With this much-anticipated Carnal Knowledge: Regulating Sex in England, 1470–1600, Martin Ingram offers a prelude and addendum, of sorts, to his influential Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987). Now emeritus fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford, Ingram has published insightful articles and essays in the intervening years on the topics of sex, marriage, crime, and law. Some of this earlier work is drawn together here, along with significant amounts of new archival research in both secular and ecclesiastical court records, to examine the legal regulation of sexual behavior before, during, and after England's Reformation.

Ingram argues that sexual regulation preceded the Reformation and its war on sexual sin, a contention that in itself will not surprise many, but he also contends that this regulation had more of an ideological seriousness of intent and underpinning moral vision than he sees acknowledged in the work of some other historians of late medieval sex and moral regulation. Ruth Mazo Karras's arguments that late medieval legal responses to sexual misconduct were to some degree “half-hearted” and intended more to regulate than to eradicate serve as a primary target, but Ingram also sees himself challenging scholars such as Marjorie McIntosh, who, he says, have depicted the courts' actions as “simply” responses to disorder and pragmatic attempts to control misbehavior. One wonders if some of the historians against whose interpretations Ingram positions his work will recognize their own arguments; one doubts that the scholars charged with having interpreted “efforts at sexual regulation merely in terms of a straightforward response to perceived problems of disorderly behaviour” (140), for example, would characterize their thesis as such.

Whatever the positioning of the arguments along the way, those arguments and the evidence upon which they are based are of interest and significance, not least in bringing together pre- and post-Reformation material. Drawing upon a remarkable range of archival sources from a wide range of courts both ecclesiastical and secular, and from areas both rural and urban over a long span of time, Ingram's work ably sets out a textured account of sexual regulation. He demonstrates the ways in which secular courts of provincial towns concerned themselves with sexual offenders in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, more often focusing on public disorder and keeping of “ill rule” than the church courts with their focus on secret sins, but both acting upon a moral vision of the commonweal that such sexual misconduct violated. The material on the early sixteenth-century wardmote quests in London is particularly fascinating, with its cases of banishment and expulsion, as is that on the 1519 drive against vagabonds and sexual offenders in and around London instigated by Cardinal Wolsey. The pre-Reformation authorities did not really “tolerate” the stews, he insists, but simply could not manage to get rid of them—until they did, in 1546. The London church courts before the Reformation “had definite limits,” he allows, while disagreeing with those who depict them as “lax or otherwise imperfect” (174). Vigorous action by secular courts might well have been sporadic, he acknowledges, but he maintains that it was cumulatively impressive.

Ingram charts several patterns of change over the period, some of which happened at different rates or intensities in cities and towns of differing sizes. Over time, Ingram argues, church courts seemed to move towards more lenient penances, even as borough courts moved towards harsher, more public shaming and corporal punishments. Church courts ordered fewer whippings, but secular courts picked up the lash. The nature of sexual offenses brought before the courts shifted, on balance, from a greater focus on adultery and the sins of married couples towards a later focus on fornication between unmarried partners. One of the more important services provided by the church courts in the late middle ages was redress for slander. Only slowly did the secular courts develop an interest in defamation, but from the early sixteenth century they did start to claim jurisdiction over slanders of theft and other temporal crimes, leaving the church courts' slander business to tilt more heavily toward imputations of sexual offenses, and with it, to tilt more toward female plaintiffs defending their reputations for sexual honesty. While jurisdictional competition between the various courts did arise on occasion, for the most part, Ingram maintains, secular and ecclesiastical courts worked in symbiosis with much of lay society to advance a common image of the common weal.

The legal regulation of sex, by secular authorities as well as religious, certainly existed before the Reformation; as Ingram acknowledges, the Reformation brought changes, but how best to characterize those changes remains a challenge. He describes the intense campaign against illicit sex that took place in London, climaxing around 1550, noting that in provincial towns the impact of religious change on sexual regulation came a bit later and more quietly. Visitations came to play a greater role in policing sexual misconduct. What followed the Reformation was not “simply a continuation or a straightforward intensification of the earlier state of affairs” but “the matrix of the past continued to shape the patters of sexual regulation in middle to late sixteenth-century England” (267). Perhaps it is unfair to hope for a clearer summary of the pattern of change when those changes were so various and context-specific. All in all, he concludes, the moral reformism of Protestants and the atmosphere produced by confessional conflict, inflected by past efforts to police sexual sin, coalesced with the late sixteenth-century economic and demographic challenges to contribute to a significant shift in the moral climate.

As Ingram notes, the material here should be of interest not just to historians of sex, gender, crime, and society but also to those working on state formation and the Reformation. For historians of the latter, in particular, this book has much to offer. Ingram notes that the energy and impulses pushing for sexual reformation could do with more attention from historians as a dimension of the English Reformation writ large. One hopes that this excellent book might help spur that work along.