The legal history of children is in its infancy. For the historian of legal doctrine, the problem with children is finding them. Save for the question of the legal capacity of minors, doctrinal writers in the West do not treat children as a separate legal category—children must be sought over a wide range of legal topics. For the historian of practice, children can sometimes be seen in the court records, but they are rarely the main topic of litigation. It is, for example, striking how many divorce and separation cases in the late medieval and early modern ecclesiastical courts do not mention children at all, or mention them only in passing. Social historians have been interested in children for some time, but what legal historians have produced for them has not been very helpful.

Granted the state of the literature, anything by a distinguished legal historian on the topic of children is welcome, particularly when it is written by the leading historian of the law of persons in France today, one whose competence covers both doctrine and practice, canon law and secular law, from the Middle Ages to the Code Napoléon. What Anne Lefebvre-Teillard has given us is a collection of twenty-one articles, all, with one exception, previously published. This is quite useful in its own right, since the articles are not easily available elsewhere.

But there is more to this book than just a collection of articles. The key, I would suggest, lies in the title. Autour de l'enfant is not “On Children” but “Around Children.” One can, if one wishes, imagine the topics of the twenty-one articles swirling around the winsome little boy whose portrait by Jan de Bray (1654) adorns the cover of the book.

So what are the legal topics that surround the child over this long period? Three articles concern marriage and procreation. I was particularly taken by a beautifully written piece on motherhood in the thirteenth-century canonists. (Somewhat surprisingly, they were in favor of it.)

Five articles concern the relationship between children and the law of persons, the closest that Western law came to having a law of children, properly speaking. One concerns the question of when a child becomes a juridical person, a massively confused story to which Lefebvre-Teillard brings considerable clarity. Two concern the naming of a child, one about canonic conceptions (which are intimately related to baptism) and the other about those introduced by the radical secularization of the Code Napoléon. One article concerns the ius sanguinis, the ultimate triumph in the Code Napoléon of the doctrine that one's citizenship is dependent on the citizenship of one's father, not where one was born. The final article in this group is a nice summary of the rules about the legal responsibility of children for their acts in classical canon law (roughly 1140 to 1350).

The remainder of the book is divided into two large parts. Eight articles concern establishing the paternity of children. Seven deal with the remarkable canonic concept of legitimation by subsequent matrimony. Thus, all of them concern the legal relationship of children to their parents and the problem of illegitimate birth.

The legal history in these articles is doctrinal, but it is doctrinal history informed by records of practice, in the examination of which Lefebvre-Teillard has been a pioneer. The doctrinal moves that Lefebvre-Teillard traces are connected to the major movements in French intellectual and political history, particularly in the ancien régime. She also, however, has a nice sense of what goes on when lawyers are talking to one another. “What the devil,” she asks bluntly, “is a bigamous clerk doing in the Lectura of Hostiensis on the decretal … devoted to the question of legitimation by subsequent matrimony?” (343) (Answer: The question is whether subsequent matrimony can make a virgin out of the woman whom the cleric corrupted and then married—Is he eligible for promotion to higher orders as one who has been married only cum unica et virgine?)

Those who are seeking the origins of such modern concepts as “the rights of children” or “the best interests of the child” will not find them here. Because premodern Western law did not conceive of children as a separate legal topic, we do not find any elaborated themes or policies concerning them. The harsh consequences of their parents' sin were visited on illegitimate children for centuries. And yet, the ebb and flow of the doctrines and practices concerning paternity and legitimation by subsequent matrimony suggest that at least in some periods there were those who sought to mitigate these harsh consequences, and occasionally they say that that is what they are trying to do. The absorption by the secular courts in the early modern period of actions that had previously been in the ecclesiastical courts did not, at least initially, bring much change in doctrine. Ultimately, however, whether because the concerns of the state were not the same as those of the church or because of a hardening of sentiment that may be associated with Jansenism, the results were less favorable to children (and to their unmarried mothers) than seem to have prevailed in previous centuries.