Reviewed by Nicole Eustace | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2

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Reviewed by Nicole Eustace | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex, and Civility in England, 1660–1740. By David M. Turner. Past and Present Publications. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 236. $55.00.) Reviewed by Nicole Eustace , New York University
In Fashioning Adultery, David Turner sets out to explore "the cultural representation of adultery in early modern England as a topic in its own right" (p. 3). Turner explains that a rising tide of cultural concern with questions of marital infidelity, as reflected in the proliferation of texts discussing the issue, make the problem key for understanding the history of the era. Eschewing an angle popular among practitioners of the "new cultural history"—the linkage of cultural and political analysis—Turner instead focuses closely on the social anxieties that discussions of adultery laid bare. This conceptual framework builds directly from one of the basic premises of the work: namely, that "over the course of the seventeenth-century ... analogies between familial and political order began to break down" (pp. 6–7). Although acknowledging that some historians may dispute this point, Turner firmly sets his own sights on understanding the relation between changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality, shifting social mores in a rapidly secularizing society, and social conflicts created by the emergence of a rising middle class. In the process, he argues that the issue of adultery was increasingly viewed as a private concern rather than a public problem.	1
Turner places his story in the midst of England's early modern burst of print culture and presents in clear, crisp prose a series of tightly argued chapters, each organized around the discussion of a particular source genre. Analyzing texts as diverse as religious treatises and conduct books, newspaper advice columns, plays, sensationalist murder pamphlets, and court records, he shows how each played distinct roles not only in reflecting but also in actively fashioning shifting attitudes toward adultery.	2
The first two chapters, one on the changing language used to describe adulterous activities and the second on conduct and advice literature, introduce the themes of secularization and gentrification. Comparing seventeenth-century advice literature written by clerics, eighteenth-century conduct books written by self-declared experts in the ways of gentility and civility, and question-and-answer adultery advice columns in the popular press, Turner makes a convincing case that old concerns about adultery as a source of sin soon gave way to newer concerns about infidelity as a mark of incivility. Traditional language discussing the sexual transgressions of whores gave way to polite references to the activities of gallants. Part and parcel of the development of a culture of politeness—with its circumlocutions on the subject of adultery—was a shift in gendered attitudes. Whereas once female whores had been held accountable for sexual sins, male gallants became chargeable with social transgression. At the same time, Turner argues that innovations in language signaled growing divisions in society, with upper-class extramarital sex receiving a softer linguistic treatment denied to—and, indeed, scorned by—the rising middle classes.	3
Much of what Turner has to say will hold comparative interest for historians of Anglo-America. These first chapters, especially, resonate with recent work in the early American field, from Jane Kamensky's Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York, 1997) to C. Dallett Hemphill's Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 (New York, 1999). Indeed, Turner makes the intriguing suggestion that the English turn from a focus on sin to one on civility may in fact have resulted from their involvement in the colonial encounter. He even throws in a brief reference to Roger Williams's approving assessment of Indians' standards of marital sexual conduct—included in a 1643 tract published in London—as evidence that reports from North America influenced changes in English culture.	. . .

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