When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature

This collection of libertine literature (some from the late seventeenth century, in spite of the sub-title) is described by its editor as “proto-pornography”—that is, material drawn from the rich vein of racy writings that pre-date and inform the more recent concept of “pornography.” The texts included are the direct antecedents of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which is now accepted as canonical or at least worthy of serious study. These works also provide obvious material for the historian of sexuality, or indeed for anyone interested in what booksellers used to describe as the “curious.”

As Bradford Mudge points out in his introduction, libertine literature was widely circulated in its day—Edmund Curll made a modest fortune selling it—but its importance has been overlooked because libertine texts have been largely obscured from view in later centuries. This is in part because very few physical specimens of these works survive, in spite of their initial popularity. Like Pepys with his copy of the Ecole des filles (which appears in this anthology in an early English translation), many original consumers must have bought and read such books surreptitiously, destroying them afterwards. The examples that do survive are confined to special collections like the Private Case in the British Library or the Φ shelfmarks of the Bodleian, off-limits within recent memory and still largely inaccessible to readers outside London and Oxford. Only a handful of rare books libraries have original copies of any of the works in Mudge’s selection, judging from ESTC. In terms of electronic access, Early English Books Online has just one at the time of writing, Venus in the Cloister. Eighteenth-Century Collections Online offers six of Mudge’s nine titles (generally the less graphic ones, but including an edition of the New Description of Merryland). Neither ECCO nor EEBO has The School of Venus or A Dialogue between a Married Lady and Maid, which are the most risqué of the lot (although ECCO has two later, tamer imitations that borrow the School’s title). All of the texts but The School of Venus are available in the 5-volume Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Set I, edited by Alexander Pettit and Patrick Spedding (at $750), and most are available in Mudge’s microfilm of the Private Case ($2,600) or ESTC microfilms. These are prohibitively expensive for the individual reader and, in the case of the microfilms, not much use outside the library. When Flesh Becomes Word, in contrast, is cheap and can be read conveniently on the bus.

The real benefit of the anthology lies in giving the student or general reader a convenient collection of the classics of late Restoration and early eighteenth-century libertine literature. When Word Becomes Flesh offers the three great “whore dialogues,” in which a more experienced woman initiates a novice in the arts of love through discussion and in some cases action: The School of Venus (1680), Venus in the Cloister (1725) and A Dialogue between a Married Lady and a Maid (1740). The first two of these are translations of French works (from 1655 and 1683, respectively); the last is an abridged English adaptation of Nicolas Chorier’s Latin Satyra Sotadica (c. 1660) or one of its French translations. As a group, they provide the missing link between Fanny Hill and a European erotic tradition that goes back to Aretino. Mudge reproduces the earliest edition of The School of Venus from a copy in Munich, apparently unique, that was unknown to David Foxon when he compiled his seminal Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745 (1965). The other titles—whole works or substantial excerpts—give a sample of other varieties of libertine literature, like pornography in the guise of the medical treatise (Gonosologium Novum [1709]) or the erotic geography of A New Description Merryland, which went through multiple editions and spawned imitations. The poems reproduced in chapter 2 (The Pleasures of a Single Life, The Fifteen Comforts of Cuckoldom and The Fifteen Plagues of a Maiden-Head) are only mildly libertine compared to the explicit descriptions of The School of Venus or the Dialogue between a Married Lady and a Maid, but they are representative of a well-established minor genre and occasioned prosecutions when they first appeared. Not every sexual proclivity is represented—we are given flagellation, female cross-dressing and lesbian nuns, but no mollies—but on balance Mudge has chosen well.

The illustrations are also good. Title pages of the various texts help to convey the look and feel of the originals, which a transcription can never really do. The mezzotints from the elusive 1680 edition of the School of Venus are of particular interest – crude, both in subject matter and execution, but at the same time charming. Mudge’s notes and prefatory material are adequate, but do not add a great deal to what we already know from Foxon’s pioneering work, Peter Wagner’s Eros Revived (1988), or Mudge’s own The Whore’s Story (2000).

The anthology’s editorial policy is sound, at least in theory. Eccentricities of style and inconsistencies in spelling and punctuation have been left unchanged in order to give the reader a true sense of texts that were published in secret and in haste, one step ahead of the censor. In practice, however, there are some problems. In the first place, Mudge might also have left obvious typographical errors as they were, rather than silently correcting them, for they too might be indicative of the exigencies of the clandestine press. More troubling is the significant number of misprints that appear to have crept into the final text. For example, repuce (for “prepuce”), obscane, spupplyed, obsrev’d, singifies, Sudorisicks (for “Sudorificks”), Gentials, Volaile (for “Volatile”), sately (for “safely”), Religicuse (Religieuse), shrick (shriek) and Impetousities must be evidence of sloppiness in transcription, in silent correction, or in proof-reading. OUP should do better. Such errors tend to undermine the reader’s confidence in the accuracy of the texts, even if they do not seriously detract from what is otherwise a useful general resource.