Reviewed by: Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity Michelle Ann Abate (bio) Anja Müller, ed. Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. xiii+243pp. US$94.95;£47.50. ISBN 978-0-7546-5509-1. The eighteenth century was arguably the most influential period in the development of modern Western conceptions of "the child" and the cultural notion of "childhood." As Philippe Ariès famously asserted in his seminal study L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime , this era marked the beginning of societal recognition of childhood as a distinct phase of physical and psychological development. For the first time, adults in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States saw children as embodying a distinct familial role and, thus, separate societal designation. In an oft-mentioned but nonetheless powerful illustration of this phenomenon, the [End Page 477] long eighteenth century witnessed the publication of two works on children and childhood that have remained among the most influential to this day: John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile (1762). A new collection of essays edited by Anja Müller spotlights this historically rich and culturally influential era. Fashioning Childhood simultaneously builds on previous work regarding the crystallization of childhood during the eighteenth century and questions some of the most long-standing and seemingly "sacrosanct" viewpoints, including those posited by Ariès. The volume contains an impressive seventeen essays, with an opening commentary by Müller. Not surprisingly, given the volume's title, one of the underlying assumptions or overarching premises of the various chapters is the notion that the emergence of childhood during the long eighteenth century did not occur organically but instead was deliberately constructed. For this reason, as Müller asserts, the essays in the volume are "less interested in the character of this construct as such but look into the processes generating the respective concepts" (3). With this premise serving as its starting point, each chapter seeks to explore and explode the history of childhood during the long eighteenth century from a variety of theoretical perspectives, cultural contexts, and academic disciplines. Whereas previous studies addressing the crystallization of modern Western notions of childhood have largely concentrated on individual nations in general and privileged American and British contexts in particular, Fashioning Childhood concentrates on Anglo-European literature and culture. The list of contributors includes scholars from Germany, France, England, and the United States, whose work engages fields as varied as art history, literary criticism, medicine, modern languages, the history of science, leisure culture, psychology, and the law. In this way, Fashioning Childhood unites many formerly disparate aspects of Anglo-European studies about the eighteenth century. While such a broad approach carries with it the potential to make the collection unfocused and even scattershot, Fashioning Childhood works well as a cohesive entity. The chapters complement rather than contradict each other, often demonstrating cultural studies at its best. Among the topics discussed in the collection are the role of children in the era's burgeoning leisure culture, early psychological discourses about the treatment of mentally troubled youth, transformations in children's portraiture, changing theories about the medicalization of infants and toddlers, the child as both a consumer and a producer of art, and the representation of children and childhood in works of fiction and nonfiction. As even this brief sampling suggests, Fashioning Childhood contains as much intellectual depth as it does interdisciplinary breadth. [End Page 478] While nearly every essay in the collection is well written and compellingly argued, I was especially impressed with Adriana S. Benzaquén's opening article, which examines medical advice books for parents. Many of these treatises tout the importance of raising children "according to nature," but, as Benzaquén aptly notes, they also assert that "the means to follow the path of nature was to heed the advice of science" (21). Similarly, Uwe Böker's essay on the Newgate Calendars and the way in which notions of juvenile delinquency emerged in tandem with concepts of childhood offers much intellectual food for thought. Especially for readers who may not be specialists in the eighteenth...