Roman Girlhood and the Fashioning of Femininity offers a sustained and subtle account of a group only glimpsed fleetingly in the ancient sources. While Roman matrons and the family have received more scholarly attention in recent years, maidens have been relegated to discreet discussions of the wedding ceremony, paternal powers, and entrepreneurial matchmaking among elites. Roman girls have borne the double disadvantage of gender and age in a society that compressed — or denied — adolescence to the extent that aristocratic girls were child brides transferred from the houses of the fathers to those of their husbands (p. 10). Upper-class young ladies did not “come out” in society as in early modern European cultures that encouraged social cultivation after puberty. The author focuses on the passage to marriage and childbearing that marked the end of childhood for girls too immature to be fully adult. She questions the conventional explanation that early marriage maximized fertility and, instead, finds the rationale in ideals of sexual purity, primarily the desire to preserve virginity until betrothal. Her method employs the “social dimensions of demography” in its analysis of quantitative evidence from a cultural perspective (p. 7). A range of evidence from the 1st century BCE through the 4th century CE derives from Augustan marriage legislation, jurists’ opinions, medical texts, funerary epitaphs and altars, and Greek novels, as well as literary accounts of the wedding ritual.