Julie Hardwick's Sex in an Old Regime City opens with a moving description of a garter left behind at a foundling hospital in Lyon around three hundred years ago that reads, “I am going away but not leaving you” (1). While the meaning of the garter for mother and for child can only ever remain unknown to the historian, its existence and survival throughout the centuries evokes the physical and emotional labor that came with having children in Old Regime France. Indeed, it is precisely those labors—rather than the act of reproduction itself—that forms the subject of Hardwick's brilliant examination of intimacy among young workers in Lyon between the middle of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution. Delving into the “archive of reproduction,” Hardwick presents a world where sex between young people stood very much at the center, not only of the lives of the couple themselves but also of the broader community (6). In doing so, Hardwick illuminates the quotidian lives of women and men who courted one another, had sex, sometimes got pregnant, and were forced to deal with the aftermath. Hardwick's analysis highlights how sex shaped women's and men's lives differently, while also acknowledging how community investment in the outcome provided women with some opportunity to exert control over their intimate lives. Ultimately, then, Sex in an Old Regime City is as much about sex as it is about city life and the ways that sexual matters—whether sexual activity, sexual talk, sexual anxiety, and sexual regulation—permeated working-class life.Sex in the Old Regime rests on two important innovations, one archival and the other historical. First, Hardwick's “archive of reproduction” is not the usual kind of archive often employed in histories of sexuality, with their emphasis on illicit or criminal sex. Rather, this archive is comprised of documents produced and preserved around the quite licit potential for reproduction between heterosexual couples. While the existence of the records—such as paternity suits, investigations into infanticide, administrative reports of entry into the Hôtel-Dieu—marks each case as somewhat unusual, Hardwick uses them to untangle the everyday from the extraordinary. They may have appeared in the archives because something went wrong, but they reveal, as well, what had been going right. Young women's paternity suits, for instance, would have occurred only when a male sexual partner tried to avoid his parental responsibilities, but the suits themselves show how women managed sexual relations as they showed the court that “they had not been carried away in the heat of the moment when they started to have sex” (66). The archive may have emerged because something went awry, but it also reveals how women and men tried to avoid an unwanted fate.Hardwick's second innovation is her important corrective to our common understanding of the 1556 Edict on Clandestine Pregnancy, which historians, including Hardwick herself, have traditionally interpreted as requiring “young single women to declare their pregnancies to a variety of public authorities” (25). The documents that emerged from this order have thus been traditionally called “pregnancy declarations” (25). However, the edict actually “referred only to the consequences of lack of declaration in specific circumstances around a baby's death” (26). Pregnancy declarations, therefore, were more like paternity suits; legal documents asserting the parentage of a child in order for a woman to “repair their honor, secure financial compensation, and arrange for their intimate partners to take physical custody of the babies as well as pay for their upbringing” (26). This reinterpretation of these documents has profound implications because it means that pregnancy declarations represented women's efforts to “discipline men” rather than an effort by “the state to discipline women” (32). The records that remain to the historian therefore do not just tell us about the role of the state in regulating sexual behavior but also about the ways that working-class women understood their own position vis-à-vis their intimate partners.Hardwick rests a convincing picture of working-class intimacy and the community that surrounded it on these two pillars. The reader comes away with an understanding of both the familiar and unexplored ways that young women and men engaged with one another three centuries ago. We witness their fears about sex and pregnancy, for example, and the ways a single night could change the course of an entire life. But we also see the everyday violence of these relationships, as so many began with sexual assault. Ultimately, Hardwick paints a picture of working-class sexual life that revolved around navigating the constraints and opportunities constructed by a community invested in ensuring that young people could find and keep sexual partners. The entire neighborhood made sure not only that young people's sexual activities remained on the right side of acceptability—a judgment often distinct from elite moral admonitions—but also that their inevitable mistakes did not necessarily ruin them forever.It is to Hardwick's credit that she acknowledges throughout the book the ways that her argument rests on both the unusual (cases that remain in the records) and the quite usual (heterosexual intimacy). As she explains, most couples dealt with unexpected pregnancy through marriage and thus disappeared from the historical record. In addition, other, same-sex and/or elite, sexual cultures existed alongside this example of working-class heterosexual intimacy. As a picture of only one possible path young people in the Old Regime could take, however, Hardwick's book wholly succeeds. It lays out not just the precarious and contingent lives of workers but also makes a forceful argument for integrating the history of sexuality more fully into the social history of work, showcases an innovative approach to the archives, and redefines our understanding of the relationship between the state and ordinary life in the Old Regime.