The “Holy Sister” Anatomized: Religious Polemic and Erotic Writing in England, 1640–1660

This article explores the profound sexualization of seventeenth-century English religious polemic by examining the history of the popular “holy sister” stereotype as it evolved during the English Revolution (1640–60) from a relatively tame element of contemporary religious satire into a regular feature of obscene antipuritan print by the 1660 Restoration. In particular, it argues that the erotic evolution of the sisterhood was primarily a function of the English civil wars, which witnessed an unprecedented crisis in post-Reformation politics and a concurrent explosion in partisan print. Together with the endemic misogyny enflamed by the transgressive activities of actual puritan women, those factors inspired a dramatic escalation in sexually explicit confessional polemic during the period—a process spurred on by the long-standing early modern association between lust and lechery as well as the commercial motivations of contemporary printers and publishers. Eventually, royalist writers during the early 1650s purposefully made graphic sexuality a staple of their antipuritan polemic, reasoning that godly moralists would find nothing more offensive than obscene depictions of human sexuality. The essay goes on to assert that this novel association between antipuritanism and explicit sexual description continued well into the Restoration, when its continued success may have encouraged London publishers to greenlight new erotic genres in print for the first time in English history. Not only, therefore, did the English Revolution spark an unprecedented sexualization in contemporary religious polemic; it may also have contributed to the much-studied erotic renaissance that characterized late Stuart culture after Charles II’s accession.