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Journal of the History of Sexuality 11.3 (2002) 521-524



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Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England. By IANFREDERICK MOULTON. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. 268. $49.95 (cloth).

This book is a new addition to an important series, Studies in the History of Sexuality. As one would expect from a book in this context, the scholarship is of high quality. The book makes a fresh and important contribution to the field and should be welcomed by historians and literary scholars, particularly those interested in sexuality, gender, and masculinity. Ian Frederick Moulton's book situates erotic writing, particularly English poetry, firmly in a cultural context and thus fills a considerable gap in the [End Page 521] published work. However, it needs to be made clear at the outset that the title of the book is a little misleading. This book is not a broad-ranging analysis of the range of English erotic writing published between, say, 1500 and 1800. Rather, as the author summarizes at the close, it is an examination of "the role of Aretine eroticism in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England" (220).

The introduction justifies Moulton's rejection of the term "pornography" for the late Renaissance period and his choice of the descriptive phrase "erotic writing." This introduction provides the lengthy discussion of definitions that all historical analyses of sexually suggestive or explicit material generally open with; helpfully in this case, the author substantiates the discussion with a detailed textual analysis of a selection of texts. Following a discussion of various definitions of pornography, Moulton argues that late Renaissance representations of sexual acts did not constitute pornography because of both literary content and social context: erotic writing was concerned with issues in addition to sex, women were portrayed as having an active sexuality, and the material was not cut off from mainstream culture (15). This last point is, for Moulton, the most significant: while pornography and its usage rest on the idea that sexuality can be separated from other areas of "public" human experience, erotic writing was not sustained by a "fiction of privacy" (14). Indeed, because sexuality was "more or less integrated with other spheres of life: the political, the social, the religious, the philosophic" (38), erotic writing was embedded in other aspects of culture. In his discussions of definitions, Moulton makes an innovative claim for pornography: "I have often thought that it might make more sense to see pornography as a way of reading rather than as a mode of representation" (11). Future studies might explore all kinds of literature and visual material in light of this comment. The claim shifts the spotlight to the contexts of literature, and for Moulton the varied contexts of erotic writing make it distinct from modern pornography. The fascinating evidence provided in chapter 1 of the literary contexts of manuscript erotic writing, which was circulated and bound with a wide array of other types of written material, is confirmation of this. The implication, and one that is vital to the analysis that follows, is that erotic writing cannot be discounted as the legitimate focus of all kinds of social and cultural historians.

Having set the empirical boundaries, the introduction establishes the thematic context of the detailed textual analysis of erotic writing that follows in subsequent chapters, namely, changing constructions of gender identity, and particularly masculinity. As Moulton claims, "[E]rotic writing was one of the arenas in which such changes were negotiated and contested. In England erotic writing played a crucial role in the construction both of gender identity and of authorial power" (28). Effeminacy [End Page 522] was a problem for masculinity, and writing (particularly of erotic material) was associated with effeminacy. The writing of erotic literature, then, was one arena in which these anxieties about masculinity were played out.

The subsequent five chapters are split into two parts: "English Erotic Writing" and "The Aretine and the Italianate." Part 1, chapter 1 opens with a discussion of manuscript circulation of erotic poetry. Chapter 2 reviews the discussions of effeminacy, national identity...

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