Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex, and Civility in England, 1660–1740 by David M. Turner (review)

165 DAVID M. TURNER. FashioningAdultery: Gender, Sex, and Civility in England, 1660–1740. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. Pp. x ⫹ 236. $60. Mr. Turner is a historian, and his book provides a fascinating account of how and why the representations of adultery change as they move in and out of discourses and ideologies. His scrupulously detailed and methodologically sophisticated readings provide a sense of witnessing such shifts as they occur. Focusing on ‘‘the ways in which concepts of civility and polite manners influenced discoursesofsexualbehaviour,’’ Fashioning Adultery makes its most direct contribution to the history of private life, which, as Mr. Turner argues, in this period resides in the textual history of its publication. He traces its political and public dimensions even as it becomes, in otherways, moreprivate.Lookingatpopular , religious, and legal debate in sermons , pamphlets, trial reports, diaries, court records, periodicals, plays, jokes and social commentary, he finds an ‘‘increasingly eclectic mix of publications’’ that address sex and marriage. His methodology , then, is tailor-made to achieve exactly that effect of witnessing change noted above, for it ‘‘allows us not simply to describe but to demonstrate how the proliferation of genres acted as a motor for cultural change.’’ Fashioning Adultery looks at conduct literature, cuckolding humor, criminalbiography , church court cases, and the advent in the 1680s of a new form of civil legal action, the criminal conversation charge. In the terminology of this new civil action, we find the perfect articulation of the relation between incivility and immorality and so witness a defining moment in the consolidation ofpolitediscourse . With the phrase ‘‘criminal conversation ,’’ the polite moralist is able to speak the unlawfulness of adultery in terms that avoid the ‘‘hard’’ language of ‘‘whores’’ and ‘‘fornication’’ that itself seems to violate genteel diction, and also the more elegant discourses of ‘‘gallantry ’’ and ‘‘intrigue’’ that threaten to euphemize , even glamorize immorality. This appropriation of moral high ground by polite discourse is central to the validation of the secular, highly social language in which delicate matters of an intimate nature could be published in genteel, popular literature. Throughout, Mr. Turner traces the articulation of sexual mores not only through gendered distinctions—the double standard—but also through distinctions of prestige. Perceptions of the heinousness of, and culpability for, adultery shift with status as well as with gender. Mr. Turner shows how it was widely acknowledged , if not always approved, that the elite had a more tolerant, even lax view of sexual peccadilloes than did the increasingly influential ‘‘middle’’ classes . The criminal conversation suit reflects the status hierarchy in the way damages were awarded according to the relative status of the plaintiff and defendant . Fashioning Adultery demonstrates how the polite world devised well-bred ways of discussing gross indecency that register adultery ‘‘as something which was as socially repugnant as it was morally wrong’’and so fulfills the conditions both of traditional morality and of contemporary elegance. A pleasure to read, this is a first-rate study. Erin Mackie University of Canterbury, New Zealand WILLIAM R. NEWMAN and LAWRENCE M. PRINCIPE. Alchemy Tried in the Fire: ...