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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 65.2 (2004) 310-316



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Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630-1685. By James Grantham Turner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xxii + 343 pp.
Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534-1685. By James Grantham Turner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xxviii + 408 pp.

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, [End Page 310] a focus that simultaneously privileged and slandered women for their purportedly innate capacity to master both the subject of sexual knowledge and the narration of sexual acts. On the other, Turner becomes increasingly absorbed with the construction of erotic practices and discourses as transcendent; in other words, he registers a post-Foucauldian attentiveness to the emergence of a seventeenth-century ars erotica.

While taking pornographia's performative claims seriously, indeed painstakingly tracing the two-way causal relation between discourses and rituals of sexual violence between 1630 and 1685, Libertines and Radicals avoids being recruited by its subject matter. Instead, it examines the broad sweep of pornographia's cultural and political performance in the crucial moment at which, as Turner frames the period from the civil wars through the Restoration, government was reimagined; women began to participate actively and visibly in political, religious, and cultural debate; and London's zones of misrule formed the material and metaphorical sites in which upper and lower ranks marked their social distinction through acts of sexual aggression, writing, and display. The book argues, first, that pornographic satire sought to "confront and neutralize women's efforts to establish their own institutions" but often failed by unwittingly exposing "women's achievement" or emphasizing the feminizing prostitution of the male institutions that were supposed to serve as the valued norm. Turner's other argument, developed chiefly in the second half of the book, is that Restoration libertine elites emulated in their sexual display and writing the unruly violence of apprentices and the lower ranks. Their transgression or transvestism of social status confirmed their own privileges and rank, while their stylish low wit was in turn taken up by plebeian imitators.

In his first chapter Turner presents Italian literature as having provided the source motif for English pornographia. The prostitute could be figured alternatively as cortegiana honesta, the glamorous and ostensibly cultivated courtesan who sublimely stimulated invention and wit through the display of her arts, and as puttana errante, the "wandering" and "errant" whore whose abject sale of self infected those who touched her. In Restoration pornographia, for example, the mistresses of Charles II, from the aristocratic Lady Castlemaine to the actress Nell Gwyn, typified but also inverted and dissolved the opposition between courtesan and whore. Because the prostitute yoked together sublime and abject, high and low, into distorted...

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