The communion of infants is different from the admission of children at, say, seven or eight. Both practices traditionally require baptism, and either may require confimation/chrysmation as well. But infant communion never requires a measure of 'understanding', whereas child communion does.

As yet there is no comprehensive history of infant communion. Several learned attempts were made during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but there were major gaps in their treatment and much that today needs amending. Thanks to the work of JDC Fisher and DR Holeton, many of these gaps have now been filled. Mark Dalby draws significantly on their work, as well as on an article previously published by him in CQR (1966), but here he seeks to fill in more of the gaps. The study concludes with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.