Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England

February 12 at 12pm ET/ 10am MST/ 5pm GMT

Join NACBS to celebrate Sam Fullerton’s recent work Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England. Jamie Gianoutsos will join Sam Fullerton in conversation.

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Sexual politics in revolutionary England recounts a dramatic transformation in English sexual polemic that unfolded during the kingdom's mid-seventeenth-century civil wars. In early Stuart England, explicit sexual language was largely confined to manuscript and oral forms by the combined regulatory pressures of ecclesiastical press licensing and powerful cultural notions of civility and decorum. During the early 1640s, however, graphic sex-talk exploded into polemical print for the first time in English history. Over the next two decades, sexual politics evolved into a vital component of public discourse, as contemporaries utilized sexual satire to reframe the English Revolution as a battle between licentious Stuart tyrants and their lecherous puritan enemies. By the time that Charles II regained the throne in 1660, this book argues, sex was already a routine element of English political culture.

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Sam Fullerton is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas. In addition to his work on the sexual politics of the English Revolution, he has published on such topics as royalist print culture, transatlantic anti-puritanism, and the history of libel. His most recent article, which examines the mid-seventeenth-century  origins of English pornography, appeared in the Journal of Modern History in September 2024. His current book project is a history of political libel during the English Revolution. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Riverside in 2019.

Jamie Gianoutsos is associate professor of history at Mount St. Mary’s University (Maryland), specializing in early modern Britain (1500-1850), including intellectual history, the history of gender, culture and political thought. Her first book, The Rule of Manhood: Tyranny, Gender, and Classical Republicanism in England, 1603-1660 (Cambridge 2021), was the co-winner of the Istvan Hont Prize for best book in intellectual history. Her next book, currently under contract with Penguin Classics UK, provides an exploration for academic and popular audiences of the long classical republican tradition in England, America, France, and Haiti. For future projects, she is also researching the role of the newspaper in the development of republican thought and conceptions of medical knowledge and republican citizen ‘bodies’ in the seventeenth century.