Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 (review)

Professor Turner's valuable study of the intersection of sexual and political culture during the Civil War, Interregnum, and reign of Charles II focuses on the European evolution of pornography and its relationship to women's attempts to achieve both literary and social power. Examining a wide range of "porno-political" texts, practices, and preoccupations, Turner demonstrates the cultural importance of a pornographic discourse normally marginalized and shows how it provides an important register of both political and sexual attitudes and practices.

Turner defines his subject as the "discourses and rituals that constituted illicit, transgressive sexuality in the early modern period" (ix); as such a definition suggests, he focuses throughout his study on both literary and social history. He therefore pays as much attention to charivari, carnival, apprentice riots, and the scandals of Charles II's court as he does to literary texts, particularly because he insists from the beginning that the libertinism upon which he focuses "was not so much a philosophy as a set of performances" (x). Turner begins, in fact, by defining pornographia in chapter 1 as an act as well as a text, an accusation directed against the prostitute or whore that suggested both transgression and its punishment. But a male discourse initiated to contain, designate, and ridicule could be manipulated by the object of its scorn and turned to her own advantage: pornographia becomes equally an expression of female power and social rehabilitation. This leads to what Turner identifies as "the crux that runs through virtually all representations of sexuality outside the sanction of marriage: the abject associations of the common prostitute constantly conflict with the glamour and prestige of the cortegiana honesta or the royal mistress. Given this inversionary affinity of high and low, the courtesan becomes a perfect vehicle for political commentary" (3). According to Turner, pornography, which begins as an act dedicated to the policing and maintenance of traditional sexual categories, actually destabilizes the hierarchies it is designed to protect.

In chapter 2, Turner considers the sanctioned rituals and festive violence that surrounded illicit sexuality in mid-seventeenth-century England. Here, too, he delineates his subject through a series of paradoxes: do English charivari and Skimmington rides represent punishment or celebration? the control of deviant sexual behavior, or its release? the castigation of female agency, or an expression of women's sexual power? Such fundamental uncertainties, according to Turner, make political reading of such rituals particularly difficult, because they could function as expressions of both royalist and radical sentiment.

Chapter 3 charts these paradoxes as they reveal themselves in porno-political writing during the years 1640-60, when the proliferation of satire that accompanied the revolution illuminates the male fears engendered by female assertions of power. The years of civil war provided opportunities for women to wield power in ways that were both new and frightening; as public speakers, political petitioners, and religious activists, they began to assume roles that questioned their subordination to men, the image of a "commonwealth of women" employed both to glorify and denigrate newly empowered women. The larger European context of Turner's argument works particularly well here, since the French cult of the femme forte had a powerful influence on English culture.

The heart of this book, however, concerns Charles II, and the final three chapters and epilogue all deal with libertine culture and pornography during the reign of the "Merry Monarch," whose sexual appetites and political indiscretions helped to engender a complex erotic discourse that highlights the tension between carnivalesque hedonism and Puritan repression. Proceeding more or less chronologically through Charles's reign, Turner examines a wide variety of literary texts and political events, focusing particularly on the "sexualization of urban geography" (136) during the early years of Charles's rule, the bawdy-house riots of 1668, the violent sexual antics...