The "Holy Sister" Anatomized
Religious Polemic and Erotic Writing in England, 1640-1660
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3324528 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Samuel Fullerton (0000-0002-1124-5156, University of North Texas, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 96 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 545-576 |
| Publication date | 2024-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Modern History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-2801 • E-ISSN: 1537-5358 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/731358 |
| OpenAlex | W4402301303 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 38 |
This article explores the profound sexualization of seventeenth-century English religious polemic by examining the history of the popular “holy sister” stereotype as it evolved during the English Revolution (1640–60) from a relatively tame element of contemporary religious satire into a regular feature of obscene antipuritan print by the 1660 Restoration. In particular, it argues that the erotic evolution of the sisterhood was primarily a function of the English civil wars, which witnessed an unprecedented crisis in post-Reformation politics and a concurrent explosion in partisan print. Together with the endemic misogyny enflamed by the transgressive activities of actual puritan women, those factors inspired a dramatic escalation in sexually explicit confessional polemic during the period—a process spurred on by the long-standing early modern association between lust and lechery as well as the commercial motivations of contemporary printers and publishers. Eventually, royalist writers during the early 1650s purposefully made graphic sexuality a staple of their antipuritan polemic, reasoning that godly moralists would find nothing more offensive than obscene depictions of human sexuality. The essay goes on to assert that this novel association between antipuritanism and explicit sexual description continued well into the Restoration, when its continued success may have encouraged London publishers to greenlight new erotic genres in print for the first time in English history. Not only, therefore, did the English Revolution spark an unprecedented sexualization in contemporary religious polemic; it may also have contributed to the much-studied erotic renaissance that characterized late Stuart culture after Charles II’s accession
Art · Sister · Sociology · Anthropology · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies
Sex and the Church in the Long Eighteenth Century
Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–1640
Women and Religion in England
The Triumph of the Saints
Monstrous Metamorphosis
Incest and Lust in Luther's Marriage
The Family of Love and Its Enemies
John Crouch
Perverts to Rome
The King's Crown is the Whore of Babylon
Misogyny, Jest‐Books and Male Youth Culture in Seventeenth‐Century England
Popular hostility towards Quakers in mid‐seventeenth‐century England∗
Feminine Piety and Personal Potency
Women on top in the pamphlet literature of the English revolution
The Power of Female Pietism
Godly Women in Early Modern England
The Quaker Executions as Myth and History
Print Culture and the Early Quakers
Censorship and Cultural Sensibility The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England
The Cannibal Cavalier
Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England
Lust and Liberty
The Roasting of the Rump
Fear, Myth and Furore
Women and the Civil War Sects
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |