BOOK REVIEWS 259

Journal of the Hisrory of the Behavioral Sciences: Vol. 32(3),259 -261 July 1996
0 1996 John Wilcy & Sons, Inc. CCC 0002-5061/96/030259-03

Lynn Hunt, Ed. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity,
1500-1800. N Y Zone Books, 1993. 411 pp. $26.95 (cloth) (Reviewed by Timothy J.
Gilfoyle)

Pornography is democratic. It attacks hierarchy, monarchical privilege and the omnipo-

tent power of the state. As Newtonian physics, pornography embodies the materialist as-
sumptions of the Scientific Revolution. Much of western literature remains unrecognizable
absent pornography. It was one of the earliest literary genres where women spoke for and
about themselves. Pornography is a logical outcome of the Enlightenment.
Many at first glance will recoil in horror at these presumed heresies, regardless of one’s
political affiliation. The Invention of Pornography not only validates such conclusions at dif-
ferent periods in early modern Europe; it confronts the iconoclastic and simplistic analyses
of contemporary pornography. This landmark book provokes and incites, ultimately chal-
lenging fundamental assumptions about the meaning of the obscene.
Pornography is related to modernity for the historians contributing to this volume.
Some specialists will fault the consistent failure to distinguish among terms like “erotic,”
“bawdy,” “obscene,” and “pornographic.”’ Others will object to employing pornography as
an analytic category before the term entered the nineteenth-century vocabulary. But these are
quibbles which ignore broader arguments. The word did not exist, but the intellectualization
and commodification of the erotic (seen in the appearance of sex aids and a literature of sex-
ual arousal) can be traced to the early sixteenth century. According to Paula Findlen, for ex-
ample, pornography emerged with Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti (1534- 1536) and was but
one offspring of Italian Renaissance humanism. Aretino lived a highly public life, interacting
with major political, religious, artistic, and intellectual figures of the age. His “illegitimate”
pornography cannot be divorced from his “legitimate” literary canon. Similarly, Joan DeJean
argues that L’Ecole des Filles (1655) is not simply a classic example of French pornography,
but indeed a critical element in the evolution of the epistolary novel. As the early novel,
pornography displayed new, first-person narratives, was often equated with libertinism, and
revolted against conventional morality and religious orthodoxy. A century later, Kathryn
Norberg contends, the “libertine whore” portrayed in French pornography was a rare female
image: independent, sensual, sensible, and skilled. While the “whore novel” did not em-
power prostitutes or convey female subjectivity, the genre was a scarce eighteenth-century
narrative style allowing women to speak about and for themselves.
New philosophies of materialism and science contributed to the appearance of pornog-
raphy. According to Margaret C. Jacob, pornography reflected the mechanization of nature
embraced by the Scientific Revolution after 1600. Both science and pornography embodied a
new metaphysics of bodies -atomized, stripped of appearances and qualities, rendered
knowable only by virtue of their size, shape, motion, and weight. Randolph Trumbach finds
the materialist ethic in pornography representative of a new alternative subculture with its
own “religion of libertinism.” Sexual organs and acts of sexual intercourse were not only
central to human life, but good, natural life-giving forces.
The authors collectively build upon recent scholarship linking early modem politics and
pornography? Rachel Weil shows how English Restoration “pornographers” used images of
and stories about the monarch’s body for political purposes. Through narratives of erotic ex-
cess and pornographic poetry, political satirists associated absolutism and Catholicism,
tyranny and popery, with the sexual. Significantly, Lynn Hunt demonstrates that politically
260 BOOK REVIEWS

motivated pornography reached its zenith in the French Revolution. A cascade of obscene
pamphlets, many depicting Marie Antoinette in sexually-exposed roles, culminated in the
writings of the Marquis de Sade.
The politics of obscenity even differed among European countries. For example,
Wijnand W. Mijnhardt found little pornography in the Dutch Republic. The bourgeois char-
acter of Dutch society was decisive in explaining its absence. A wider consensus in law, pol-
itics, and sexual morality among social groups simply made pornography less useful as a
political weapon.
The Invention of Pornography moves the obscene pamphlet and the censored print from
the margins of social and literary history to center. stage. To understand pornography is to
fathom modernity. Pornography emerged in the sixteenth century, developed concomitantly
with print culture, relied on themes from antiquity, spoke to the same public that read scien-
tific journals and novels, and charted changing attitudes toward the human body, sexual be-
havior, and republican government. A vehicle to criticize religious and political authority,
pornography expanded in periods of social turmoil and was directly associated with demo-
cratic movements.
By historicizing the subject, the authors persuasively show that pornography’s assump-
tions change. The obscene has not always structured domination upon gender, as many cur-
rent commentators a ~ s u m e . ~Eighteenth-century pornography, as Norberg argues,
emphasized sexuality, not sex. While obscene literature constructed a fictional universe built
around crude and even violent images of domination, it assumed a plurality of forms.
Pornography did not make women the sole victims or objects.
The paradoxical meanings of early modern pornography raise new and provocative
questions for future research. Like Restoration England, nineteenth-century American
brothel guides satirized certain social movements and turned prostitution into an idolatrous
religion. What political meanings were attached to brothels labeled “temples to Venus” or
prostitutes called nun^?"^ If political pornography declined because of its incompatibility
with new ideals of domesticity, does the rise of “hard-core” pornography throughout the
twentieth-century West reflect the deterioration of those same ideals? Do pornographic car-
toons of Jerry Falwell or George Bush “in drag” personify important critiques of late twenti-
eth-century politics? Indeed, can the entirety of pornographic literature since 1800 be
explained solely as an outlet for male genital gratifi~ation?~
Such questions and their answers are full of irony and ambiguity. Indeed, Lynn Hunt
demonstrates that pornography and democracy have a paradoxical relationship. Initially
written for elite, urban, aristocratic, libertine male audiences, pornography after 1700 broad-
ened into republican discourses. At other times, notably in the English Civil War and French
Revolution, royalist newspapers employed sexual slander to attack revolutionary govern-
ment. Democratic themes of social equality persisted. In most cases, however, this populism
was gender-specific. Pornography was almost always a leveling for men. Women remained,
in more ways than one, on the bottom.

NOTES
1. For works that make such distinctions, see Roger Thompson, Unfit For Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic,
Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1979); Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in
London, 179.5-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 205-231.
2. See Robert Damton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1982); Peter Wagner, Ed., Erotica in the Enlightenment (Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 1991).
 BOOK REVIEWS 26 1

3. CatharineA. MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

4. For examples of guidebooks, see Butt Ender, Prostitution Exposed, or, A Moral Reform Directory (NY n.p.,
1839); Old Man of Twenty-Five, Guide to the Harem, or Directory to the Ladies of Fashion in New-York and Vari-
ous Other Cities (NY?: n.p., 1855 and 1856), both in personal collections of Leo Hershkowitz; Free Lovyer, Direc-
tory to the Seraglios in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and All the Principal Cities in the Union (NY n.p., 1859).
For interpretations linking pornography with antievangelicism and anti-Catholicism, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City
of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (NY W.W. Norton, 1992), pp.
130- 135; David J. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emer-
son and Melville (NY Knopf, 1988), pp. 64-65,87.
5 . For an extension of this discussion into the nineteenth century, see McCalman, Radical Underworld

Journal of the History of fhe Behavioral Sciences: Vol. 32(3), 261 -263 July 1996
0 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0002-5061/96/030261-03

Stephen J. Stein. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of
Believers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. 554 pp. $ 40.00 (cloth) (Reviewed
by A. Gregory Schneider)

In this major work, Stephen J. Stein presents the first comprehensive history by a pro-
fessional historian of the Shakers, from their beginnings to the present day. It is a monumen-
tal effort that deserves most of the encomiums that adorn its dustcover. The praise it perhaps
does not deserve and the way in which it falls short will be the topic at the end of this review.
Stein takes his professionalism very seriously in this book. From first to last he is self-
conscious and explicit about the professional historian’s duty to be critical, to debunk myths,
to cut through sentimentalized images, and to present only verifiable historical facts. In par-
ticular, he is determined to put an end to the fantasy of the Shaker village as an arts and
crafts utopia.
The way he organizes his book reflects this pervasive commitment. He divides Shaker
history into five periods and his book into five parts, each part dealing with a particular pe-
riod. He eschews what he deems to be subjective criteria for the periodization of Shaker his-
tory -success and failure, prosperity and decline-in favor of more objective public events
like the death of leaders and the opening or closing of villages. Part one of the book, further-
more, which is devoted to the “Age of the Founders, 1747-1787,” is much shorter than
might be expected. This is because Stein attempts to “slice through the layers of tradition
that surround this early period and, in doing so” greatly reduces the body of historical detail
that can be verified (xv). Stein challenges members of his profession to follow him in doing
source criticism and searching for the historical Ann Lee, Shaker founder, rather than accept-
ing hagiographic depictions of her.
This approach dictates greater attention and space devoted to the second period of
Shaker history, what Stein terms the “formative period,” 1787- 1826. The leaders and activi-
ties of this period, argues Stein, have been overshadowed by the myth of the founders. Yet
these were the people and the actions that created classical Shakerism.
Stein labels the third period, 1827-1875, “the maturation and revitalization of the soci-
ety.” His treatment of the period does much to establish his contention that the Shakers, con-
trary to popular images of them as paragons of spiritual harmony, “were an extremely
factious people” (xiv). Stein finds some of the most fascinating evidence of factiousness in
the outbreak of spiritualistic frenzy called “Mother Ann’s work.” He is also convinced that