Fashioning Adultery

Abstract

This 2002 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.

Adultery and the double standard in a Dutch city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

“…This corresponds to one of the findings of Turner's study into seventeenth and early eighteenth-century adultery in England, concluding that during this period the bedchamber increasingly came to be associated with sexual intercourse, also strengthening the association between privacy, secrecy and adultery. 45 Possibly, the fact that women committed adultery in their own houses contributed to the severity of the punishment. One month after Maria van den Bogaert's husband was locked up in a workhouse, she started to have sex with another man in her own house, with whom she became pregnant.…”

The Pleasures of a Single Life: Envisioning Bachelorhood in Early Eighteenth-Century England

“…It placed less emphasis on men's subordination and control of women with sex and stressed new manly qualities of civility and politeness instead. 93 The Pleasures of a Single Life placed its speaker in a 'Domestick Scene', an unconventional but eminently congenial setting, one obviously more so than the shared space most single persons (especially women) inhabited. 94 Indeed, the speaker's domestic life was above all available to single men of a certain substance, those who emerged from the dependency of family, service, or apprenticeship into independent living unavailable to single women and to single men of lesser means.…”

The History of Masculinity, circa 1650–1800

“…David Turner has analyzed the uses of polite language in representations of adultery, arguing that civil codes of values affected the way men were depicted and their fortunes in courts of law. 34 Elizabeth Foyster has demonstrated how earlier expressions of strong emotion by men were reined in and how anger was increasingly regarded as a vice. 35 Robert Shoemaker argues that between 1660 and 1760 men increasingly solved disputes through talking rather than through physical violence, owing to refinement, sensibility, and the Reformation of Manners campaign.…”