Carnal Knowledge: Regulating Sex in England, 1470–1600 by Martin Ingram (review)

In this important new study Martin Ingram sets out fascinating and important details about the regulation of sexual behavior in southern England before and during the formative years of the Reformation. It is his contention that historians have neglected the final decades of the fifteenth century—because they form a hinterland in the commonly accepted shift from "medieval" to "early modern"—and the early decades of the sixteenth because of a fixation on the effects of Reformation. His aim is not simply to fill the resulting gap, but to argue the importance of this period in providing a context against which to assess (and perhaps to discard or modify) a number of existing theories about religious and cultural change.

As its title suggests, in his first book, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), Ingram concentrated on the records of the church courts. In Carnal Knowledge he draws on a breathtaking range of material from a wide variety of archives covering civil as well as ecclesiastical courts, from manor and borough courts to wardmote inquests and King's Bench, as well as other officials such as magistrates, and other institutions, including London's Bridewell hospital. This broadening of the historical lens provides the book's greatest strength, allowing different regulatory bodies and their strategies to be compared side by side over time. It also allows Ingram to make observations about how common expectations within communities more often led to overlap or cooperation between different jurisdictions rather than to competition or outright conflict. In late Elizabethan Colchester, for example, the church courts punished instances of incest, fornication, adultery, illicit pregnancy, and the harboring of unmarried mothers, while magistrates in petty sessions concerned themselves with cases of bastardy and illicit pregnancy that might have had an impact on the provision of poor relief. Both groups can be presumed to have regarded illicit sexual behavior as highly offensive not only to God but also "to the good order and reputation of the town" (345).

Space does not permit a rehearsing of all of Ingram's findings, but his instinctive focus is on continuity, demonstrating how active policing of sinful and disruptive sexual behavior long predated Protestant concerns about personal morality. From at least the fourteenth century, churchwardens made concerted attempts to steer parishioners away from sin; in subsequent decades, they were joined in towns and cities by various civic authorities who played key roles in monitoring and prosecuting illicit sex. The impetus for this moral policing had a religious base, but increasingly became inflected by broader social concerns about stable and ordered households, especially within growing towns and cities where economic dislocation and homelessness were becoming more common. Discipline, it seems, was a virtue valued by citizens from across the social spectrum. Prostitution caused unease for all levels of governance throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Ingram takes aim at scholars who suggest a late medieval tolerance for sex work (exemplified by the fame of the Bishop of Southwark's "stews") that gave way to rigid crackdowns. The stews existed, of course, but church officials never condoned them and fretted about how best to limit their sphere of operation. Ingram similarly does not deny the existence of periodic moral purges or intensifications of regulatory activity; rather, by making use of a long and deep chronology, he characterizes most of them as cyclical oscillations rather than points on a linear and evolutionary graph.

Having flattened out the contours of change and questioned the identification of the Reformation as a watershed, Ingram does identify various gradual shifts in attitudes and practices over time. During the fifteenth century and into the early sixteenth century, for example, the church became more lenient in the punishments it prescribed for sexual sin, resorting more often to shaming rituals than to whippings. Over the same period, however, civic authorities came to treat miscreants more severely. Another discernable change...