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Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630-1685, and: Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534-1685 (review)

James Grantham Turner’s vast knowledge of seventeenth-century publications high and low—his familiarity with their inside “dirty jokes” and their allusions to politics, classical writing, and contemporary elite and popular culture—would put both a John Milton and a Samuel Pepys to shame. In Libertines and Radicals he coins the term pornographia (the designating mark on or of a prostitute) to distinguish the seventeenth-century sexual-political discourse that is the subject of his study from contemporary pornography and the debates surrounding it. Nonetheless, his broad concern is the very contemporary one of exploring how sexual discourses engender, are engendered by, and constitute violent acts. Frequently performed within the space of misrule and unreason that is carnival, festival, and satire, these parallel acts of discourse and gesture are, in his argument, resolutely sexual even as they ambivalently express specific political, religious, and social identifications. In a companion volume of sorts, Schooling Sex, Turner examines “sotadic” or “hard core” pornography based in the classical tradition and revived in Renaissance Italy only to migrate to France and England in the seventeenth century. His interest here is twofold. On the one hand, he examines the ambivalent focus of sotadic works on the education of women, 310 MLQ June 2004