The four works under review here appear as two vital debates are converging about how we study subaltern identities during the medieval and early modern periods. The first of these conversations, undertaken primarily by historians of sexuality, is aimed at rethinking the possibilities of sexually subordinate subjects beyond the Foucaultian paradigm.Footnote 1 Ruth Mazo Karras and others have argued that the act/identity model unravels in the face of politically, socially, and sexually subordinate people that even by Foucault's own measure must be understood to have had identities.Footnote 2 Indeed, the multifaceted recognition that both medieval and early modern cultures were capable of producing sexually subordinate identities has added further questions to those being asked already by political historians like Tim Harris about what it might mean to do “history from below” when most evidence of subordination comes from institutions and individuals with power.Footnote 3 Remarkably, scholars of various beliefs and methodologies (cultural materialists, Marxists, political historians, feminists, and historians of sexuality, to name a few), who often can agree on little else, agree that a historiography focused merely on rounding up early modern dissident “suspects” risks becoming a tautological and fetishized search for reflections of the modern in the premodern that may also lure us into a new kind of essentialism. All too often the belief that a search for dissident subjects can be definitively undertaken is accompanied by the belief that the archives to which we have recourse really do reveal what life was like for people in the past.Footnote 4

How then do we respect the singularity of the past—its differences and uniqueness—without reinscribing what one contributor to Sodomy in Early Modern Europe recognizes as identity politics? The answer, a growing number of historians and literary critics argue, lies in a new epistemology of the archive that recognizes the social and political contingencies of the documents themselves.Footnote 5 Some scholars have and will react to this methodological turn with horror. But the point here is to demystify rather than to dismiss archival authority. For archives clearly tell us something. But what they tell us is no less contingent than the identities they appear to document. Nowhere are these contingencies more evident than in those archives that seem to document the existence of sexually subordinate subjects. As Paul Griffiths, Robert Shoemaker, Laura Gowing, and others have shown, legal records documenting charges of adultery may offer scholars evidence of the rate of sexual misconduct, and therefore of sexually subordinate subjects, or they may not. For the conclusion we draw from that record depends very much upon whether the court in question was a church court or a civil court, whether the charge was made by a neighbor or by an offended spouse, who the judge was, and a host of other “local” circumstances. Particularly with the study of medieval and early modern subaltern subjects, it is necessary to ask “what an archive contains,” what social and political interests crosshatch its discourse, “what a researcher can find therein,” and “what that might prove.”Footnote 6 Excavating the complex combinations of these contingencies is a tall order. But it is also a vitally important undertaking. Without such an effort, studies of subordinate subjects in the early modern period do little to expand our understanding of the way identity functioned. In a variety of ways, the works under review here illustrate the triumphs and the pitfalls of failing to recognize that the study of subaltern identity in the early modern period must be combined with this hermeneutic of archival suspicion.

Readers will find Bryan Reynolds's Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England an ambitious attempt to rethink the complex dynamic whereby late Renaissance England imagined a criminal underclass during the century between 1520 and 1640. They will also find it fraught with problems. For Reynolds, the interactions between this criminal underclass and “official culture” manifest a “transversal power,” which he defines as “a mechanism for experiential alterity” that “energizes and is energized by the enunciation and amplification of transition states, as when one empathizes, performs, transgresses, or, to cite more far-reaching examples, when one copes with transformations spurred by tragic happenings, sociopolitical uprisings, or natural disasters” (p. 19). Such pressures on the conventional boundaries of identity, according to Reynolds, lay the groundwork for dissident subcultures.

Although readers may well feel that Reynolds's terminology is an annoying distraction, Becoming Criminal does take up an interesting and salient question. Extrapolating from the work of Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Ernesto Laclau, Reynolds asks: if culture is by nature hegemonic, where then do the forces that thwart cultural totalitarianism come from? Becoming Criminal pursues this question through a case study of “gypsies.” Not surprisingly, given his training as a literary scholar, Reynolds's primary interest here is in the way “gypsy” functioned as cultural signifier of Renaissance England's avant-garde—people who possessed the transformative power to think “outside the box” of official culture. What is surprising is the amount of space Reynolds devotes to proving that a gypsy subculture actually existed—a point arguably irrelevant to his project—and the elaborate challenges he mounts to historians like A. L. Beier. The loss of focus and imbalance evident here, coupled with Reynolds's inability to explain why it is important that criminal “cant” actually existed, compromise the integrity of Reynolds's project.

Nor is this the only place where Reynolds undermines the success of his argument. In addition to the imbalance of his engagement with historians, Reynolds's own efforts to read archival material fall victim to his inability to sort through the contingencies of his terminology. Chief among these instances is his use of Louis Althusser's concept of “ideological state apparatus.” As with Althusser, the term “state machinery” in Becoming Criminal denotes the force and dynamic of a putative consensus between church and government, wherein the government is understood to be roughly equivalent to the modern nation-state. But anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Renaissance England knows that an English state did not exist. As such, any discussion of government, official culture, or state machinery in early modern England must carefully differentiate between institutions like the crown (which may or may not be synonymous with the reigning monarch), Parliament, and the church at the national level. On top of this general awareness, discussions of official responses to crime must be particularly careful to account for local government, the jurisdiction within which most crime was addressed. In fact, had he proceeded with a subtler hand, Reynolds would have seen that a discussion of local authority and jurisdiction might have provided him with a rich opportunity to talk more specifically about the underside of cultural hegemony and the construction of subordinate identities since local courts, officials, and communities often resisted both crown and church policies.

As is often the case with projects built upon shaky methodological and theoretical foundations, the errors in Becoming Criminal tend to redound on one another. Reynolds's sloppy use of “state” undermines a crucial portion of his claim that “official” culture instituted a series of policies that solidified a sense of national identity by repressing local dialects. Reynolds claims that the “state dealt with the problem primarily at the grassroots level through the institutionalization of an official public school system” (p. 67). Upon closer scrutiny, however, Reynolds admits in his note that schools were established in outlying areas at the parish level, presumably making them an extension of the church, but that in larger municipalities similar schools were civil ventures. Two problems present themselves. Most obviously, Reynolds's concept of “state machinery” upon which he hangs his transversal theory leads him to conflate the different agendas of church, crown, parish, municipality, and guild. But most troublingly, the conflation so much in evidence here reveals a crass understanding of the ways power circulated differentially even among official institutions, leading Reynolds to claim that the schools and their relatively consistent curricula are manifest evidence of the state's “strategic official action” (p. 67).

Given Reynolds's interest in the ideological formation of early modern England's cultural underside, it is all the more shocking that Becoming Criminal simply ignores most recent work on early modern subaltern identities by historians and literary scholars such as Laura Gowing, Frances Dolan, Paul Griffiths, and Steve Hindle, to name a few. Because Reynolds refuses to engage with the multiple contingencies of early modern identity formation—both dominant and subaltern—he never puts himself in a position to answer the question he poses at the beginning of Becoming Criminal: “Why gypsies at this particular moment?” (p. 28). In lieu of a convincing or even a compelling answer, Becoming Criminal only ever produces anemic assertions that members of official culture during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries fixated on gypsy identity because they wanted to experience the dissident “antistate concepts” of “heterogeneity, mutability, expansion, nomadism, performance, and indeterminacy” (p. 26). Readers will be left wondering why.

Little of the conceptual confusion or archival naïveté that vexes Becoming Criminal attends David M. Turner's Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660–1740. But readers will not find any of the intellectual adventurousness, either. One of the growing number of historians interested in rethinking our understanding of early modern sexual subalterns, Turner has written a broad but fairly standard study of adultery's shifting legal and social meaning during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries grounded in a truly impressive array of texts. Unlike Reynolds, Turner is careful to differentiate among his sources both socially and politically. In this study he contends that during the eighty years between the Stuart restoration and the middle eighteenth century “a variety of factors … were to lead to the proliferation of a wide range of opinions and angles of vision on adultery and other moral issues. By the 1730s and '40s boundaries were being redrawn and assessments of adultery depended on a wider variety of social and cultural circumstances” (p. 2). Turner situates his work in the context of social historians such as Lawrence Stone, Tim Meldrum, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, and Randolph Trumbach, as well as in that of historians of early seventeenth-century England such as Keith Thomas, G. R. Quaife, Susan Dwyer Amussen, Laura Gowing, and Elizabeth Foyster, each of whom has contributed to our understanding that moral regulations and domestic relations were undergoing significant change but who have also left adultery largely unscrutinized (p. 3). Fashioning Adultery “attempts to fill this lacuna by analyzing how marital infidelity was represented in a variety of literary and legal contexts” (p. 3). Beyond the social dimensions of Turner's study lies the recognition that the family also functioned as a political metaphor during this period. Fashioning Adultery is also interested in contesting claims that the period witnessed a “rising cult of domesticity” and a correlative “privatization of the family” (p. 7). Such truisms, Turner argues, “ignore the complexity of the debate on the public or private nature of marriage and adultery” as well as the “continuing importance of gender, the family and sexuality to political debate in this period” (p. 7).

Fashioning Adultery moves through six chapters that describe various aspects of the way adultery was discussed during the decades in question. The first, “Language, Sex and Civility,” and the last, “Criminal Conversations,” offer readers the most trenchant expressions of Turner's thesis and the most rigorous explorations of the evidences he considers. “Language, Sex and Civility” lays a convincing foundation for Turner's claim that over the course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries adultery was less and less understood in the moral terms of Christian law and increasingly understood as a transgression of civility and underlying social obligations that people had to one another. Turner sustains this view in “Criminal Conversations,” where he investigates an important but infrequent form of marital litigation that allowed a cuckolded husband to sue his wife's lover for financial redress. As Turner puts it, these cases “raised important questions about whether adultery was a ‘private tragedy’ or matter for public regulation” (p. 173).

Between the first and final chapters, however, Fashioning Adultery drifts somewhat aimlessly as the study becomes more concerned with accounting for the diversity of form and thematic through which adultery was shaped during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it fails to address the central question of why adultery was being thus reimagined. Chapters devoted to advice literature, satirical literature on cuckoldry, and sensational pamphlets on adultery and murder do little to tell us how these representations relate to the “growing interest in the relationship between private virtue and political probity, marked by increased attacks on aristocratic vice by a middling sort anxious to assert its social, economic and political worth” (p. 8).

In the case of the chapter on adultery and murder, Turner himself seems to lose track of his point. On the hand, he dismisses the pamphlets as a genre in which “adultery played a significant, yet largely unexceptional, role” (p. 118), raising questions about why he bothered to focus on these materials at all. More vexing, however, is the fact that Turner fails to engage a cultural construction that so clearly relates to his claim of a growing relationship between private virtue and public probity. For the pamphlets Turner discusses in this chapter disproportionately represented women who murdered their husbands and thus committed the crime of “petty treason” with all the obvious political implications. Rather flat-footedly, Turner characterizes the crime of “husband-murder” as one that merely carries “strong overtones of domestic disorder and disobedience” (p. 118). As a consequence, David Turner adds to the conversation about the existence of subaltern identities without complicating or challenging its direction much.

Readers will likely find James Grantham Turner's Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 more challenging than Fashioning Adultery and at times equally as frustrating as Becoming Criminal. Like David Turner, James Grantham Turner has assembled an impressive array of pornographic representation during the period he covers. On that ground alone readers will find Libertines and Radicals worthwhile. However, like Becoming Criminal and Fashioning Adultery, Libertines and Radicals evinces a peculiar ignorance of the current debate surrounding representations of seventeenth-century English prostitutes that parlays itself into historiographic errors.

Like Becoming Criminal, Libertines and Radicals attempts to articulate the ways in which England's underclass and its ruling class mutually shaped one another's attitudes and behavior, in this case about illicit sex. Also like Reynolds, Turner attempts to retheorize a familiar concept—“pornographia”—to similar problematic effect. “Pornographia,” Turner contends, foregrounds pornography's constitutive feature: the conflict between “a woman's autographism or self-representation” and “efforts by the narrator/defamer to pry open or cut into her respectable exterior, to reveal the expected story of sexual exposure and conquest.” Why exactly we need this neologism remains unclear since the urge to write and thereby expose prostitutes’ degradation, which Turner identifies as pornographia's constitutive feature, has underwritten pornography at least since the nineteenth century when social scientists adopted the latter term. In fact, Turner's neologism is arguably more akin to modern pornography in its salacious fixation on the prostitute's genitalia. Nor is Libertines and Radicals' undertheorization of pornography a small matter, since it leads Turner to conflate the figures of prostitute and whore, and this cannot be done for seventeenth-century culture without careful explanation. As Robert Shoemaker points out in his study of urban crime during the seventeenth century, women who were engaged in what we understand as prostitution, that is the exchange of sex for money, were understood in moral terms as lewd or loose women. “Whore” was one name that might apply colloquially or appear in defamation complaints, but it had no legal standing. Indeed, prostitution was not illegal until the middle eighteenth century. Because Turner fails to engage with current historiography on “the gross material substratum of ‘whoring’” (p. xi), he cannot fully articulate the complex relationships between women who were occasional prostitutes, women who gained their livelihood by that means, women who were involved in adulterous relationships, or women who were kept mistresses.

Turner's failure to differentiate among the varieties of relationships in which underclass women exchange sex for some form of compensation may also explain what is a disturbing oversight in his study. The evidence in Libertines and Radicals of women's being prosecuted for sexual transgressions comes almost exclusively from two sources: Ian Archer's Pursuit of Stability and Laura Gowing's Domestic Dangers.Footnote 7 These are fine studies of Renaissance history, but neither of them extends significantly into the era that Turner investigates. The Pursuit of Stability focuses on Elizabethan London, while the records Gowing used in Domestic Dangers extend only to 1640. Moreover, both Gowing and Archer would likely be the first to admit that the court systems for prosecuting vice changed significantly after midcentury, if only because the consistory courts, upon whose records Gowing bases much of her argument, were abolished by Parliament, never to regain their former glory under the Stuarts. Nowhere does Turner give any indication that he is aware of this midcentury institutional shift. To his credit, he does make use of Robert Shoemaker's meticulous research in Prosecution and Punishment (1991), though not as much use as he should.

Readers should also be aware that Turner's confusion of the Renaissance and the Restoration is not merely a bibliographic issue. Indeed, it serves as compelling evidence for why the new epistemologies of subaltern identities must be coupled with a new epistemology of the archive. The synopsis that introduces Libertines and Radicals claims that Turner himself examined sex-crime records, but careful scrutiny of his endnotes reveals that he did not. Rather, Libertines and Radicals reads other scholars’ transcriptions of sex crime records, usually with no attention to the social and political contexts of those records. For example, in his sole reference to Prosecution and Punishment, Turner misses the important point that while Shoemaker does say “adultery, prostitution, and solicitation of chastity” were unindictable at sessions, he does not say that they were unpunishable or unindictable in other courts.Footnote 8 Had Turner bothered to read this passage more carefully, he would have learned that Shoemaker observes that many of the indictments were removed to King's Bench by a writ of certiorari, which gave the superior court the right of review. Moreover, Shoemaker himself is guarded in the conclusions he draws from his selection of the Middlesex sessions records. Nonetheless, Turner uses Shoemaker to substantiate his claim that highbrow pornography imitated public shaming rituals like the charivari and Skimmington rides. In this case Shoemaker provides the archival evidence of what Turner earlier refers to as the aristocratic propensity to “flaunt … privilege” (p. 120). It is Shoemaker who points out that Charles Sedley's outrageous exhibitionism in 1668 became the standard by which all subsequent charges of “public lewdness” were judged. Yet Shoemaker's point actually undercuts Turner's claim. Inasmuch as Sedley set the precedent for prosecutions and was convicted, he can hardly be said to exemplify privilege. Moreover, the attempt to control “public lewdness” cannot be understood as a lack of interest in private vice. An offense had to be deemed criminal in order to be subject to indictment. Unless sexual misconduct was discovered in a bawdy house, the patronizing of which was indictable, it was always handled at petty sessions, where offenders were treated to summary justice at the hands of two or more magistrates. Petty sessions were still courts of law and thus public in an institutional sense. Moreover, magistrates and statutes alike understood perfectly well that even private vices had public implications.

The largest gap in Libertines and Radicals emerges in Turner's failure to consult, cite, or otherwise engage with prominent historians of seventeenth-century national and urban politics. Nowhere will one find Paul Halliday, David Wootton, or Blair Worden, who have worked extensively and most recently on midcentury politics. Nor will one find Gary De Krey's insightful work on urban politics and urban radicalism during the Restoration, which might have helped Turner explain the aristocratic expropriation of shaming rituals from earlier eras. Tim Harris's London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II plays an appropriately important role in Libertines and Radicals, but, as with De Krey's work, Harris's other studies of Restoration urban politics are absent. Missing as well are literary scholars who have produced important work on the relationship between literary representations and social practice, including Paula Backscheider, whose Spectacular Politics specifically addresses questions of urban politics and public rituals, and Frances Dolan, whose work on Elizabeth Cellier is conspicuously absent from Turner's discussion of the “Popish Midwife.” The point here is not to fill in Turner's bibliography. The point is that these omissions and oversights seem to lure Turner away from the politics of midcentury, particularly in their urban manifestations, and into several bizarre claims, including a proclamation that the “riots and charivaris of earlier decades” alone anticipated the “upheavals of 1640–1660” (p. xiii).

Among the books under review here, Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, edited by Tom Betteridge, offers scholarship that is the most comprehensive and most willing to engage in careful conversation about the intersection between early modern subaltern identities and the vagaries of archival evidence. Readers will find nine essays here by junior and senior scholars of extraordinarily high quality and an afterword by the late Alan Bray. Covering a range of topics and archives from trial records in early modern Germany to bestiality in early modern Scotland, these essays, to a one, are carefully researched and thoughtfully written. The aim of Sodomy in Early Modern Europe is, as Betteridge puts it, to “give readers a sense of the vitality of the field and provoke them to further reading and study of sodomy in early modern Europe”—a goal this collection accomplishes admirably (p. 9). Two essays in particular bear closer examination both for the kind of work they exemplify and the kinds of insights they offer readers: Sarah Silah's “Sexual Identities: A Medieval Perspective” and Alan Bray's “Epilogue.”

Readers will find Silah's essay a learned and shrewd engagement with the intersection between studies of subaltern sexuality and the epistemology of the archive. They will also find it one of the most tantalizing challenges to ways historians and literary scholars alike undertake the study of medieval and early modern culture. Silah builds on Eve Sedgwick's challenge to Foucaultian discourse analysis in order to argue that the current study of subaltern sexualities is overly reliant on narrative and thus fails to attend to the multiple contingencies of early modern sources: “If the emergence of the homosexual (rather like the rise of the bourgeoisie) can be discovered in any period a scholar chooses to examine,” Silah suggests, “it may be that narrative is not the appropriate format for this discussion” (p. 114). To underscore her point, Silah offers her readers a variety of medieval texts, some of which clearly employ sexual identity and some of which do not. Her point in doing so is to concede early on that “the premodern was able to conceptualize sexual identities” when it needed to (p. 117) and then to underscore the fact that it did not always do so. What really interests Silah, and by implication she believes ought to interest the rest of us, are questions that discover the kind of cultural work an identity formation performed at a given historical moment: “What kinds of identities could [medieval culture] produce; why does this conceptualization remain marginal; when does it appear, in which genres, which circumstance, implicated in which networks of relations; interacting in what ways with other categories of gender, age, social status, religious profession?” (p. 117).

Alan Bray's afterword draws out the implications of doing the kind of work Silah and other scholars in this volume have undertaken as he meditates on his own groundbreaking study Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982). For Bray, the politics of identity that typified histories of sexuality and the study of subaltern identities twenty years ago, his own included, marked a historical moment when the subordinate subjects of Western culture were becoming visible in ways they had not hitherto been. At the time, it was a much-needed strategy. But it has also become a severely limited politics and historiography, Bray notes, whose time has not so much passed as it is ready to mature. In different ways, each of the works reviewed here illustrates the current limits of subaltern sexual studies; they also illustrate the exciting possibilities of a subaltern studies enriched by a new epistemology of the archive.