The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714

With this original study, Melissa Mowry makes a strong contribution to a provocative interdisciplinary conversation about an important and influential sub genre: seventeenth-century political pornography. Mowry argues that Stuart partisans cultivated representations of bawds and prostitutes because polemicists saw the public sale of sex as republicanism's ideological apotheosis. This book further advances our understanding of pornography's importance in seventeenth-century England by extending its investigation beyond the realm of cultural rhetoric into the realm of cultural practice. It includes substantial archival evidence of prostitution from the Middlesex Sessions and the Bridewell Courtbooks. Carefully grounded in original research, The Bawdy Politic is a cultural study with broad implications for the way we understand the historical constructions and legal deployments of women's sexuality.