With this original study, Melissa Mowry makes a strong contribution to a provocative interdisciplinary conversation about an important and influential sub genre: seventeenth-century political pornography. This book further advances our understanding of pornography's importance in seventeenth-century England by extending its investigation beyond the realm of cultural rhetoric into the realm of cultural practice. In addition to the satires which previous scholars have discussed in this context, Mowry brings to light hitherto unexamined pornographies as well as archival texts that reveal the ways in which the satires helped shape the social policies endured by prostitutes and bawds. Her study includes substantial archival evidence of prostitution from the Middlesex Sessions and the Bridewell Courtbooks. Mowry argues that Stuart partisans cultivated representations of bawds and prostitutes because polemicists saw the public sale of sex as republicanism's ideological apotheosis. Sex work, partisans repeatedly asserted, inherently disrupted ancestral systems of property transfer and distribution in favour of personal ownership, while the republican belief that all men owned the labour of their body achieved a nightmarish incarnation in the prostitute's understanding that the sexual favours she performed were labour. The prostitute's body thus emerged in the loyalist imagination as the epitome of the democratic body politic. Carefully grounded in original research, The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714 is a cultural study with broad implications for the way we understand the historical constructions and legal deployments of women's sexuality.

Engendering the Fall argues that early seventeenth-century women's writing influenced Paradise Lost, while later seventeenth-century texts reworked central aspects of Milton's epic in order to reconfigure the politically resonant gendered hierarchy laid out by the story of the Fall.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material. This book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focussing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can assist in social research, and can be used to deepen our understanding and comprehension. McEnery and Baker draw principally on two sources – the newsbook Mercurius Fumigosis and the Early English Books Online Corpus. This scholarship on prostitution and the sex trade offers insight into the social position of women in history.

Focussing on Quaker pamphlet literature of the commonwealth and restoration period, Catie Gill seeks to explore and explain women’s presence as activists, writers, and subjects within the early Quaker movement. Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community draws on contemporary resources such as prophetic writing, prison narratives, petitions, and deathbed testimonies to produce an account of women’s involvement in the shaping of this religious movement. The book reveals that, far from being of marginal importance, women were able to exploit the terms in which Quaker identity was constructed to create roles for themselves, in public and in print, that emphasised their engagement with Friends’ religious and political agenda. Gill’s evidence suggests that women were able to mobilise contemporary notions of femininity when pursuing active roles as prophets, martyrs, mothers, and political activists. The book’s focus on collective, Quaker identities, which arises from its analysis of multiple-authored texts, is key to its claims that gender issues have to be considered when analysing the sect’s emergent system of values, and Gill assesses the representation of women in male-authored texts in addition to female writers’ attitudes to agency. A bibliography that, for the first time, lists men and women’s involvement as contributors as well as authors to Quaker pamphlets provides a valuable resource for scholars of seventeenth-century radicalism.

Corpus Linguistics, Context and Culture demonstrates the potential of corpus linguistic methods for investigating language patterns across a range of contexts. Organised in three sections, the chapters range from detailed case studies on lexico-grammatical patterns to fundamental discussions of meaning as part of the ‘discourse, contexts and cultures’ theme. The final part on ‘learner contexts’ specifically emphasises the need for mixed-method approaches and the consideration of pedagogical implications for real world contexts. Beyond its contribution to current debates in the field, this edited volume indicates new directions in cross-disciplinary work.

"Joanna Picciotto's Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England is a splendid study of the origins, devlopment, and eventual decline of the Experimentalist tradition in seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century English letters. In tracing out the arc of this intellectual and professional trajectory, Picciotto engages productively with the crucial religious, socio-economic, philosophical, and literary movements associated with the ongoing labors of the `innocent eye'".---Eileen Reeves, Princetion University --