Wolfgang Müller argues that in medieval Europe and Great Britain prosecution of miscarriages shifted gradually from perpetrators of assault against pregnant women to include women who intentionally abort pregnancies and their accomplices. This restrained conclusion, however, masks the book's larger contribution. Müller's work carefully recounts legal history through an exploration of the particular and changing meanings of crime, criminal, law, legal personhood, and abortion in medieval Europe and Great Britain, supporting its case through fine-grained analyses of almost uncountable legal cases.

Given that contemporary opponents of legal abortion often look to the Middle Ages for a legal precedent, Müller's additional goal is to demonstrate the lack of consistent, coherent Western medieval legal and religious proscriptions of what we now call abortion. Along the way, he revises a number of historiographical precedents.

Müller's presentation is thematic rather than chronological, a good choice given that the developments he describes progressed (and often regressed) by fits and starts at varied paces in various regions. He begins with chapters on early proponents of criminalization in an era when “crime” had an uncertain civil meaning and when representatives of the Church penitentially or canonically meted out. He also demonstrates that ecclesiastical responses developed “translatable” characteristics through public penances and ecclesiastical court proceedings, which provided useful analogues for later civil action against abortion. A further chapter explores the varied and often conflicting traditions of multiple coexisting legal systems. Here and throughout the book, Müller points out that when lines of permission or lesser penalty and unqualified prohibition were drawn they usually fell between unformed and formed fetuses. Consequently, miscarriages of formed fetuses caused by assault or abortion were typically (but not always) treated with the same severity as infanticides. Although Müller cautions that the application (and non-application) of laws make analysis of cases essential to our understanding of actual popular and legal opinion about abortion, he also devotes two chapters to medieval arguments for and against criminalization. Ethicists and theologians will probably be most interested in these, which reflect the (re)appearance of Aristotelian categories in Western thought.

Women's history buffs will appreciate Müller's comparatively lively chapter on midwifery and on female expertise and authority in all things reproductive; he points to early signs of the eclipse of local and female medicine by formally educated male practitioners.

Two chapters explore abortion cases in the criminal courts of the ius commune, important because rationales for rulings and penalties reveal as much about popular and legal opinion as do the outcomes of the cases. Müller's closing chapter on the frequency of criminal prosecution is cautionary: in any time and place the frequency of recorded cases reveals little about the frequency of abortion and of objections to it at the local level, as prosecution occurred only when pregnancy and abortion were evident and when someone objected to the latter. Often, women and their families concealed both for strategic reasons.

Painstaking, encyclopedic, and dense in its detail, The Criminalization of Abortion in the West is most appropriate for scholars of legal history. It is a challenging read. Terms are not always defined; Müller seems to code-switch between Latin and English technical terms; and the index is too sparse to support a reader attempting to keep track of unfamiliar vocabulary. The author sometimes assumes a great deal of specialized knowledge on the reader's part; for example, he refers to “four-fold Romano-canonical procedure” (173) without clearly defining its elements or significance. His opaque style sometimes frustrates interpretation as well. Still, medievalists and legal historians will find the text accessible and will benefit from Müller's rich, masterful integration of primary sources and his engagement with important secondary treatments of legal history.