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Martyrdom, Murder and Magic: Child Saints and Their Cults in Medieval Europe. By Patricia Heah/ Wasyliw. [Studies in Church History, Vol. 2.] (New York: Peter Lang. 2008. Pp. 203. $67.95. ISBN 978-0-820-42764-5.)
Patricia Heah/ Wasyliw has produced a general survey, and at the same time an impressively thick description, of the veneration of children as saints across fifteen centuries of Christian Europe. The Acta Sanctorum, the Bibliotheca Sanctorum, and many other more specific sources and studies have been learnedly excavated and ransacked. The work is heavily footnoted (indeed, so much so that readers will long for the notes to have been placed at the bottom of the page rather than at the end of the text). A complicated historical route has been ably traced through the literary, liturgical, and popular devotions surrounding deceased children in Europe. We hear of the Holy Innocents, child martyrs, children murdered (often not for any ostensibly religious motives), and alleged victims of specifically ritual murders. Although an admittedly marginal...