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Libertine Enlightenment
Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century is a 2003 book edited by Peter Cryle and Lisa O'Connell. OverviewLibertine Enlightenment is a multi-author collection of essays covering several aspects of libertine thought as it developed during the Enlightenment, including sexual liberty, personal liberty, and political liberty.[1] The book contains the following sections and essays: Part I. Disquieting Theories 1. "Taking Liberties: Sterne, Wilkes and Warburton" by Simon During Part II. Improper Women 6. "The Female Rake: Gender, Libertinism and Enlightenment" by Kathleen Wilson Part III. Spurious Practices 10. "Libertines and Radicals in the 1790s: The Strange Case of Charles Pigott I" by Jonathan Mee ReceptionJames Grantham Turner, reviewing the book for the Journal of the History of Sexuality, described Libertine Enlightenment as "a star-studded collection in the sense that it provides small but intense points of light, case studies rather than large definitions or broad syntheses."[2] Turner went on to say, "[t]he main focus of many essays here is not sexuality but sexualization—a kind of automatic assumption that any free-thinker or skeptic must be wildly experimental in sexual matters."[3] Turner concluded: "these essays bring Enlightenment to life as a complicated phenomenon, contradictory, even slovenly, but still vital. I find this timely."[4] Michael McKeon, writing in Studies in English Literature praised the book for its eclectic approach: "Libertine Enlightenment ... mixes methods of criticism, moving back and forth between theoretical synthesis, textual analysis, and biographical story-telling, the latter two predominating. What unites these styles of procedure is a fairly common thickness of circumstantial detail, briefly immersing the reader in a world and a demimonde that seem only rather more strange than they do familiar[5] McKeon went on to say:
Adam Rounce in The Cambridge Quarterly commented on the misleading title of the book: "this essay collection inverts the old-fashioned idea of hiding erotica under a dull and pious title, so that politics and liberty get equal attention with sex."[7] Rounce did offer qualified praise for the book, stating that despite its unevenness, "the best parts ... would stand very well on their own, while some of the others would benefit from less rigidity."[8] Kevin L. Cope, writing in Eighteenth-Century Life, reviewed Libertine Enlightenment alongside Sophie Carter's Purchasing Power: Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture and Frances Ferguson's Pornography, the Theory. Cope called Libertine Enlightenment "most ambitious and successful of the three ... Libertine Enlightenment ... expands the standard concept of the place of Enlightenment."[9] However, Cope found Libertine Enlightenment, as well as the two other books under review, diminished by a certain timidity in addressing their topics: "All three of these books suffer from a pervasive nervousness, whether a highly professional concern to please the aging power-brokers of our profession or a quiet tension about taking up the tawdry side of life as one’s topic in a 'tenure' book or an affected trembling about the injustices of sex in the exploitative city or some other form of hypertrophic worry. These books remind readers that the long eighteenth century may well be larger than our wits (or our lusts) and that its seeming preoccupation with sexuality may only symptomatize its vivacity."[10] See alsoReferences
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