In this ‘pre-modern history of quotidian sexuality’ in early modern Lyon, Julie Hardwick interrogates an ‘archive of reproduction’ consisting of records relating to pregnancy, abortion, infanticide, child abandonment and maintenance payments to reconstruct the intimate lives of young people in their late teens and early twenties. Paying attention to physical and emotional interactions as well as to how social, economic, cultural, religious, legal and political systems shaped quotidian experiences, Hardwick outlines how ‘community safeguarders’ assisted youngsters on the verge of parenthood. Hardwick argues that ‘a culture of sexual heteronormativity’ operated, in which it was assumed that young single women were to be chaste but not necessarily celibate, and that young single men would take responsibility for the children they fathered.

Hardwick begins her study by outlining where and how young people courted each other. Many were economic migrants who travelled to Lyon to seek work in the silk industry. Walking together in the evenings and on Sundays allowed opportunities for couples to link arms, hold hands and share kisses. Young people indicated their intentions towards each other by exchanging letters and gifts and discussed fertility and pregnancy before engaging in sexual intercourse, with women being more cautious than men when it came to penetrative sex. If pregnancy ensued, couples were encouraged to marry, and some mothers-to-be brought paternity suits to compel their partners into marriage, or to pay financial compensation and accept custody of the child. Judges looked favourably on maintenance claims if the women who made them had been in monogamous, consensual relationships, and men who failed to acknowledge their duties as fathers might be imprisoned to prevent them fleeing before a case had concluded.

Pregnancy was not an inevitable outcome of intercourse, and many women resorted to medical ‘remedies’, often procured by the men with whom they had been intimate, to restart their menstrual cycles or induce abortions. If a sexual encounter led to pregnancy, legal remedies in the form of notarial documents were procured by expectant mothers to ensure their offspring were provided for, while fathers-to-be paid for their pregnant partners to be ‘put’ in rooms rented from landladies, as well as for the services of midwives and wet-nurses. Knowledge about when and where unwed mothers gave birth was widespread but rarely divulged, and when neighbours and care-workers were interrogated it was to check on the well-being of mothers and infants, as well as to ensure fathers were providing. Single people in established relationships were less likely to be reported to or pursed by authorities than ‘debauched girls’ and predatory male employers, and although new-born infants were abandoned and murdered, prosecution rates for both were low. Many foundlings were abandoned in safe-spaces where they would be discovered easily, and dead infants were placed in prominent places in boxes or wrapped in sheets, suggesting a desire for their bodies to be dealt with appropriately.

Hardwick draws attention to how the patchy survival of records limited her ability to undertake quantitative analysis, and her qualitative reading of the evidence is informed by her close engagement with existing studies of ‘fictions in the archive’ as well as her own sensitivity to the language used within the sources. One major strength of this book is how Hardwick engages with the historiography of emotions, and there are striking parallels between her readings of the Lyonnais archive and the research findings of historians working on eighteenth-century Britain such as Katie Barclay, Sally Holloway and John Styles. The richness of the material enables Hardwick to situate her subjects within the built environment and rural hinterlands of the early modern city too, and her attention to space (as practised place) and topography enables her to offer evocative reading of the evidence.

There is much here to interest historians of community too. Rather than depicting the period as one when sexual misbehaviour was policed intensively, Hardwick demonstrates that young people on the brink of parenthood enjoyed the support of neighbours, employers, family members and care-workers as well as religious and legal officials. Hardwick finds little evidence of a rigid double standard and provides many instances of young single women shaping their own destinies in matters relating to sexual intercourse and reproduction, but she is attentive to how experiences of courtship were gendered and dismisses arguments for an early modern sexual revolution, arguing instead that the 13 decades covered by her study were ones primarily of continuity, with changes more evident in the nineteenth century. Focusing on a single city inevitably raises questions about the typicality of evidence and the extent to which the arguments articulated apply to other parts of Europe, but there is no doubt that at the very least Hardwick has produced a nuanced and persuasive case-study of early modern urban sexual behaviour which deserves a wide readership.