Grace E. Coolidge is Associate Professor of History at Grand Valley State University, USA. She is author of Gender, Guardianship and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain (Ashgate, 2011).

• Introduction; 1: Ideals of Childhood; 1: Reproductive Genesis: Mothers and Children in Martín Carrillo's Elogios de mujeres insignes del viejo testamento; 2: Mothers and Daughters in Chivalric Novels; 3: Fathers and Sons in Don Quixote; 4: Paintings of the Education of the Virgin Mary and the Lives of Girls in Early Modern Spain; 2: Children at Court; 5: Childhood and Royalty at the Court of Philip III; 6: The Education of an Heir to the Throne: Isabel of Borbón and Her Influence on Prince Baltasar Carlos; 7: “My sister is growing up very healthy and beautiful, she loves me”: The Childhood of the Infantas María Teresa and Margarita María at Court 1; 8: Growing Up Carlos II: Political Childhood in the Court of the Spanish Habsburgs; 3: Suffer the Little Children; 9: Good Boys: The Fifth Dialogue in Pedro Luján's Coloquios matrimoniales; 10: Investing in the Lineage: Children in the Early Modern Spanish Nobility, 1350–1750 1; 11: The Castigation and Abuse of Children in Early Modern Spain; 12: Containing Risk: The Integration and Isolation of Orphanage Wards within Eighteenth-Century Seville

'A very significant interdisciplinary collection of consistently high-caliber essays. Although it is focused on Spain, I believe that the approach and example of these essays will set the research agenda for studies of early modern childhood.' Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, author of Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister 'This collection provides a good overview of the current research on children and childhood in early modern Spain ... will be useful to a wide array of scholars, including scholars of early modern Spain, children, and gender across the disciplines.' Renaissance Quarterly