Record Nr.

UNINA9910807819603321

Autore

Turner David M. <1972->

Titolo

Fashioning adultery : gender, sex, and civility in England, 1660-1740 / / David M. Turner [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa


Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2002

ISBN


1-107-12991-5
1-280-16218-X
0-511-11905-4
0-511-04123-3
0-511-14875-5
0-511-33052-9
0-511-49610-9
0-511-04704-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xii, 236 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

Past and present publications

Disciplina

306.73/6/0942

Soggetti

Adultery - England - History

England Social life and customs 17th century

England Social life and customs 18th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-228) and index.

Nota di contenuto

; 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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.