In 1699, William Wake, then rector of St. James's Westminster and later archbishop of Canterbury, published The Principles of the Christian Religion, part of which explicated the Decalogue. When coming to the seventh commandment, Wake explained that “Thou shalt not commit Adultery” prohibited more simply than “the Violation of the Marriage-Bed” (Wake, 117). Instead, faithfully keeping the seventh commandment meant that one should “abstain not only from Adultery, but from all manner of Carnal Pollutions whatsoever,” including anything “which may be likely to Raise our Passions to any Immoderate Height” (Wake, 118). The problem of sexual incontinence, Wake reckoned, was not just that it was “a very heinous Sin in the Sight of God,” but that it was “destructive of Humane Society also” (Wake, 118–19). Wake, in other words, reckoned that sexual incontinence had both soteriological and social consequences.

William Wake's take on sex now seems antiquated at best, repressive at worst, since it holds that God prescribed limits to the legitimate activities of the autonomous self. But surely one thing Wake's Principles reminds us is that sex has always been thought about in moral and social terms. For thinking about sex requires thinking about what it means to be human; about what behavior is best for humans; and about how best-behaving humans can best relate to one another. Recapturing the world from which William Wake's Principles emerged and to which it spoke requires thinking both capaciously and sympathetically about the subject. The authors of Sex and the Church do just that. William Gibson and Joanne Begiato are colleagues at Oxford Brookes University but have previously plowed different scholarly fields: eighteenth-century ecclesiastical history and social and cultural history of the family and marriage, respectively. In Sex and the Church, they deploy their complementary talents to produce a learned work, one based on wide reading in both the printed and manuscript sources. They have also produced a provocative work, one which avoids the temptation to make the eighteenth century either the hero or the villain in a story of progressive sexual liberation. Indeed, they self-consciously and assiduously avoid identifying the eighteenth century as the time when sex became privatized or secularized and, their book's subtitle notwithstanding, they gently but firmly push back against the work of those like Faramerz Dabhoiwala, who famously pinpointed the eighteenth century as the site of “the first sexual revolution” (The Origins of Sex, 2012)

Gibson and Begiato open Sex and the Church with a consideration of the eighteenth-century church's teachings regarding sex. By “the church,” Gibson and Begiato mostly mean the established Church of England, although other Protestant churches also get some consideration. And by “teachings,” they mostly the various polemical texts produced by eighteenth-century divines regarding sexual behavior. While Gibson and Begiato show that churchmen thought about a wide variety of sexual behaviors and in a variety of contexts, their evidence highlights the continuities with early modern Protestant thinking about everything from adultery to fornication to onanism: theologically, what constituted deviant sexual behavior remained in the eighteenth century what it long had been, even if new explanations for that deviant behavior were increasingly offered up. Gibson and Begiato's chapter on the church's teachings about sex also inadvertently highlights the considerable scholarly work left to be done on eighteenth-century soteriology, as their treatment of “a new theology of sex” (42–53) posits a Pelagian consensus that, unusually for the book, seems more the product of intuition than of overwhelming evidence.

The conclusions of the rest of Sex and the Church are nothing if not richly and convincingly substantiated, as Gibson and Begiato proceed thematically to consider sex and the public sphere; illicit sex and the church courts; marriage and marital sex; evangelicalism and sexual respectability; celibacy, chastity and moral restraint; sodomy and same-sex desires; sex scandals; and obscene narratives.

A few themes run through the thematic chapters. Firstly, the church held sex to be a good thing if practiced within marriage. The Anglican priesthood was not celibate, and a moderately sexed marriage—that is, one marked by “conjugal chastity”—was held to be the ideal for all. Secondly, there existed a variety of official and semiofficial institutions to police deviant sexual behaviors. The ecumenical Societies for the Reformation of Manners brought prosecutions against those engaged in illegal sexual behaviors, while the church courts were more active and for far longer than previously thought. For the most serious sexual crimes—cases of sodomy, for example—the civil courts became involved, and some found guilty were punished with death. In 1695, Thomas Aikenhead was the last person in the British Isles put to death for blasphemy, but in 1726 Gabriel Lawrence was executed after being caught in a molly house raid.

Lawrence was not the only nor the last person in Britain engaged in same-sex sexual activity, which points up a third theme of Sex and the Church: illegal sexual behavior—like illegal public expressions of theological heresy or blasphemy—was more often managed than prosecuted. Especially in places like Oxford and Cambridge, blind eyes often were turned to the behavior of sexually aggressive dons; even when charges were brought against some of them, they were often allowed to slip off to France with their lives, if not their livings. There is a distinct sense from the evidence Gibson and Begiato adduce that prosecutions and punishments for deviant sexual behavior were intended to be exemplary to dissuade future potential sexual malefactors.

Finally, one's sexual reputation formed a key part of one's overall personal reputation and thus was often used as a polemical and political cudgel, as John Wesley and dozens of Methodists discovered. All of this leads Gibson and Begiato to conclude that the eighteenth-century English laity “thought about and practiced sex within a religious, and predominantly Anglican, framework” (285). Surely this is true, just as surely as it had been true for the English laity for centuries past. Demonstrating that is one of the many considerable virtues of Sex and the Church, a volume that should be on the bookshelves of all serious students of eighteenth-century British history.