Noteworthy for its historical detail and intellectual incisiveness, this study establishes Milton as a monumental but divided figure--torn between radical and conservative mentalities, between eroticism and hatred of the flesh, and between patriarchal and egalitarian conceptions of Paradisal marriage.

Schooling Sex is the first full history of early modern libertine literature and its reception, from Aretino and Tullia d'Aragona in 16th-century Italy to Pepys, Rochester, and Behn in late 17th-century England. James Turner explores the idea of sexual education, from the simple instructional dialogue to the advanced experiments of the philosophical libertine, analyzing the hard-core curriculum that defined sexuality centuries before the Marquis de Sade.

This study analyzes English sexual culture between the Civil Wars and the death of Charles II in unprecedented detail. James Grantham Turner examines a broad range of Civil War and Restoration texts, from sex-crime records to Milton's epics and Rochester's "mannerly obscene" lyrics. Throughout, he interprets satirical texts, whether political or pornographic, as an attempt to neutralize women's efforts to establish their own institutions and voice. This exhaustive study will be of interest to cultural historians as well as literary scholars.

This book explores the interconnections between Milton's politics, poetics and prose writings.

In this book, some of the most eminent critics of seventeenth-century literature and some of the liveliest younger scholars explore the interconnections among Milton's politics, poetics, and prose writings. While the essays focus on Milton's prose, they open up new perspectives on his major poems and on seventeenth-century ideologies, theologies, and interpretive practices. These essays challenge the notion of Milton's prose as an "achievement of the left hand," proposing a complex relation between text and context, the aesthetic and the sociopolitical, issues of representation and the...

This exploration of sexuality and gender in Renaissance art and literature starts from an assumption that would have seemed unthinkable a generation ago: that the "natural" phenomena of sex, gender, and subjectivity are constructed rather than essentially biological or fixed. The essays in this collection rise to the challenge of producing a new post-Foucaultian history of gender and sexuality. All of them have been influenced by feminism, and several deal with women not just as objects of representation, but as subjects and authors in their own right. Among the historical issues examined are...

This study analyzes English sexual culture between the Civil Wars and the death of Charles II in unprecedented detail. James Grantham Turner examines a broad range of Civil War and Restoration texts, from sex-crime records to Milton's epics and Rochester's "mannerly obscene" lyrics. Throughout, he interprets satirical texts, whether political or pornographic, as an attempt to neutralize women's efforts to establish their own institutions and voice. This exhaustive study will be of interest to cultural historians as well as literary scholars.