By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority

By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority. By Holly Brewer. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xvi, 390 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2950-1.)

Political historians tend to regard the history of childhood as a quaint, subsidiary aspect of social history, one unimportant to big historical questions. Holly Brewer's highly original and powerfully argued book about the treatment of children in English and Anglo-American law and legal theory from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries turns this perspective on its head. Brewer shows that questions about the nature of childhood and the powers and obligations of parents were central to the great debates among early modern religious, political, and legal thinkers over religious and political authority. Her approach yields important new insights into the origins of modern ideas about children and families, as well as the sources of modern...