Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England. By SamuelFullerton. Manchester University Press, 2024. Xi + 304 pp. £85.

Samuel Fullerton has produced an excellent debut monograph which is intelligent, ably written, and certain to be of great interest to a wide range of scholars.Fullerton explores how 'explicit sex-talk' (p. 2) and graphic sexual imagery entered mainstream English print culture and political discussion during the 1640s and 1650s.This development was a change from early Stuart norms in which such language had been kept towards the margins of public discourse, predominantly in scribal publications, in order to avoid censorship.Reticence was a casualty of the English Revolution.The collapse of effective censorship allowed pornographic language to be used, and the incendiary nature of British politics provided motivation for partisan authors to employ denigrating language for polemical purposes.As sales of new 'porno-political' literature boomed, publishers realised that they were onto a winner and soon the market was awash with lurid texts.Popularity and the dialogic nature of English pamphlet culture, what Fullerton describes as its 'mutually constitutive interchange of partisan polemic' (p.59), ensured that once sexual language began to be used by one side of the revolutionary conflict, it was employed with greater vigour by another side in turn, sparking still more emphatic rhetoric from the original party.Once sex-talk entered political culture, it proved impossible to retract or slow down its use.By the time of the Restoration, sexual politics was deeply ingrained in the mindsets of Englishmen and women, providing 'the ideological basis for both Charles II's pleasure-centred self-representation as well as that of his moralising godly opposition' (p.2).Fullerton's secondary aim in the book is to 'present a new narrative history of the English Revolution' which 'places sex and gender at the centre of its analysis' and shows the 'broader significance of England's mid-seventeenth-century civil wars and interregnum to the history of Western sexuality writ large' (p.3).The book is structured chronologically, and over its course Fullerton analyses the use of porno-political language during the Bishops' Wars, the collapse of Caroline government, the first civil war, mobilization during the conflict, debates over religious toleration, the regicide, the creation of the Commonwealth, criticisms of the republican regime, Interregnum moral reform, Cavalier dissidence, and eventually the Restoration.Thanks to his thorough research in both archival and printed collections, Fullerton is able not only to delineate the contours of the period's sexual politics but also to show how readers reacted to it.The marginal notes of mid-century readers are discussed, and effective use is made of court records, giving the reader a sense of how ordinary subjects -such as the Londoner Elizabeth Humphries who recited a royalist pamphlet trope that the Parliament 'were al cuckolds' (p.56) -adjusted to the new normal.Fullerton is also impressively attuned to the diachronic nature of his story.He notes how imagery began to be recycled over the decades and discusses how attitudes towards explicit language and sexual politics altered from the censoriousness of the early 1640s to Charles II's association of the Restoration court with libertine morality, not only out of personal loucheness but as a deliberate association with anti-Puritan sensibilities which had been developed by the Cavalier underground during the 1650s.