Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more