English
St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England,
1660–1714
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Company
Burlington, VT
2004, 173 pages
With this original study, Melissa Mowry makes a strong
contribution to a provocative interdisciplinary conversation about
an important and influential sub-genre: 17thcentury political
pornography.
“This deeply learned, clearly-written book examines the cultural
function of political pornography by exploring how the bawd and the
prostitute figure as the denigrated representatives of mass
political participation in the period, as well as how this
figuration relates to what we can learn about historical women who
were bawds and prostitutes. Mowry’s distinctive focus and argument,
and her careful grounding in original research, distinguish The
Bawdy Politic from other scholarship on the topic. This book will
contribute to our understanding of the histories of women, of
sexuality and of pornography, as well as of political rhetoric and
its resources both in the past and today. The book will also make
an important contribution to discussions about women’s relationship
to the emerging public sphere.” —Frances E. Dolan, University of
California-Davis
“This is a fascinating study of how the distopic vision of
pornographic pamphlets and broadsides—particularly their
representation of a monstrous bawdy politic governed by ‘common
women’—provided fodder for anti-democratic politics of the late
17th-century.” —Valerie Traub, University of Michigan