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.

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write as intellectual women? What forms of sexuality emerged in the age of educational, scientific, and political revolution? Schooling Sex reconstructs the vividly compelling loose canon of sexually-explicit literature, in Latin, Italian, French, and English.

The frescoes of Peruzzi, Raphael and Sodoma still dazzle visitors to the Villa Farnesina, but they survive in a stripped-down environment bereft of its landscape, sealed so it cannot breathe. Turner takes you outside that box, restoring these canonical images to their original context, when each element joined in a productive conversation. He is the first to reconstruct the architect-painter Peruzzi's original, well-proportioned, well-appointed building and to re-visualize his lost facade decoration-erotic scenes and mythological figures who make it come alive and soar upward. More comprehensively than any previous scholar, he reintegrates painting, sculpture, architecture, garden design, topographical prints and drawings, archaeological discoveries and literature from the brilliant circle around the patron Agostino Chigi, the powerful banker who 'loved all virtuosi' and commissioned his villa-palazzo from the best talents in multiple arts. It can now be understood as a Palace of Venus, celebrating aesthetic, social and erotic pleasure.

This detailed and incisive study of Milton's confrontation with his precursors and contemporaries, establishes him 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.

In this book some of the most eminent critics of seventeenth-century literature and some of the liveliest younger scholars explore the interconnections between Milton's politics, poetics and prose writings. While the essays focus on Milton's prose, they open up interesting perspectives on his major poems and on seventeenth-century ideologies, theologies and interpretative practices. Their aim is to bridge the gap between a history-of-ideas approach and literary/textual analysis, showing how key ideas - such as authority, divorce, martyrdom or iconoclasm - stimulate and trouble the imagination of a great writer. These essays challenge the notion of Milton's prose as an 'achievement of the left hand', and propose a complex relation between text and context, the aesthetic and the sociopolitical, issues of representation and the politics of gender.

A 'Deluge of Libertinism' swept through England in the turbulent seventeenth century: class and gender relations went into deep crisis, and sexually explicit literature took the blame. Bridging periods often kept apart, Libertines and Radicals analyses English sexual culture between the Civil Wars and the death of Charles II in great 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. Turner places special emphasis on women's writing and on pornographic texts like The Wandering Whore and The Parliament of Women, flavoured with cockney humour or 'Puritan' indignation. Throughout, Turner reads satirical texts, whether political or pornographic, as an attempt to neutralize women's efforts to establish their own institutions and their own voice. This exhaustive study will be of interest to cultural historians as well as literary scholars.

This book's 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.

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 politics of gender.