Fashioning Adultery

Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660 1740
Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-0-521-04270-3
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 251 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 415 g

Reihe: Past and Present Publications

This book provides a major survey of representations of adultery in later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Bringing together a wide variety of literary and legal sources - including sermons, pamphlets, plays, diaries, periodicals, trial reports and the records of marital litigation - it documents a growing diversity in perceptions of marital infidelity in this period, against the backdrop of an explosion in print culture and a decline in the judicial regulation of sexual immorality. In general terms the book charts and explains a gradual transformation of ideas about extra-marital sex, whereby the powerfully established religious argument that adultery was universally a sin became increasingly open to challenge. The book charts significant developments in the idiom in which sexually transgressive behaviour was discussed, showing how evolving ideas of civility and social refinement and new thinking about gender difference influenced assessments of immoral behaviour.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Turner, David M.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements; Note on the text; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Language, sex and civility; 2. Marital advice and moral prescription; 3. Cultures of cuckoldry; 4. Sex, death and betrayal: adultery and murder; 5. Sex, proof and suspicion: adultery in the church courts; 6. Criminal conversation; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Turner, David M.
David M. Turner is Lecturer in History, University of Glamorgan. He was educated at Oxford and Durham Universities, and was awarded the first Past and Present Society Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, London. This is his first book.