Helen Berry uses the Athenian Mercury, a popular periodical that flourished between 1691 and 1697, to recover the cultural world of the late Stuart middling sort, particularly with respect to gender relations. The journal solicited queries from the public on an astonishing range of issues and printed them (anonymously) with answers from the Athenian Society (comprising the bookseller John Dunton, the Anglican cleric Samuel Wesley, and the mathematician Richard Sault). Like the later and better-known Spectator, the Athenian Mercury had an agenda of moral edification and created a community of readers for whom its pages functioned as a virtual coffeehouse, a place of exchange and dialogue. But the Athenian Mercury's question-and-answer format, Berry suggests, gives the historian more direct access than does the Spectator to the voices of its readers, who, she argues, included many women and members of the “middling sort.” Moreover, because the Athenian Mercury relied less on “wit” and more on a tradition of moral casuistry, it offers special insight into what created dilemmas or caused anxiety for its target audience.

Using printed material to recover the views of real people poses well-known methodological problems, and Berry handles these honestly and deftly. Although there are no surviving letters to the Athenian Mercury (such as exist for the Tatler and Spectator), she makes a strong case that many of the published questions genuinely came from readers. Berry persuasively uses advertisements and the nature of the questions posed in the journal to justify her characterization of its readership. The perspectives of the “middling” and lower sort were reflected, for example, in the large number of questions about credit and debt, about apprenticeship contracts, and in the fact that writers tended to assume as a matter of course that women worked.

About 30 percent of the questions printed in the Athenian Mercury concern gender, sexuality, marriage, or the body, and Berry's discussion of what the readers and writers of the Athenian Mercury had to say about these matters is often fascinating. Courtship, Berry demonstrates, was a process fraught with anxieties for women and men: the former wondered how much they could initiate, the latter how to please women without becoming effeminate themselves. Writers struggled with the extent to which parental wishes or financial considerations should influence the choice of partner. Many questions posed to the Athenian Society revealed the desire of correspondents to secure commitments from others while avoiding commitment themselves, to manipulate potential partners while staying just within the bounds of law and morality. Readers wondered what counted as a marriage (was it enough to live together as man and wife?), whether promises to marry were binding, and whether it was permissible to hedge bets by pledging to multiple partners. Another intriguing vein of questioning concerns friendship. Readers wanted to know whether platonic friendship was possible between different sexes or laudable between members of the same sex. Berry does an excellent job of explaining why the questions would have mattered. At stake in worries about platonic friendship, she suggests, was the relation of body and soul and its implication for the meaning of sexual difference, as well as on a more pragmatic level the awkward fit between conjugal and homosocial relationships. When correspondents asked whether a corpse could have an erection, or a man experience empathetic morning sickness, they were engaging with a contemporary debate about whether sexual difference resided in the difference of hot and cold humors, or about the relative contributions of males and females to reproduction. Berry rightly identifies the late Stuart period as one in which the meaning of biological sex was vigorously debated, and she offers a vivid portrait of just how much was up for grabs.

The book is somewhat less successful in placing the Athenian Mercury into a narrative about the public sphere, or about the place of women therein. It is refreshing to have a study of print and coffeehouse culture that does not begin and end with the Spectator, but Berry herself does not spell out what, exactly, the inclusion of the Athenian Mercury in the story would change. One might also question Berry's description of the Athenian Mercury as a space for dialogue. As the frontispiece to Charles Gildon's History of the Athenian Society shows, the editors of the journal who answered the questions were understood to sit high above the people who asked them. The writers were allowed only one question, some questions were held up to ridicule, and the Athenian Society always has the last word. “Dialogue” seems too generous a description of the terms of this exchange.

The book is peppered with strong but underdefended claims for the Athenian Mercury's radicalism; it is credited, for example, for having “anticipated the first stirrings of self-consciously feminist protest” (242). Berry's sympathy for the journal causes her to take strong exception to Faramerz Dabhoiwala's description of it as the “mouthpiece” of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners. Berry insists that despite his overtly conservative intentions, Dunton unwittingly opened a Pandora's box of sexual subversion by allowing the mention of taboo topics like fornication or hermaphroditism in print, and by allowing for an ongoing dialogue about them in which women's voices were heard. Yet, there is reason to question (even on the basis of material Berry herself presents) whether the Athenian Mercury represents the first public discussion of these matters—the late Stuart press was hardly reticent about sex. Berry seems to me to put too much weight on the idea that simply discussing sex is disruptive of a normative moral order. Does right-wing Christian radio promote gay liberation simply by talking so much about homosexuality? I remain skeptical. In any case, the book would have benefited from more consideration of what Dunton, Wesley, and Sault thought they were up to, and how that agenda itself shaped their treatment of letters and the possibilities for “dialogue” in the journal's pages.

Still, it is a pleasure to find a scholar advocating so passionately for a source. This intelligent and interesting book may attract a new generation of readers to the Athenian Mercury; it deserves many readers of its own as well.