This volume is borne of an innovative combination of two burgeoning areas of research into the early modern period: the history of children, childhood and youth, and the history of religious minorities.

In setting out the book's aims, the editors highlight several key contributions. Firstly, they emphasise the broader significance of the history of children, childhood and youth. The history of childhood and youth is presented in this work not solely as an end in itself, but also as a powerful means to understand religious divisions and confessional developments. Secondly, and perhaps most ambitiously, the authors examine these themes not in one geographical setting, or in relation to one minority, but rather in relation to Christian minorities and Jews in England, Germany, France and the Low Countries over a span of nearly four hundred years.

Reflecting this wide scope, the volume's chapters are grouped thematically. The first section examines the role that children and childhood played in the practices of religious minorities. These range from the ceremonial roles played by Jewish children described in Tali Berner's chapter on domestic devotion, to the anxiety over infant baptism expressed by ‘Puritans’ in Elizabethan England, which Anna French highlights as indicative of the broader importance of attitudes towards infants and children for our understanding of the Reformation. Together, the four chapters in this section make a persuasive case for the centrality of the history of childhood and youth to understanding the development and practices of religious minorities. The second section looks at how families as a whole responded to the experience of persecution. While the experiences of all the minorities discussed in this section highlight the devastating effects that persecution could have on families, the experience of persecution could also, as Fiona McCall's study of family life among loyalist Anglicans during the Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century convincingly shows, strengthen family loyalties and identities centred around the experience of persecution. The final section looks at religious conflict within the family, highlighting how family ties could both ease tensions across religious divides – as seen in Jesse Sadler's work on raising families across religious boundaries during the Dutch Revolt – and exacerbate them, as is apparent in Bernard Capp's engaging exploration of family conflict following conversion in early modern England.

The volume as a whole provides a useful aid for scholars new to the fields it combines. The introduction gives a helpful overview of the religious minorities and contexts covered in the volume, as well as outlining approaches to the history of childhood. Multiple chapters make innovative use of sources, or introduce previously unexamined material, highlighting the diverse methodological approaches available to historians of these subjects. Tali Berner looks at a range of illustrations of Jewish children involved in household ritual, and by taking a thematic approach to these images, rather than grouping them by the context in which they were published, is able to expand our understanding of children as ‘active participants’ in domestic devotion (p. 71). Mary Clare Martin makes a convincing case for attention to adult memoirs of childhood in her study of the much-neglected area of children's experiences of religion in eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps most intriguing in terms of previously un- or under-studied sources is the packet of Calvinist letters from 1569 and 1570 examined by Susan Broomhall, confiscated by the authorities in the Low Countries as they were in the process of being smuggled to England. In analysing these sources, she employs effectively an emotional historical approach, illustrating the emotional work that such letters had to perform for families forced apart by religious persecution.

Several chapters also resonate with the recent preoccupation of historians of children and childhood with the ‘agency’ or ‘autonomy’ of children in the past. Naomi Pullin's chapter on Quaker childhood and youth shows the vital role of children and youth in shaping early Quakerism, and her chapter is particularly useful in demonstrating how the parts played by children and youth changed over time as the movement evolved. Ahuva Liberles's chapter on religious conversion and puberty in fifteenth-century Ashkenaz tackles the issue of children's agency in exploring the legal status of orphaned Jewish children who had been converted to Christianity. The fact that baptised children in this position were frequently viewed as holding the legal status of Jews until they grew older illustrates one area in which contemporaries placed boundaries on the autonomy of children.

Viewed together, the chapters of the volume furthermore underline the now well-established view of historians of religious coexistence that any movement towards greater tolerance of religious difference was far from linear. Joel Harrington's chapter particularly emphasises this by drawing attention to the increased frequency of child abductions for religious reasons in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moreover, the experience of persecution did not have to be direct for it to matter: Lucy Underwood's study of the role of childhood memories and family histories in the collective history of English Catholicism in the seventeenth century highlights how later generations of Catholics kept senses of persecution alive, such that ‘to be Catholic was to be among the persecuted’ (p. 250).

Further work might give a broader sense of how the experiences of children, youth and religious minorities changed over the period. The wide geographical and temporal scope of this volume, as well as the inclusion of multiple different minorities, meant that it was not possible to trace its themes consistently across any one time or place. This is not necessarily a weakness of the volume – its wide scope is useful in drawing attention to similarities in the experiences of minorities in diverse areas and periods – but it does emphasise the potential value of further comparative research. It would be particularly interesting to explore in more detail whether there was anything distinctive about the experience of Jewish as opposed to Christian minorities, and how they were affected differently by the chronology of Europe's Reformations. Overall, this is a valuable volume for scholars of early modern religion and childhood alike, and will hopefully prompt further explorations of this relatively untravelled terrain.