Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630-1685, and: Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex (review)

Reviews/Comptes rendus James Grantham Turner. Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics andLiterary Culture, 1630-1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xviii+366pp. €45. ISBN 0521782791. Pamela Cheek. Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and tL· Placing ofSex. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xi+246pp. US49.50. ISBN 0-8047-4663-X. The subject of"libertinism," like diose odier vexed subjects "homosexuality," "pornography," "venereal disease," and "antinomianism," to name a few, is important to eighteenth-century fiction in a variety ofways. This review essay will discuss the related critical fortunes of libertinism and pornography in two recent complementary books, with glances at odiers. The writings of James Grantham Turner have become, in die past two decades, a starting place for all discussions of"libertinism" in early modern Europe, but especially in English culture. In two articles that appeared in die late 1980s, Turner attempted to define, or at least characterize, libertinism in all its paradoxical significations. In "The Properties of Libertinism," Eighteenth Century Life 9:3 (1985), 75-87, he surveyed modern and seventeendi- and eighteentii-century definitions ofthe topic and came to the conclusion diat questions about die nature and development oflibertinism in the early modern period reflected two different approaches to the history of ideas, one expansive, or maximalist, the other restrictive, or minimalist. The former depicts libertinism as a broad movement ofsensibility, evolving towards cultured hedonism and incorporating the ideals of rakish vitality, psychological honesty, and a fair-minded assumption of combative equality between the sexes. The latter imposes sharp distinctions between the genuine libertine, and the more agreeable aspects of the late seventeenth-century mentality; it limits the duration, typicality, and influence of libertinism, and seeks to deny altogether its hegemony in English Restoration literature. (77) EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 17, Number 2,January 2005 270 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:2 He dien went on to discuss die religious meanings oflibertinism and offered the following formulation: there is no necessary connection, much less identity, between the religious and secular applications of "libertinism." The word refers, not to a single entity with different facets, but to three distinct movements of thought or clusters of attitudes: religious ("spiritual") libertinism, philosophical libertinism (the combination of antireligious skepticism and scientific materialism), ... and sexual libertinism. (79) In die odier article, "Lovelace and die Paradoxes of Libertinism," in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 70-88, he focused on Richardson's Lovelace as the primary eighteendi-century avatar of erotic libertinism ... the melange of Ovidian seduction-theory and Epicurean philosophy that Richardson found in the court wits of Charles II and in the seducer-heroes ofRestoration drama and early eighteenth-century fiction ... . these antecedents ofLovelace are torn between two roles; they proclaim dieir allegiance to Wit and Sense, but they are unable to reconcile the two components of this libertine character, intellectual brilliance and passionate sensuality. (71) I have quoted Turner's own formulations instead of paraphrasing them in order to indicate his careful delineation ofa slippery and multi-faceted topic. At least ten years in die making and with die help of four major grants, Libertines and Radicab, as the subtide indicates, covers a rich fifty-five-year period of die seventeenui century, ending widi die reign of Charles II. (It should be noted diat Turner's companion volume, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England: 1534-1685, appeared in 2003. The appearance ofdiese two books is a major publishing event in seventeendi-century studies.) Evident on nearly every page is die influence ofBakhtin on die social and bodily "lower stratum," ofStallybrass and White's TL· Politics and Poetics ofTransgression, of contemporary British microhistory, of Christopher Hill, Foucault, and McKeon on all kinds of "status confusion," of the current expository stylistic double-principle (for example, "the 'riding' or anti-procession ... at once humiliating and triumphant " [32]). Starting widiJane Barker's phrase, the "Deluge ofLibertinism, which has overflow'd the Age," and combining diis term widi die "popular Libertinism" diat Evelyn found rampant in the streets of London and with (over) recurrent reference to Milton's "Sons ofBelial" and "vagabond lust," Turner's major conceptual innovation in...