This study is based on and abbreviates a Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Johns Hopkins University in 1999. In an effort to contest results of scholarly debates about concepts of childhood in Europe in the Middle Ages, MacLehose strives to demonstrate that literature from the High Middle Ages reveals the presence of a heightened anxiety over children in society, or at least within certain segments of society. Adults perceived children as especially vulnerable, susceptible to dangers and threats, and fragile. Medieval authors accounted for children's vulnerability by tracing it back to factors inherent to the child's perceived nature of being innocent, open, trusting, or morally weak. At the same time they recognized children's vulnerability as a factor that exposed children all the more to the dangers they encountered when coming into contact with people who cared for them, that is, mothers, midwives, and nurses, or people who otherwise were perceived as the “other,” at the margins of medieval Christian society, that is, heretics or adherents of other religions, primarily Jews. In pursuit of this thesis, the book examines data derived from a wide range of sources, including medical texts, chronicles detailing historical events, legends of miracles of the Virgin Mother Mary, hagiography, martyrdom accounts of children, and theological texts written for a broader, more popular audience. The study contributes to the scholarly work of reconstructing the developments of (the) medieval notion(s) of the “child,” including the assessment of whether or not one may speak of the existence of such a notion in the first place. Less convincingly in the first chapter, but then quite solidly in the remainder of the study, the book also demonstrates the thorough interplay between the three realms of family, society, and religion.

The book presents a study of four primary, specialized discourses involving children as they emerge in medieval literature. Chapter 1 examines medical texts and commentaries on them in an effort to discern the perceptions of the interplay between women's bodily fluids (menstrual blood and milk) and their impact on the health of the fetus and the newborn child. Paradoxically, women's bodies were seen simultaneously as life-giving and death-carrying. The attention this chapter pays to the treatment of the child in medical literature offers an important contribution to an emerging scholarly focus in studies of the history of children. Chapter 2 carefully attends and explicates debates between “orthodox” and “heretical” Christian groups about the necessity of infant baptism in light of varying views of the doctrine of original sin (a more detailed discussion of the correlation between developing heresies and Catholic responses during that time is provided in an appendix). Chapter 3 examines the subset of martyrdom accounts of children who supposedly were killed at the hands of Jews in ritual settings. The present study offers the first systematic investigation of figures of the child—either as a Christian to begin with or as a young convert from Judaism—and of the mother mourning in grief in these texts, which, in their turn, contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. Chapter 4 concentrates its attention on the famous Children's Crusade of 1212. As explanation of its failure, the study identifies in the sources a blame not only on threats against the children from the outside, primarily in the form of Muslims and foreign traders, but also on the corruption of children's innocence as a necessary consequence of their development and growth.

MacLehose has skillfully structured his study in such a way that these individual discourses, each of which focuses on one particular period of the child's development, that is, the stage of the fetus and newborn, the infant, the child of the age of reason, and the adolescent child, respectively, follow one another in sequence. This arrangement contributes to the impression created for the reader that the primary literature that has been examined was interested not only in particular children at a certain stage of their development but in the whole, complex period of childhood. Yet the study does not formulate such a claim directly, which also would not be supported by the specific discourses that have been examined. Some consideration of other specialized, but well-known material on children that witnesses to anxieties over children during the time studied—for example, the story of the Pied Piper of Hamlin that refers to events in 1284—would have been welcome. One might take some exception to the study's claim of “a heightening of social anxiety over children” (xi) during the time studied. The four discourses that come into focus are very specialized, and one wonders to what extent they reflect the sentiments of the broader strata of society. That the written texts that survive from the preceding centuries do not contain these discourses does not constitute evidence that people in the West—ever since the disputes between Augustine and Pelagius—were not similarly anxious about the fate of their babies who died before baptism. Comparisons between Western and Eastern perspectives could have been helpful as well. Some of the themes—for example, the Jewish child who becomes a Christian convert and is slaughtered by his father, and whose mother mourns and/or converts to Christianity herself—have at least contributing sources in literature from late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages in other language traditions, notably in Greek and Syriac sources.

MacLehose has mastered and carefully examined an impressive collection of varied primary sources in Latin as well as the requisite secondary literature. His book presents scholars of childhood studies with detailed scholarly treatments of distinct sets of literature that they will be eager to incorporate into more topically oriented studies in the history of childhood. For the most part the book is carefully edited. The lack of an index renders the printed version of this Gutenberg e-volume that this reviewer was able to examine less useful for scholars who work at institutions that do not subscribe to this service. They still are well-advised to place this volume on their own bookshelf for study and reference.