Nicholas Orme. Tudor Children New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. 288. $30.00 (cloth).

With Tudor Children, Nicholas Orme continues on from his 2003 book, Medieval Children.It represents another significant contribution to the study of childhood by Orme.As stated in the preface, it seeks to be an introduction to the subject rather than a comprehensive history and the book achieves this goal.There are two central arguments that hold Tudor Children together, which Orme highlights throughout.First, there was much more continuity than change in the "treatment and experience of children" over this period (227).Orme takes the opportunity to grapple with the perception that the Reformation was revolutionary and changed every aspect of life in England.With specific exceptions, the daily life of children remained much the same in 1600 as it had been in 1500.Second, Orme underlines the importance of studying the history of childhood.While this may seem obvious to cultural and social historians, and while the ghost of Philippe Aris may appear to have been exorcised decades ago, this plea from Orme is still relevant.As a scholar of pre-modern education, I myself see how children's experiences in the past are dismissed and ignored, to the detriment of a better understanding of social, cultural, and intellectual history.Tudor Children is another attempt to correct this ongoing issue.Orme divides Tudor Children into seven chapters: "Birth and Infancy," "Childhood at Home," "Play," "Religion," "School," "Speech, Songs, and Stories," and "Growing Up," with a reflective conclusion at the end.While each is valuable and utilizes interesting case studies and examples, "Religion" and "Speech, Songs, and Stories" are particularly strong.Orme's descriptions present a useful and succinct summary of religious practices before and during the English reformations, covering topics from the rituals of baptism and how these changed over the sixteenth century to how being in a religious minority affected a child's daily life.The chapter "Speech, Songs, and Stories" explores the popular culture of Tudor children and youths.Here, Orme makes judicious use of later (seventeenth century) materials to suggest which rhymes and songs were current in the sixteenth century.He demonstrates the continued interconnectedness of popular cultures across western Europe by noting the French origins of popular tales, and he makes an interesting argument about the existence of a shared adult/child literary culture.Orme successfully conveys the mental world inhabited by youngsters in Tudor England.To paraphrase Miri Rubin, Orme gives the reader a sense of what it was really like for them.Overall, Orme does exactly was he sets out to do in the preface: to provide a general introduction to the topic of Tudor children.There are certain points, however, where more detail and/or greater nuance would have been appreciated and would have been entirely appropriate to an introductory work.These sections may have been the result of attempts to avoid tangents or to keep to editorial requirements, but they leave the reader with a less-than-accurate, or at least an overly simplistic, idea of the historical situation at hand.One example is Orme's discussion of corporal punishment.While he cites Ben Parsons's