This study offers fascinating insight into the lives of a group of children in early medieval England who were called "oblates" - children "offered" to monastic houses by their parents to live the rest of their lives in prayer and study. The author leads readers through a maze of evidence to reach compelling new understandings of their life courses, providing the first comparative study of religious boybood and girlhood using contemporarily defined gender categories, and exploring their horizons against a tumultuous historical background of intellectual renaissance, church reform, and military conquest. In doing so, the author reveals much of the fabric of academic scholarship on this period to the general public, and points the way to many of the challenges historians face in crafting definitive "histories" in general.