Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity. By Maria E. Doerfler

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Maria Doerfler takes on the cheerless topic of childhood mortality in her first book, winner of the AAR’s Best First Book Award for 2022. Doerfler writes gracefully and sensitively, opening up a world unfamiliar to many of us: Syriac Christian theological treatises, homilies, and sermons, particularly the work of Ephrem Graecus, Jacob of Serugh, Narsai, and other eastern Christian writers from the fourth to sixth centuries. Some of these sources have long been available but have not yet been mined for the particular focus that consumes Doerfler; others, she makes available to English-language readers for the first time. She deftly weaves together fragments of a hidden phenomenon: despite its ubiquity, the death of children—not to mention societal responses to it—remains largely absent from both the literary and the archaeological record. Death in childhood was all too common in antiquity, but for most of us, it remains something to which we mercifully cannot relate. It is that emotional distance that made this topic one that was, prior to Doerfler’s book, uncharted territory within scholarship, and it is that same emotional distance that makes this issue possible to bear today. Like the authors she discusses, Doerfler never succumbs to sentimentality nor to morbid description.