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

The jacket blurb describes this substantial work as 'the first full history of early modern libertine literature and its reception, from Aretino and Tullia d'Aragona in sixteenth-century Italy to Pepys, Rochester, and Behn in late-seventeenth-century England'. James Grantham Turner's focus is sexual libertinism, though his book also explores the relationship of libertine writing with philosophy and pedagogy, and the role of sexuality in an age of scientific and intellectual revolution. The book concentrates on the pedagogic performativity of erotic discourse, asking why the sexual education of a young woman should be the main theme of libertine literature. Turner is right to foreground this issue in surveying a period preoccupied with female intellectual and sexual education generally, and his chosen corpus clearly demonstrates how this preoccupation is found in the libertine text as well as in mainstream literature: works by Aretino, Tullia d'Aragona, Antonio Rocco and Ferrante Pallavicino in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, and the seventeenth-century French classics of the genre, L'Escole des filles and L'Académie des dames (Casanova's bible of sexual theory) are closely scrutinized. Turner is meticulous in detailing previous work on the genre and in establishing a place for himself in the vanguard of theoretical study, claiming coverage of a broader historical corpus than any of his predecessors. There is more than a hint of self-satisfaction in this oft-repeated contention, which may alienate some readers. Moreover, the claim is not entirely justified: the assertion that 'Nobody has analysed the entire genre of erotic literature in detail' (p. viii) is belied by the existence of a number of studies predating this book, by Gaëtan Brulotte (1999), for example, and Peter Cryle (2001). Turner's avowed mission to 'reconstruct the ars erotica that Foucault declared missing from the west' (p. xi) is a central theme of Brulotte's work. All of this suggests an uneasy relationship with the existing literature, which is compounded here by the irritating absence of a bibliography. There are also some methodological inconsistencies, notably the eschewing of a psychoanalytic or Foucauldian vocabulary in the context of an investigation of how sexuality came to be a 'discipline or body of knowledge'. The originality of Schooling Sex lies in its emphasis in Part II on reception-history and the erotics of literary response, which includes fascinating accounts of early responses to L'Escole des filles and L'Académie des dames, extending a discussion at the beginning of Part I of scenes from Pepys's and Casanova's memoirs. Interested scholars will also learn much from an examination in Part II of the extent to which English translations and emulations of French and Italian libertine literature in the second quarter of the seventeenth-century were often what the more psychoanalytically minded might describe as Bloomian rewritings of the precursor-text.