Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660-1740.

David M. Turner. Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660-1740.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xii + 236 pp. index. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-521-79244-4.

Scholars have long regarded the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a period of fundamental change when Britain went from Laslett's distant lost world to one in which many aspects of life are recognizably modern. David M. Turner now adds one more area of change: the way adultery was regarded by the public and by the law. Although the Commonwealth's attempts to have adulterers put to death failed, at the Restoration adultery was still considered a great sin deserving of punishment. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, adultery was viewed as a personal tragedy. Turner has scoured a wide variety of sources dealing with marital breakdown from popular plays and pamphlets to legal treatises and trial records to support his thesis.

Turner develops several corollaries to support his argument. Women, who had been seen as the more lustful sex, were now seen as the passive victims of scheming males. Cuckolds, who had been universally perceived as objects of ridicule and the butt of stage humor, became objects of sympathy who now had recourse at law. Previously the only remedy for a failed marriage was a ruling by an ecclesiastical court granting a legal separation without remarriage. By the mid-eighteenth century, a deceived husband could take civil action in the courts of King's Bench or Common Pleas against his wife's lover for the "loss of comfort and society" and claim damages. Adultery, or "criminal conversation" as it was legally described, had become a crime and not a sin. The civil courts did not have the power to grant a separation, however. For that the victim still had to take his case to the Church, but the cuckold who had once been considered helpless before his wife's sexuality now had "a chance to reassert his power and turn the tables on his wife's lover" (174). But although men could sue their rivals, they had to be careful not to be perceived as being excessively vindictive, or the jury might shift its sympathy to the accused.

The changed attitude permitted men to claim the moral high ground. They had behaved with propriety and their willingness to forgive an errant wife became a sign of strength not of weakness. This changed attitude is also evident in the words used to describe and therefore trivialize the offense. The "whoredom" of the seventeenth century became "gallantry" in the eighteenth. Thus, Samuel Pepys could describe his acts of adultery as his "follies," and his wife was fighting a losing battle when she forced him to write a letter to his paramour denouncing her as a "whore." By the eighteenth century the term was restricted to streetwalking prostitutes.

Many factors led to the changes briefly sketched above, and limitations of space do not permit consideration of the arguments and examples presented in this carefully reasoned cultural study. Clearly the royal example had an effect, as did the Church of England's loss of its legal monopoly. Meanwhile, the growth of the metropolis brought new opportunities, and changing ideas of civility made adultery more acceptable. At the same time, the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 combined with the growth of literacy led to an "explosion" in popular print. Indeed, one of the strengths of this informative book is the use Turner has made of pamphlets which took delight in exposing the marital problems of the upper classes as well as those that offered serious marital advice to their readers.

Turner shows further that the social distinction also became more pronounced. In the seventeenth century, adulterers from all stations of life were equally sinful, but by the eighteenth "rank seemed to rewrite normal codes of sexual reputation" (93). The judgments in criminal conversation suits followed this code too. It was much easier for the great to claim that his right to respect had been injured if his wife's lover was of lower rank, but an upper class defendant could get off by pleading that his admitted adultery could not have "injured" his lower status rival.

ROBERT C. BRADDOCK

Saginaw Valley State University