes which run through the history of infant sanctity: the role of the child as innocent victim, as pure voice of divine truth and of the murdered infant as public proof of the secret wickedness of adult, most often of royal or aristocratic crime. The transformation of classical ideas of childish passivity into Christian veneration of innocence tells us much about changing attitudes to childhood, as does the assumption that children as young as three might be capable of a rational response to religious truth. The ‘magic’ of Wasyliw's title is an alliterative exaggeration, but there is none the less a useful, if superficial, discussion of necromancy and folklore. The perhaps over-familiar category of the infant victim of Jewish perfidy is here expanded to comprehend a far wider spectrum of social and religious history, and although the last two chapters inevitably take us back to the world of William of Norwich and his successors as victims of supposed ritual murder, there are interesting reflections, even here. A brief coda reminds us that not only the blood libel, but the urge to canonise the innocent, remains an abiding theme in Catholic history, with a brief, but fascinating survey of nineteenth and twentieth-century examples of the genre.