When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature ed. by Bradford K. Mudge (review)

160 about.’’ He recapitulates the theories of seemingly sundry innovators, including very minor players (like Giorgio Baglivi, whose Paraxis medica in 1699 argued for a chemical-mechanicalexplanationofthe body) to more important figures, such as William Harvey (discoverer of the circulation of the blood, 1628). Whole chapters or large sections are devoted to the usual suspects, such as Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury,Mandeville, Swift, the Spectator, Erasmus Darwin, Hume, Cheyne, Sterne, Johnson, Godwin , Blake, and Byron. So who or what dealt the lethal instruments to the soul? Renaissance revival of materialist thought, Hobbes’s rationalism, Locke’s destruction of innate ideas, Hume’s skepticism ,theneedtodeterminehumanidentity (Locke again), the increase in sensibility and fear of disease by the new consuming classes of the lattereighteenth century—all had a role. Mr. Porter, who died in 2002, kept one eye focused on the past and another on the present, implying that the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century was erected upon the theoretical groundwork of the late eighteenth. He often delights his reader when he perceives an alliance between supposedly enemy thinkers, as in the William Godwin-Robert Malthus debate over the future. Christian doctrine and a materialist view of human nature, he argues, find a surprising level of agreement, revealing ‘‘the commitment of the liberal and progressive intelligentsia to a new view of mankind, elevated above the gross and fallen Christian flesh in pursuit of a millennium in which what counted was the march of mind, sanctity of intellect , freedom of the spirit,commitment to enquiry and the adventure of the life critically examined.’’ One need hardly stress Mr. Porter’s affirmation of the Age of Reason against the school of Foucault and his acolytes, such as Terry Castle, who recently sneered at what was not ‘‘an Age of Reason but one of paranoia, repression and incipient madness.’’ This does not mean he is without strong opinions about superstitious realities such as the witchcraft mania and widespread fear of the devil and damnation still operating in Europe even in the Age of Reason, but they are deftly hidden in his lucid and elegant prose. His best chapter is devoted to Sterne, who in Tristram Shandy made ‘‘a sewer of fiddlesticks, sausages, noses, whiskers , buttered buns, yards, spouts, asses, cabbage-planters, whim-whams, pipes, organs, holes, crevices, breaches, wind, battering rams and horn-works. . . .’’ Against this laundry list of filthy double entendres, a higher wisdom emerges: ‘‘Thehuman animalneedstobeaccepted, not denied.’’ This is also the wisdom of this learned and humanistic compendium . Arthur J. Weitzman Northeastern University When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature, ed. Bradford K. Mudge. New York: Oxford, 2004. Pp. xxxiii ⫹ 332. $74; $24.95 (paper). This is a welcome, affordable collection of erotic texts from 1680 to 1746, covering a wide variety of material. Although all but one of the texts have been reprinted in the twentieth century, When Flesh Becomes Word presents a new transcription of the texts, complete with an Introduction, annotations, a Bibliography , and a detailed Index. Its numerous contemporary illustrationsareunglossed. The editor remains an unfortunate choice. Mr. Mudgeseemsunfamiliarwith 161 editorial practices; his knowledgeof erotic writing is demonstrably thin. His hasty and dogmatic Introduction rehearses the truism that there is no pornographicgenre for the period. His essay charting the genre ’s rise is inconsistent. What is ‘‘libertine ’’ about these texts remains unclear, unless one relies on the simplistic definition of libertine as ‘‘salacious.’’ Seven of the nine texts have been recently annotated in Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, set 1 (2002). Mr. Mudge lists this collection in his Bibliography, yet it is obvious that he has not consulted it. Now he has made it necessary to consult ECBE for more cogent and reliable annotations. Indeed, Mr. Mudge’s own annotations are usually unhelpful. It is obvious that in a bawdy reference to the Rabbit Woman of Godalming, a ‘‘warren’’ is an enclosure for rabbits and not, as noted, ‘‘an obsolete form of ‘warrant .’’’ There are several unnecessary emendations to the texts, such as Mr. Mudge’s ‘‘ell’’to ‘‘[h]ell’’change to The School of Venus: ‘‘. . . a flabby wide one. I’ll have none of these last sort of Cunts, that if a man...