Until recently the study of Roman children was defined by methodological approaches rooted in textual evidence with incidental attention given to visual analysis and/or the archaeological record. In the past decade or so, scholarship has profitably focussed on the visibility of children within Roman visual language and the importance of children within the cultural symbolism of Roman state art. In general, however, much less attention has been paid to the intersection of image and text in one of the largest evidentiary categories for understanding Roman concepts of childhood, namely funerary monuments. This is particularly surprising since, as B. Rawson has noted (Children and Childhood in Roman Italy [2003], p. 363), the quality and quantity of children's funerary monuments from the Roman world is a phenomenon without parallel in any culture before the twentieth century. Though demographically biased, monuments of the prematurely deceased have the potential to illuminate the social valuation of children, constructions of childhood and, arguably, genuine expressions of sentiment. In this monograph, based upon his 2008 doctoral thesis, M. attempts to look at many of these issues and more through a wide-angle lens. This is an ambitious book, cataloguing nearly 900 portrait monuments from Rome, Italy and the western provinces, and for that reason alone a most welcome study of the genre.

To establish the parameters of his study, M. begins with a brief overview of the inherently problematic task of defining childhood in the Roman world. As a social construct, one's status as a ‘child’ was likely defined by any number of variables – legal, socio-economical, biological in addition to ritual, marital and perceptual – and, thus, the concept of childhood was perhaps more complex than modern notions based on chronological criteria alone. M., as with most scholars, uses calendar age as the sole criterion and while some may question his upper age limit of sixteen as too generous, others may wonder more about the value of using tombs of young slaves as reliable source material for assessing notions of childhood. While his geographic range is vast (and he is mindful of the fluid and somewhat fictive nature of a Roman ‘West’), M. circumscribes his study of children's funerary monuments by limiting his analysis to reliefs, urns, stelae, altars, pillar and aedicule formats and excluding sarcophagi and free-standing sculpture.

Chapter 2, ‘Commemorating the Roman Child’, addresses variables that affected the choice to erect a monument to a child. That the corpus of children's monuments from Rome – both figural and non-figural – is replete with bias has long been recognised; which children actually get commemorated at death is often a function of class, status, age and/or sex. Recent comparative studies of children's monuments have also illustrated the essential links between certain types of figural monuments and the conventions that governed the depiction and construction of childhood within each genre. M. covers some new territory with analyses of iconographical ambiguities (age and gender), discrepancies between image and text, and instances of other inconcinnities, deliberate or circumstantial. The chapter closes with a short section, ‘Locating “Roman” Children’, that raises more questions than it answers, though this is not a criticism. M. considers how geography, identity, assimilation and regional production may have affected the commemoration of children and is sensitive to the complications of looking at so large a data set (especially in terms of imbalances in regional publication or attention historically devoted to better preserved examples).

Chapter 3, ‘The Iconography of Childhood’, considers the iconographical attributes of children and the occurrence of such attributes by type and gender. While this is a welcome compilation and overview, this chapter does reveal some of the limitations of the broad scope of M.'s study; the frequency of specific attributes by region is presented in an accompanying table but one wishes for a more granular analysis of regional patterns vis-à-vis other variables such as gender, social status and/or chronology. More thought provoking is the section ‘Elevating the Child’, in which M. focusses on three visual models largely found in Rome and used to enhance the status of the deceased child – representing children as gods, placing them in the world of adults (i.e. prospective portraits such as the puer senex) or literal physical elevation in which the deceased child floats above other figures in the pictorial frame. As to production and agency in the creation of these monuments, M. gives passing attention stating ‘Whether the person making these selections was the dedicator or the sculptor (or both) rather depended on the nature of the monument’ (p. 36), with a range of possibilities from stock pieces to entirely original ones. Since the ideological underpinnings of his analysis are not so much that these monuments reflect childhood as much as reflect the visualisation of childhood, the question of agency is not an unimportant one. In the case of servile dedications, for example, how is the identity of these figures constructed – as children, as slaves, as both – and by whom (masters, biological parents, workshops)? Though in many instances such information may be ultimately irretrievable, one wishes for more substantive engagement with issues of agency and production.

Chapters 4 and 5, ‘Nuclear Notions’ and ‘Fluid Families’, are broadly demographic in focus while dense with social history. Embedded within is a note of caution about using the increased visibility of children (as on these funerary monuments) as evidence of changing social attitudes in the valuation of children or, similarly, as evidence of the emergence of the ‘child’ within ancient thought. M.'s chief concerns in these chapters are the relationships between commemorative patterns and family structure (biological and surrogate) and the visualisation of the family unit on tombstones. M. does a commendable job of outlining changing trends in the capital (specifically the shift from group portraits to individual portraits and the associated monument types) while isolating patterns in family imagery outside the capital. Conventions in representing the nuclear family, single parents and/or siblings across the west are illustrated by numerous examples. Particularly noteworthy is his discussion of the symbolic language of touch and the conventions governing the representation of gesture and affection within these monuments.

Chapter 6, ‘Portraits in Context’, is a – necessarily – brief discussion of the fragmentary archaeological evidence of children's monuments within their original settings. Adhering to the competitive model of funerary commemoration, M. sees these monuments as expressions of social advertisement within mortuary landscapes. Elsewhere he recognises the ‘possibility of multiple motivations’ (p. 155) behind the commissioning of a funerary portrait for a child, but he consciously eschews any attempt to assess emotional intent. The degree to which children's tombstones can be said to express an emotional response to bereavement is a much debated issue and while M. is clearly conversant with these debates, his interpretative stance is one that tends to privilege social over emotional motivation. (For different perspectives, see, among others, M. King, ‘Commemoration of Infants on Roman Funerary Inscriptions’, in The Epigraphy of Death [2000], pp. 117–54; E. Minten, Roman Attitudes towards Children and Childhood: Private Funerary Evidence c. 50 b.c. – c. a.d. 300 [2002]; and H. Mouritsen, ‘Freedmen and Decurions: Epitaphs and Social History in Imperial Italy’, JRS 95 [2005], 38–63.)

Though the brevity of M.'s concluding chapter may leave the reader wondering what, ultimately, is gained from this type of macro analysis, taken as a whole, the monograph is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in childhood in the Roman world. Comprising more than one-half of the book, the catalogue portion is well-conceived and organised. Tables, while basic in format, appear frequently throughout and one could learn much about children's monuments simply by glancing through his quantitative analyses of subjects like ‘Child attribute possession by geographical region’ (table 8) or ‘Types of physical contact’ (table 16). Other helpful additions include a museum index with cross-referenced catalogue and inventory numbers, an epigraphic index and indexes of nomina and cognomina. The thorough bibliography suggests attention to broader scholarship on diachronic constructions of childhood while also providing a useful (if small) list of electronic resources. M.'s lively prose and thoughtful analyses make this important contribution to Roman social history an engaging one to read.