Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534-1685 (review)

In this well-researched and ambitious book James Grantham Turner examines the production, reception, and cultural context of erotic educational texts published in Europe between 1534 and 1685. During this period, Turner argues, erotic literature was actively engaged in contemporary philosophical, medical, and pedagogical debates. At the same time, learned men and women were preoccupied with the relationship between knowledge and direct sensory experience via the body. Furthermore, a small number of highly visible women pursuing philosophy sparked debates about whether women's bodies precluded them from education. Turner identifies the intellectual context for the appearance of an important set of works on erotic education—texts that would eventually form a new canon of erotic fiction.

Turner explains that the goal of his book is to answer the call for "a greater intellectualization of libertine literature," which has not been met in spite of a growing body of scholarship on the history of sexuality. Turner largely succeeds in this goal, moving texts of sexual education from the self-contained category of "pornography" into dialogue with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophical, medical, and educational literature. His obvious comfort with the literature (high and low) of the period allows him to forge convincing connections between diverse texts such as Milton's On Education, Margaret Cavendish's The Female Academy, and the erotic work L'escole des filles, ou la philosophie des dammes. In Turner's hands this is not a stretch, as he shows that the literature of pedagogy and eroticism existed in genuine proximity to one another. The nature and importance of the senses was, after all, a pressing philosophical question, as was the relationship between knowledge and pleasure.

Though the nonexpert reader is occasionally lost in the wealth of intertextual close readings, Turner's erudition is most often a strength. It allows him to paint a rich and layered picture of the links among erotic knowledge, philosophy, and women's education. The texts of erotic education that form the center of Turner's book are written in French, Latin, English, and Italian, and the comparative thrust of the book is often a great strength. It was common for the authors of these texts to borrow themes and vocabulary from books written in other national contexts (the Italian author Aretino was a favorite), and contemporary readers, like the famous English diarist Samuel Pepys, read books in several languages. Turner has also done careful bibliographical research on the publication histories of the central works in question, consulting the earliest editions whenever possible, providing information about the legal fate of these books and their authors. While historians of print culture will want to know more about the material histories of these texts (where they came from, how they traveled, who bought and sold them), this is not Turner's primary task.

In the first section of Schooling Sex Turner spells out the complex questions surrounding education and its relationship to the body. Here he is particularly concerned with the status of sensual knowledge. Were the passions—insofar as they provided direct knowledge of the physical world—the key to education? Or was education in fact the process of disciplining, refining, and controlling the passions? "In the seventeenth century," he argues, "competing conceptions of philosophical life underlie seventeenth-century representations of sexuality, and their opposition can be felt, I hope to show, even in the most frivolous and scandalous text." In fact, this is precisely what he does.

Turner begins to answer these questions by considering the writings of women authors who were actively engaged in debates about education—among them Moderata Fonte, Margaret Cavendish, Queen Christina of Sweden, and Madeleine de Scudéry. This itself is an important contribution to scholarship on early modern erotic literature. The growth of erotic texts based on the idea of an "academy for girls" takes on new meaning when one realizes that there was also a...