Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain- Sexua ...

Sam Fullerton

• 25 juni 2024
• 9781526175908

Samenvatting:

This book explores the sudden emergence of graphic sex-talk in English print culture during the events of the English Revolution (1640–60) and argues for the long-term significance of that development for the political culture of late Stuart England and beyond.

Sexual politics in revolutionary England explores the sudden appearance of graphic sex-talk in polemical print during the English Revolution. This was a novel development, for prior to 1640, explicit sexual language in England was largely confined to subversive oral and scribal forms. Yet after the collapse of press licensing that accompanied the outbreak of civil war, it rapidly evolved into a vital component of mid-century public culture. By the Stuart Restoration, sexual politics had become a routine element of English political life.

This book tells that story for the first time in a sweeping narrative account. Drawing on print and manuscript sources from dozens of archives, it traces the evolution of explicit sex-talk from its pre-war underground roots into a premier mode of public politicking during the 1640s and 1650s. In those years, contemporary ideas about sex and the body invaded crucial mid-century debates over religious toleration, sectarian radicalism, and patriarchal kingship to dramatic effect. In the process, the book shows, sex-talk became a key tool of partisan identity formation and military mobilisation, as contemporaries repeatedly portrayed themselves as morally upright patriarchs and their enemies as promiscuous lechers. By 1660, twenty years of increasingly visible sexual politics had laid formative groundwork for the libertine antics of Charles II’s courtiers as well as the caustic slanders levelled against the Restoration court by its godly critics. This book offers an important new context for approaching the history of late Stuart sexual culture – and through it, that of Western sexuality more broadly.

Sexual politics in revolutionary England recounts a dramatic transformation in English sexual polemic that unfolded during the kingdom’s mid-seventeenth-century civil wars. In early Stuart England, explicit sexual language was largely confined to manuscript and oral forms by the combined regulatory pressures of ecclesiastical press licensing and powerful cultural notions of civility and decorum. During the early 1640s, however, graphic sex-talk exploded into polemical print for the first time in English history. Over the next two decades, sexual politics evolved into a vital component of public discourse, as contemporaries utilized sexual satire to reframe the English Revolution as a battle between licentious Stuart tyrants and their lecherous puritan enemies. By the time that Charles II regained the throne in 1660, this book argues, sex was already a routine element of English political culture.