L'escole des filles by active 1655 Michel Millot We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

In an age where the Church ruled and anything but the missionary position with your spouse was a sin, people still wanted more. That is clear from the fact that this book exists, was translated from the original French to English, and at least one parliamentarian admitted to reading it. I'll add in my own assumption that even without this book there would be a lot of people asking for forgiveness for their bedroom activities based on the Church's guidelines. Samuel Pepys, an Admiral and Parliamentarian purchased his own copy in England, in 1668 when he saw it in an average book store. Though, he notes he bought it in plain binding as he intended to burn it after reading as not to disgrace himself if someone found it. He skipped church the next day to peruse his purchase and on conclusion wrote this in his diary: "It was not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world... it did force my prick beyond stand all the while."

Mighty Lewd Books describes the emergence of a new home-grown English pornography. Through the examination of over 500 pieces of British erotica, this book looks at sex as seen in erotic culture, religion and medicine throughout the long eighteenth-century, and provides a radical new approach to the study of sexuality.

This is a history of early modern libertine literature and its reception, from 16th-century-Italy to late-17th-century-England. James Turner explores the idea of sexual education, from the simple instructional dialogue to the advanced experiments of the philosophical libertine.

The concept of obscenity is an ancient one. But as Joan DeJean suggests, its modern form, the same version that today's politicians decry and savvy artists exploit, was invented in seventeenth-century France. The Reinvention of Obscenity casts a fresh light on the mythical link between sexual impropriety and things French. Exploring the complicity between censorship, print culture, and obscenity, DeJean argues that mass market printing and the first modern censorial machinery came into being at the very moment that obscenity was being reinvented—that is, transformed from a minor literary phenomenon into a threat to society. DeJean's principal case in this study is the career of Moliére, who cannily exploited the new link between indecency and female genitalia to found his career as a print author; the enormous scandal which followed his play L'école des femmes made him the first modern writer to have his sex life dissected in the press. Keenly alert to parallels with the currency of obscenity in contemporary America, The Reinvention of Obscenity will concern not only scholars of French history, but anyone interested in the intertwined histories of sex, publishing, and censorship.

Written c. 1567 (though unpublished until 1603), this is the work of an extraordinary scholar, a radical and polemicist, rival of many of the leading intellectual and political figures of his day. According to François Hotman’s distinguished biographer Donald Kelley the Antitribonian ‘is, or should be, a landmark in the history of social and historical thought’. It is also a landmark in the history of legal thought. The present edition is the first to evaluate Hotman’s text in the context of the history of Roman law from the time of the sixth-century Byzantine Emperor Justinian I to the Germany of the Enlightenment.