Doerfler addresses an original and thought-provoking topic—examining how Christians in late antiquity came to terms with child mortality. As she notes in the introduction, “this is a book as much about bereavement as it is about children’s death” (6). Indeed, most of her study focuses specifically on how clerical authors in the fourth through sixth centuries constructed and adapted liturgical narratives to be useful to a laity familiar with an alarmingly high mortality rate. In a subject as delicate as this one, Doerfler is consistently respectful of her subject matter and how grieving parents emotionally and intellectually negotiated a life cut short. That attention to care serves her well for the most part, although a slightly less sympathetic eye toward the architects of this discourse would have been welcome.
After starting with a brief discussion of the prevalence of the phenomenon and an overview of early philosophical responses to such...