Early modern Europe was a dangerous place for the young; some fifty percent of children died before they reached the age of ten. Often it also failed to provide children with the most basic shelter and nurturance, as is shown by the bands of homeless, apparently rootless children who bedeviled the authorities across Europe in this period. These uncomfortable realities have fueled much speculation about the nature of family affection in premodern times, in addition to prompting inquiry into the efficacy of early state welfare institutions. Harrington's study, centered loosely upon a single Nuremberg foundling home and orphanage (the “Findel”) during the period approximately 1555 to 1670, seeks to shift our view toward the social and family environments out of which homeless, abandoned, and institutionalized children and infants came. In so doing it complicates earlier accounts in various ways.

Harrington's book aims to establish the notion of “child circulation” in preference to other formulations (such as “child abandonment”) that, in his view, are too inflexible to describe the diverse ways that children became separated from their natal families, and that also encourage an excessive emphasis upon the state and state institutions. His methodological inspiration is “histoire croisée,” associated especially with Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. This historiographical approach emphasizes points of interaction between individuals and groups and prefers a plurality of perspectives to a single overarching point of view. It ends up influencing the structure as well as the content of Harrington's book. Five out of six of the chapters center on an individual actor (or, in one case, a pair of twins) and his or her social networks. A sixth chapter seeks to braid the various stories together and reflect upon their significance for the historiography of children, families, and early modern institutions.

By any standard this is an impressive book. The chapters are an elegant blend of individual stories and comparisons between the central protagonist(s) and similarly situated persons and groups. Harrington successfully conveys the drama of these people's lives, and a number of well-chosen pictorial illustrations enhance the effect. And there is a good deal here that is new. The most original contribution of chapters one (“The Unmarried Mother”) and two (“The Absconding Father”) is to show the diversity of child-circulation practices. Pregnant and unwed women used a range of stratagems and social connections to garner support for themselves and their offspring; the failure of options in the case of Apollonia Vöglin, the protagonist of chapter one, led to tragedy both for her newborn and herself. In chapter two Christoff “Stoffel” Baur, a soldier, sought to fob off his young daughters on his grown son, who, when his father skipped town, tried to get the Findel to take the girls in. Other abandoning parents tried, often successfully, to get more distant kin, neighbors, or even casual passersby to take over responsibility for their children. Harrington concludes from this and other evidence that “informal” child-circulation strategies were probably far more common than resort to the Findel. Chapter three (“The Beleaguered Magistrate”), about the career of Albrecht Pömer, head administrator of the Findel from 1633 to 1654, demonstrates the degree to which city institutions such as the Findel were woven into the structure of hereditary patrician governance. It also traces the impact of war and epidemic disease on Findel intake policies and includes an illuminating discussion of patrician efforts to stamp out child begging and what city fathers saw as “bad parenting.” Chapter four (“The Street Orphan”), based largely upon a series of confessions elicited under torture from a seventeen-year-old thief named Jörg Mayr, contains astoundingly detailed evidence about children's street gangs and adolescents' alternately supportive and exploitative relationships with more established households. In addition it traces the gradual progression on the part of Mayr and others from asking for alms to extortionate begging to opportunistic theft, through to purposeful housebreaking. “Unwanted” children emerge from Harrington's account as much more socially connected than has traditionally been thought. Chapter five (“The State Wards”) confirms the widely acknowledged truth that institutions such as the Findel were death traps for the very youngest. Moreover it shows that the prospects for girls, the illegitimate, and the physically or developmentally disabled were often poor, and that at least some of the children who survived ended up as homeless beggars. Still, Harrington also demonstrates, using the example of the orphan twins Susanna and Eberhardt Schier, that some Findel wards succeeded in living to adulthood, learning a craft, and marrying well.

The strengths of histoire croisée are many, but its weakness, as Harrington is well aware, is its sometimes limited capacity to move beyond particularistic and local issues. As he remarks, “The relative closeness to these individuals' experience [afforded by micro-historical approaches including histoire croisée] not only obscures the big picture but appears to make it unintelligible and virtually unobtainable” (p. 281). In reality the big picture is neither unintelligible nor unobtainable in Harrington's fine book, but it is sometimes painted in rather broad strokes. The close-grained discussions of individual lives and social networks that make up the bulk of the book engage questions to do with gender, parenting, the military revolution, the rise of the state and state welfare institutions, the history of epidemic disease, historical demography, the history of crime, central European distinctiveness (or lack of it), and much else. But Harrington's final chapter, “From Micro- to Macro-: Individuals and the Big Picture”—the shortest in the book—while not without its virtues, cannot hope to tie together all the threads, and in some cases does not even try. Still, this is an impressive and well-written book; its well-wrought contextual approach to the history of an early modern welfare institution is likely to stand as a model both for the German lands and other parts of Europe for some time to come.