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Mark Jackson, ed. Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002. xiii + 293 pp. Ill. $84.95 (0-7546-0318-0).
Infanticide is a troubling concept and a challenging crime, as this book of thirteen collected essays makes clear by examining its historical treatment in England and a few other locations since the sixteenth century. Written by different authors who adopt a wide range of perspectives and methods and edited by Mark Jackson, Infanticide provides a stimulating introduction to what has evidently become a booming area of inquiry in Britain. The footnotes are replete with references to a large number of mainly English studies that examine the problem as part of a broad set of inquiries into the history of law, psychiatry, the female body, literature, and medical practices. As a result, the book can be quite difficult to read since it alludes to a number of different disciplinary projects, and its essays are uneven.
Despite these obstacles, the social significance of the crime of infanticide and the several issues to which it is attached makes many of the essays worthwhile. In distinguishing the killing of older children from the attempts to hide the birth of newborns, for example, Hilary Marland's essay...