The more children a society has, the less it writes about them, and the reiterated purpose of this volume is to fill a ‘lacuna in scholarship’. The boldest effort is that of Reider Aasgaard, who suggests that the gospels of infancy are addressed to a puerile audience, which may be partially responsible for their content: readers of that very adult volume, the Koran, in which these episodes pass for history, may demur. Tony Burke proceeds more circumspectly with a review of parallels and antecedents to the same narratives. The travails of real children at the font are the subject of Inta Ivanovska's contribution: she concludes that, whereas in Cyprian the baptised child was a soldier against a pagan world, Augustine would have regarded immediate death as the most auspicious sequel to immersion. Carole Burnett shows that, for all the evidence of maternal affection in Christian sources, the ideal mother was one who could renounce her offspring for the sake of God. Cornelia Horn finds in Basil and Nazianzen more than a little insight into both the talents and the afflictions of the young. Susan Holman finds that moral innocence is often set off against physical disease in tales of the healing of children by saints; Horn's review of the same topic shows that sickness in children could be at once a catalyst to miraculous powers and a cause of spiritual perturbation, while the cases of infant deformity examined by Nicole Kelley forced both families and healers into reflection on the fallen state of humanity. But sin is manifold, and I am not so ready as John Martens to discover an allusion to pederasty in every admonition against the harming of children; why should more be read into Matthew xviii.6 than classicists read into the charge of corrupting the young that was laid against Socrates? Children were certainly forced into the monasteries by coercion and cajolery, according to Ville Vuolanto, and Horn (in a third contribution) collects allusions to the edifying behaviour of fictitious children from sermons to ascetics. In an essay on the ‘difficulties’ raised by the admission of juveniles to the novitiate, Carrie Schroeder finds one clear embargo on the defloration of minors, though she notes that monasteries became ever more hospitable to these young sirens. One reason, as Chrysi Kotsifou remarks in a survey of the evidence in papyri regarding orphans, is that monks were often given the charge of children whose parents were dead or too impecunious to support them. A new avenue of study is suggested in Robert Phenix's proposal that the data concerning childhood in early Christian Ethiopia should be subjected to the methods of social science, but it would seem that current ethnography offers little more than suggestive analogues. The editors might usefully have solicited some reflection on the factors which make the Gospels so deficient, and Augustine so plethoric, in information regarding the childhood of their protagonists: a ‘lacuna’ is a historical datum even before it is ‘filled’.