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Sam Fullerton, "Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England" (Manchester UP, 2026)
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- [00:00]
Samuel Fullerton
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Yana Byers
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in Early Modern History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Samuel Fullerton, assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, to talk about sexual politics in revolutionary England, Originally out in 2024 with Manchester University Press. We're chatting today on the occasion of its release in paper hooray in January 2026. Hi, Sam, and welcome to the podcast.
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Samuel Fullerton
Hi. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here.
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Yana Byers
Yeah, let's. Let's see how it goes today. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So how are you? How's your. How's your morning in Texas?
- [01:50]
Samuel Fullerton
It's wonderful. We have been very warm for the last. Well, I mean, you know, since last spring, really. But there's this phenomenon and North Texas called Second Summer, where you think the temperatures are dropping at about, you know, mid September, and then they come shooting back up. And so up until Saturday, so two days ago, it was. The highs were in the sort of low 90s, and then we had a storm that evening. Yesterday, the temps dropped to about 72. I got to wear a sweater for the first time since April. So it's been a wonderful reprieve from.
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Yana Byers
The heat, fall it is such a gorgeous blessing of a season. Yeah. And I imagine in Texas it really would be.
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Samuel Fullerton
Yes, absolutely. And Denton, I will say I'm here in Denton, Texas, which is the Halloween capital of the state. And so there's all sorts of fall activities in October that don't really feel appropriate when it's 92, but feel perfectly wonderful and suitable now that the temperature has dropped. So it's a good day.
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Yana Byers
You know, I think this is a good podcast for the spooky season here. Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England. So, you know, let me start with my standard first question. How did you come to this topic?
- [03:09]
Samuel Fullerton
Sure. So I think it's in many ways a familiar story. When I got into grad school, I should maybe say before that, as an undergraduate, I was at a tiny liberal arts college without actually an early modernist on staff. And so I spent my, my undergrad years working in a very different chronology and temporality. I was, I mean, I think you'd call it genocide studies. I, I, I was mostly taking coursework and writing about the Holocaust, about Rwanda, and I knew that I wanted to go to grad school. I wasn't sure I had this sort of emotional fortitude to write about genocide for the rest of my career. And so I had a very fortuitous, totally normal study abroad trip planned to London, and I basically went as a junior and came back and thought, well, this is something I could do. The reason I say that is because I got to grad school freshly minted early modern British studies person without really any idea what I wanted to do. And so my advisor and the spirit of all good advisors everywhere, said, hey, I've got something you should look at, and handed me a new book, a book by Wermers de Boisville, who'd written this remarkable study of the sexual Revolution in 17th and 18th century Britain. And then he said, take this book, take these pamphlets which are full of these really raunchy and pretty, I think objectively horrifying sexual slurs being bandied about in print during the 1640s and said, Take these away and see what you do with them. And I picked them up and I started thinking about this stuff and I, I guess I, I never really stopped or, you know, continued until this book came out last year at least.
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Yana Byers
Oh, that's such a good advisor. Why don't you take a look at this, which is so much nicer than you're going to write your dissertation on this. It's the right thing to do. Do you, are you going to do it now? Or should you faff around for two years and come and learn I'm right. I don't care either way. That's great. Yeah. And I can imagine that this must have been interesting because that this is like. This is lewd and lascivious and not kidding around. Like a monster baby. That's kind of fun. But like, some of this is not kidding around. Yeah, let's just like the sex talk. There's a bunch of this stuff that's happening in the first half of. Well, and the. The 17th century is an explosion, but there is like sex talk before 1640, when you start this book. There's a lot of, like this. Of like pornographic material. But it's not in the mainstream, right?
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Samuel Fullerton
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So this material, I mean, I think if you talk to literary scholars, they will say, look, if you know where to look, right. This stuff, this, as you say, sort of. I think, why our standards, deeply offensive, but certainly deeply graphic invocations of the human body, of sexuality, which, I mean, the caveat I offer at the beginning of the book, and I guess I should go ahead and say now, is that, you know, that the vast majority of this stuff, all of it really intrinsically, is deeply misogynistic and it is, you know, distasteful on every level. Literary scholars would tell you, and some of my historian colleagues would say, yes, this stuff exists. It's sort of an endemic element of the Protestant, post Reformation England. Endemic element of the literature, the theater of the time. But it is remarkable how hard the culture works to keep this stuff as an obtrusive, as underground. Although I think that's. That's not always like a totally appropriate word as possible. And then, you know, the argument of this book is everything changes and it never really reverts.
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Yana Byers
Yeah, I think that was part of my surprise here is just the. The level of lewdness. I am. I'm expecting in underground publications. I'm expecting. Well, in fact, you know, I study Italy and Italy. Shush. But I'm. But like that. I'm seeing it here in these, these pamphlets. And of course it's deeply misogynistic. Of course, you know, it's the 17th century. But there, There is still a level. I was still a little bit shocked by the material.
- [07:43]
Samuel Fullerton
Yeah, I think that's true. I was too. And you know, there. There's this again, as a result of the kind of circumstances we just talked about, you really have to go looking, I think, particularly in that early part of the narrative, the early part of the century. To find the most distressing stuff. But when you do, and by that I mean, right, you have to go into the archive and start digging around these collections of poems that people have scribbled onto the back of their notebooks or whatever. But when you look, it's there. And it is, as you say, deeply alarming. I don't know. We can talk later if you like. You know, there's. There's this. This looming question of, like, well, okay, this is England. What's going on in the rest of Europe? And I think you. You could argue that there are parts of the continent. You know, if you look at France in the mid-1640s and 1650s, you find. And certainly later, you find, I think, probably equally, if not more, shocking language of this kind. But. But as you say, to find it here at this point in this place, I. I agree. It was. Was quite a surprise to me.
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Yana Byers
Sure. Yeah. Okay. So before 1640, we're not seeing a lot of, like, sex talk in. In, like, mainstream publications, in kind of in. In a respectable. Do I want to use that word? Like, respectable? The respectable press?
- [09:07]
Samuel Fullerton
Yeah, yeah. I think the. The. The word I use, which is not an unproblematic or an unprofessional, an uncomplicated word. Right. Is public discourse. And that is tricky because there are. There are uneven but important connections there with the idea of the printing press. Right. There's a print public. Well, probably, if we take public to mean, you know, a kind of discourse directed broadly and widely for all readers, I think that using that metric, we can say, okay, there are moments when, yes, we see some of this stuff creeping into discourse that is intended to be public. Right. But there's almost always, in those circumstances, considered subversive or problematic by the folks who are ultimately charged with monitoring and regulating things like print in the theater.
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Yana Byers
Yeah. Okay. So very little of it before 1640 and by 1660. Everywhere. It's absolutely everywhere. So kind of what, you know, so in, you know, print culture in England went from not being able to really describe sex to, and I'm quoting, gleefully describing carnal passages between a Quaker and a cult, which is, like, ridiculous and hilarious. I mean, as noted, I had a fever while I was reading the book. So perhaps I'm not a super reliable critic here, but that's a lot to go from nothing to bestiality with Quakers. They're so nice. Just seems like a huge leap to me.
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Samuel Fullerton
Yeah, I think it's a remarkable transformation. And I've just written another piece in the Journal of modern history on this question or on this theme, when it comes to this book is mostly about politics. But you can see it, too. If you look at basically the development of erotic writing, what we would call pornography or proto pornography, you see a. A massive change in these 10 or 20 years. And it's. I mean, I think it's. It's worth investigating. You know, I think it's an important shift.
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Yana Byers
Yeah, absolutely. Because it's not just about this one kind of writing. Nothing is ever about, you know, not. No topic is ever as small as you. You know, we. We. We. We pigeonhole it, but it's not. It's about something much bigger than that. So a lot of the book is about going to explain why and how this happens. But before we get kind of to your argument, I want to talk a little bit about definitions. And the first would be sexual politics, which, as a feminist theorist, is something immediately that jumps out. It's Kate Milik's landmark book. Landmark Theorist is a landmark book. 1970, which is so long ago now. But she lays out the ways that politics is about a power structure that's everywhere. Men dominate women, but they don't just do it once, they do it repeatedly. Repeatedly. And not just in private, but in fact in political and cultural institutions, including literature and other artistic and entertainment forms. So that's Kate Millet's Sexual Politics. And then you expand on this for your book, and I would like you to talk about what you do with that.
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Samuel Fullerton
Sure, yeah. I mean, and expand is the most appropriate word, I think, because I take a broader view. I mean, I shouldn't say I take as though I disagree with Millett. And I think really, Millet's version of this analytical framework fits it within my own. But my view, the way that I use that label is broader. And by that I mean I simply. I apply that label to any collision between contemporary discourses of sex, gender and the body, or the sexualized body and the political. And so it's. It's a. It's a more utilitarian. I think it's a, as you say, a sort of less specifically grounded version of this kind of. Of analysis. And it works for me in part because I say. I put this in the introduction, as I say, Kate Millett's version of this tool, this heuristic, is embedded in mine. And that has a lot to do with the fact that, again, most early modern sexual discourse is rooted in some of those same gendered assumptions, the same misogynistic assumptions. But I also think, following some Other theorists, theorists who I say maybe don't use sexual politics in quite the same way or maybe use a different set of terms to describe the work that they're doing, either early modern or modern, but basically historians of pornography who I think have rightly argued that Millett's definition doesn't allow for the same kind of elasticity that, that I want to use this, this broad idea of sexual politics to, to. It's not the, it's not quite as all encompassing or theoretically flexible as I want it to be in order to do the kind of work that I do in this book. So I, I have no beef with Kate Millet's definition and I, I appreciate the work that she's done and I just take it and basically zoom out a little bit so that I can think a little bit more broadly. Yeah.
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Yana Byers
And this, a lot of this has something to do with what you call porno politics, which I'd love you to explain.
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Samuel Fullerton
Sure. So this is an idea, again, I can't claim credit. I think some other folks, again, mostly early modern folks, but not exclusively mostly literature scholars, have already made great hay with this idea. But for me, when I use that idea of porno politics, it's very specific kind of sex talk. And, and for me in particular, when I say porno politics, what I mean is theorists or polemicists, folks who are writing these pamphlets and engaging in this discourse, who take the idea of sexual politics beyond what we might think for this think as straightforward libel or straightforward sort of partisanship, and instead start thinking about politics through a lens that applies basically the mechanics of sex to political movement and motion. So this, this works particularly well in early modern Britain because these folks are our contemporaries, our historical actors like to think about, for instance, the king as a loving father and his, his kingdom as his wife. Right. There's a implied sexual relationship endemic to the bare bones political structure that, you know, regulates this kingdom, at least for most of this book. The same is true of the Church, right. The bride of Christ. There's this marital imagery that just makes it really easy to take these ideas, these ideas that begin as kind of straightforward libel and turn them into really interesting sort of constitutional discussions of how politics ought to work. For instance, if the king is husband and kingdom is wife, how is there, you know, there's no better way to explain a rupture like civil war, except in terms of adultery. Right. That's like an enormously powerful way to think about the rupturing of the contract. Right. A contract that here, I think is frequently articulated in explicitly sexual terms. So that's what I mean, a sort of more elevated application of these ideas at the theoretical level.
- [16:54]
Yana Byers
All right, in your first chapter, Sexual Satire and Partisan Identity, which is kind of works chronologically, it's 1637-42, you demonstrate how explicit sex writing plays an essential role in the formation of these. Of par. Of partisan stereotypes that are going to be really hefty and useful. So could you explain that for our listeners?
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Samuel Fullerton
Sure. So at the beginning of this period and the. In the road to civil war as, as we could call it, two groups, two, two different sort of political alignments start to coalesce as England falls into this crisis that will eventually end in armed conflict. And those, those two political positions are flexible, but they're organized along a series of different polarities. Religious differences, sort of cultural and political differences. You could argue perhaps class or economic differences, or certainly disagreements. And what is interesting about the way that these two sides coalesce, they're royalists and Parliamentarians. In one version of this story, the language that contemporaries use, Cavaliers for the Royalists. So these swashbuckling knights and soldiers on the one hand and round heads on the other, which is to say it's a play on a particular kind of haircut that is attributed to the supporters of, of Parliament. These, these two groups are, are held to be diametrically opposed on all these different issues. Again, religious, political, economic, cultural. And what's interesting and, and what my work does, that I think no one has really done before is all of those different areas of disagreement map onto a certain set of, or I should say a wide array of sexual stereotypes that have been circulating again, underground, sort of beneath the surface in this culture for decades. And what we see during these, these years prior to the outbreak of war is folks venturing into, increasingly into print, but also in terms of sort of manuscript poems and rude songs, begin applying these sexual stereotypes to their opposing numbers. And in doing so, they create over the course of this five or six year period, two pretty distinctive partisan stereotypes that are in multiple ways linked to these sexual politics that again I argue, have been blatant right up until this point. But as the stresses of civil war drive some of those differences to the surface, suddenly you see this stuff start appearing in print. So the Cavaliers, the Royalists, again, swashbuckling soldiers, they're accused of being sexually rapacious, right? Of being aggressive, of being amoral and, and kind of wanton, promiscuous. The, the round heads, right, who are identified with what we would call Today, the sort of the Puritan, the, The hyper Christian element of. Hyper Protestant element of English society are accused of hypocrisy. Right. Are accused of preaching moral purity, but secretly wallowing in sin. So very. Two very distinctive, but two, I think, equally potent versions of partisan stereotypes that are both linked deeply to these sexual themes that, that again suddenly sprout into to public discourse as this civil war gets underway.
- [20:41]
Yana Byers
But there's lots of sex. Like, everyone's having the sex is the thing. Like, at least the Cavaliers are. Are. Are honest about it, and these roundhead Puritans are. Are hypocrites about it. But there's an. Just an immense amount of conversation about sex and some interesting versions thereof that's happening. And this really engages a broader part of the populace.
- [21:08]
Samuel Fullerton
Yeah, certainly. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a remarkable and, and, you know, my, My inclination certainly by the end of the period is to assume it's intentional. I'm not necessarily certain in the hullabaloo of these early years how calculated that decision is. I think it might just be a. An unconscious or a subconscious choice. But absolutely, you know, sex as a. As a political language works on a more democratic level than highbrow disputes over, you know, the King's specific rights in relation to Parliament or the specifics of, you know, the Calvinist predestinarian theology. Right. Everyone in this society has some understanding, possibly a deeply flawed understanding of how sex and bodies work, but nevertheless, it's something that I think we can reliably assume everyone is thinking about, even if they're thinking about it strongly negative or terms or otherwise. And in that way, I think it becomes an enormously powerful tool for mobilization of encouraging, or at least attempting to encourage uncommitted or hesitant contemporaries to buy into the stakes of this conflict. Right. And I guess ultimately, ideally, to spend some money or to sign up to serve with whichever side they find most compelling.
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Yana Byers
I mean, it's very handy in, say, the escalation to civil war, for instance, which is something you discuss in your second chapter. So how. Yeah, so let's move on right now to how politics as a subject, idea, kind of realm of discourse includes this very strong religious angle.
- [22:58]
Samuel Fullerton
Yeah, yeah, certainly. And I think if you talk to my colleagues, certainly people who've been on this podcast, I think that, that I'm not alone in arguing that England, Britain, I mean, certainly most of Europe, I suspect, by the 17th century is, is. It is inescapable. The, the long shadow of the Reformation, the debates and the violence provoked you know, at this point, a century prior. But nevertheless, those wounds remain fresh, those debates remain contentious and ongoing about. Not so much. I mean, certainly there, there are moments in the English Revolution when there are, if not genuine, really serious conversations about Catholics and Protestants of the kind that you might see, you know, in the mid 16th century. But what is, what is ever present and ongoing are debates over what English Protestantism ought to look like and its relationship to other churches and other confessions, both at home and abroad. And I think it's, it's. It's basically impossible to imagine a, a political upheaval like this one not pulling in and sort of wrapping itself up in these, These questions. Right, so. So when we talk about England in the 17th century, I think you have to. To imagine it as, as part of both the, a post Reformation milieu, one in which the Reformation happened and we all know it, but also one in which the, the long Reformation. Right. This idea that the Reformation is ongoing and therefore vigilant is necessary, remains necessary because the battle is not won. And you can say that no matter which side of the battle you're standing on. Right. So, and then I, I guess it should go without saying, I, I made this point already. I think I'll say it again, that the Reformation is all about sex. Right. Or rather that that sex is. Is infused into, baked into so many angles of that moment and that movement from Luther onward. And that just makes it all the easier, I think, to take these languages and apply them in really forceful and creative ways to what's happening in the 1640s.
- [25:20]
Yana Byers
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, thinking about the, you know, one of the two prongs of attack against the Church is that it's hypocritical. And, you know, it just, it really slides in so nicely here, you know, when we're looking at this also, it seems like no one likes the Puritans.
- [25:40]
Samuel Fullerton
Yeah, I think that that is, that's an understandable read. And I certainly, it's true that. I mean, I would argue that the anti Puritans who feature in my book are, I think, ultimately more creative, the royalists more creative, more crass and, and ultimately grosser than their counterparts. And that makes that language resonate, I think, in some ways more than the Puritan responses do, at least at certain moments of the story. But I think, you know, I'm not certain, as historians of this period, have a lot of complicated feelings about Nathaniel Hawthorne. Right. I mean, I think it is true that Puritanism, at least in its most outspoken, in serious forms People found, many people found that deeply distasteful and potentially alarming. But we have to recognize that language, Protestantism is a spectrum. Right. And there are really interesting moments throughout this story during the Civil wars when this stuff is putatively, you know, sort of one of the central things of dispute. Right. How will the English church look at the end of this conflict? What influence does the King have over the constitution of that body? There are lots of people who certainly in the early years are not mad about the, the efforts made by again, people we would describe as Puritan parliament men to, to clean up the church, to challenge Catholicism as they see it. Popery is what they call it, right. The, the sort of Catholic esque beliefs and practices. There are lots of people who are, who are broadly on board with those ideas and that movement. And it's, it's really, I think, only at the edges, the margin when the more extreme advocates of this, this particular version of English Puritanism, those folks are much less popular. And as the period goes on, as we get into the middle chapters of this book, for instance, we see they, they turn a lot of their energy, their fractions just inward and it suddenly becomes an intra puritan debate that is no less accurate than the royalist in parliamentarian debates that we start with. So I think yes, Puritanism in its purest form, as it were, is not an ideology that lots of people, or that lots of people are suspicious of, I should say. But I think that the only reason we get a civil war is because at the beginning of the story there are lots of folks who think that some reform is important and necessary. And in that sense you could probably call them at least sympathetic to the movement.
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Yana Byers
Yeah, I think maybe anti puritanism just has really long legs as well.
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Samuel Fullerton
It's an easier position to hold too, I think, because it's so complicated. The arguments that erupt in the mid-1640s is again, so the King is defeated, Parliament says we now have a chance to fix things. And suddenly the details of ironing out how that church work, they, they turn on such fine points that it becomes really easy to ridicule these people because they are, they are so caught up in tearing one another apart over stuff that seems from the outside both tenditious and, you know, potentially wacky. So yeah, I think you're right. I think it's an easier position to, to take. It's easier to be a critic in those circumstances.
- [29:14]
Yana Byers
Yeah, tenditious and wacky. I think this is a really nice way to describe the 17th century in this period. Yeah, this certainly works for your book. Okay, so now talk me through how your discourse and the discourse that you're describing links with the trial of Charles I.
- [29:36]
Samuel Fullerton
Sure. So the. The trial of Charles I, which unfolds, I mean, the sort of longer story is a story of the last few years of the 1640s, but the trial itself, January 1649, it concludes with Charles's execution and the creation of an English Commonwealth of a republic for really, the first time in English history. So Charles, the trial of Charles I. If you read the transcript, if you read the reports on what happened, you see very little evidence that sexual politics are at work in the High Court of Justice. There are a few moments where I think incidental moments where you see some of this language come into play. But what's really interesting is that the discourse, again, the conversation surrounding not just the fact of the trial, but the question of the king's guilt, his role in the outbreak of war, the role played by his chief enemies in bringing him to the scaffold, those debates are soaked in sexual politics. And that comes down to that porno political angle that we discuss. And what's really interesting is if you, again, if you zoom out in a way that I think most folks writing about this trial haven't really to date, and you think about the larger question at issue, which is what is the relationship between the king and his people? Right? Again, that relationship is framed in all sorts of familial metaphors. The one that most people have used to date is father and children, parent and children. I should say I'm gendering the king as male on this discussion because Charles is on the throne. But if you look back, there are moments when, say, Elizabeth takes all masculine, a masculine perspective in order to make these precise same arguments, but the one that I'm interested in, that relationship is husband and wife, right? The king, husband, his people, the kingdom is the wife. And you see, if you. If you take that lens into these debates, you see all sorts of interesting claims being made from the royalist side about how parliament, so the people who ultimately will try the king, Parliament, is framed in the royalist terms as a. As a seducing homewrecker, right? An adulteress. They've got a name, mistress, Parliament. It is an anthropomorphized body who is seen basically breaking with her rightful husband, the king, right, and cavorting instead with these plotters, these parliamentarian enemies who have, by virtue of basically sexual deception, have seduced and lured the people into acquiescing to the execution of their rightful husband. Right. Which again, and I mean, I was gonna say in this society is a bad thing. I think we can maybe generally assume that that's read as an inappropriate move in a marital relationship. And then on the other side, you see parliamentarians taking a very different set of arguments, but still sort of rooted in the same assumptions, assumptions about the. The connections between. The parallels between sexual fidelity and political fidelity, who argue that Charles deserves his trial, deserves his death, ultimately, because he is the one subverting that marital relationship by. By tyrannizing over his. His wife, his lover. Right. That tyranny takes a number of forms, including allegations of sexual assault, again in a sort of constitutional sense, but no less powerful for the metaphor. And as a result, try Charles and eventually move on to sort of defending what will become a Republican project under this. This idea that kings as husbands. That whole idea is. Is sort of laced with these inappropriate connotations, connotations that again, come back to sexual assault, sexual tyranny. So you can. If you. If you take these things on board and you return to that question of the trial, you can watch as. As sexual politics sort of suffuses the energy in the room, even when it doesn't necessarily enter the conversations being had between Charles and his accusers in January, in 1649. And I argue that those, Those debates resonate through the end of the 17th century, really, although they don't do necessarily do so in explicit terms as they do in the 1640s.
- [34:22]
Yana Byers
Yeah. Does this. Does sextile cover. Is it de rigueur? Does it ever, like, does it become kind of meh.
- [34:30]
Samuel Fullerton
I think yes. I mean, I. I don't know. I should say there's. There's a. This methodological problem which is not really the question you're asking. But, you know, we, we. I would really love to know. I would. I would love to know how people are reading this stuff. And it is very difficult to know that. Right. There are certainly lots. There's lots of circumstantial evidence that people are reading these pamphlets and reacting strongly. People, you know, if you're. If we're going to talk about evidence, right. You can find copies of these pamphlets where readers have scribbled stuff into the margins that suggests they're engaging with this material. We have records from basically people being written up in local courts for saying rude things that seem to reflect their engagement with this material. So there's a woman who's arrested or, I should say, is brought before her local justices and accused of saying. Basically repeating this line about Charles as a. As a rapist. Right. As a sexual tyrant in really interesting ways. I mean, again, suggestive of a connection between what people are thinking and what they're reading. All that is to say, you know, I can't say for certain that it becomes maybe a boring or an unexciting element of public discourse. What I can say. And again, this is kind of at the heart of the argument, is it. It settles into political culture in this period and it really never leaves. I mean, so it becomes, you know, maybe never truly acceptable. I think there are lots of folks who continue to argue that it's a problem, that this kind of language is accessible and available, but it does become something that people come to expect, I think. And we have plenty of evidence that that's the case, certainly.
- [36:27]
Yana Byers
Yeah, yeah. I mean, reception's so hard to grasp. And, you know, at what point does the level is this so common that people are just kind of swimming in it and it becomes part of the discourse which seems to very much be happening. But yes, this ever not salacious? You know, that's. That's a pretty hard thing to kind of get your hand on. My feeling as an historian in general is that it never stops being salacious, which is why we continue to use it and so like. Or we continue to see its use through the 17th century. It's really effective.
- [37:05]
Samuel Fullerton
But I would agree with that. I mean, it certainly never stops being effective. I like, like. I mean, this, this. It's a. It's a. One of the reasons I take this broad view of the idea of sexual politics is because it gets applied in so many different ways by so many different people. But the fact is once. Once they start using it, you know, once it becomes commonplace, they never stop. And I think, as you say, that's. That's evidence to its. Its. Its appeal in one way or another, forever and ever.
- [37:33]
Yana Byers
Forever and ever. It's ongo. It's ongoing popularity. All right, so let's talk about what you call the struggle between Cromwellian discipline and royalist jollity.
- [37:43]
Samuel Fullerton
Yeah, sure. So after the execution of the king in the wake of the trial, Parliament basically constructs an entirely new constitutional arrangement for the kingdom. England becomes a republic, ruled by effectively the same people, but led by a few luminaries, folks whose successes during the war, you know, catapulted them into prominence and who continued to be prominent as a result of ongoing success, I guess you could say. And Cromwell over Cromwell is one of these people. The republic, after a few years, collapses in its own way, turns into a slightly different arrangement, one in which Cromwell takes the helm as the Lord Protector as a. I mean, his critics would argue, a quasi monarchical leader, but nevertheless is the one way or the other as the sort of chief officer of state of this new government. And I say all that to say what's interesting about that period, 1650s, when England is undergoing this series of constitutional experiments, is that, for one thing, the royalists, the partisans of Charles the First, never go away. Some of them, many of them, flee to Europe, where Charles I's son, also Charles ii, is campaigning to reclaim his father's throne. Many of them remain in Britain as a sort of internal resistance to the new regime, but they exist and they continue to sort of object in various forms, various ways, to the existence of this new Cromwellian state. And we can particularly use that adjective, Cromwellian, after the republic folds and the protectorate is created. But what's interesting about the 1650s is one thing that the new republic does very well, the 1640s, basically precluded on both sides of the ball, is that they successfully get a handle on the printing press, on the kingdom's presses, and they succeed in a number of ways in really tamping down on printed descent, active dissent to the regime. And that mostly means. Well, that largely means royalist critics. So what develops in an interesting way is a different kind of discourse, a discourse that's not so much directly libelous, right, discourse of royalist resistance and Cromwellian rigor, but it is. It is broadly cultural. And what we see basically is a puritan government, right? A series of puritan governments arguing that now, with the death of the king, they have the opportunity to really live out their beliefs and to turn to transform England to a moral commonwealth. And in doing so, they not only preach their. This need for moral discipline, but they institute laws, really, in many cases, draconian laws that are intended to regulate the kingdom's morality like never before. The most famous one, the most infamous One, is the 1650 Adultery act, an act which made adultery not just illegal, but a capital crime. Not many folks die as a result of this act. It's seen as a little bit too harsh by basically everyone involved. But nevertheless, it represents this position, the Cromwellian position of crafting a moral republic. Royalists, for the reasons we've already talked about, find this enormously hypocritical. But what's quite interesting is over the course of the decade, as they take find these alternative ways to resist, they suddenly begin to kind of embrace their identity as a Counterculture. And what we see over the course of the 1650s is Cromwellians are doubling down on this idea that we are the. You know, we are building a moral republic, one in which everyone does right or, you know, or else royalists are saying, well, we think that is untenable, and we think it's deeply suspect. And instead, we kind of believe that, you know, it's okay to be a little bit worldly, it's okay to be a little bit human. And as a result, over the 1650s, you. You see both of these. These partisan groups that started again in the 1640s as basically the constructs of mudslinging pamphleteers, really embracing both of those identities. Royalists saying, you know what? Yes, we like to drink and we like to love and we like to embrace these parts of us that make us humans. And their counterparts are saying, no, we really need to continue to tighten up to be better people. And it results in the same kind of discourse. I mean, I should say different kinds of discourse, but the same acrimony, the same kind of oppositional, confrontational literature. But it takes on a totally different tenor when royalists start to say, you know what? Maybe you're right. Maybe this is the way that we are. And that opens the door for a whole different kind of society or a whole different kind of sexual culture when the king eventually comes back in 1660.
- [43:14]
Yana Byers
Yeah, okay, so tell me how this story ends.
- [43:17]
Samuel Fullerton
Yeah, so the story ends, I think, for historians, in a very familiar way. But what my book is doing is explaining basically a new path to that familiar ending. So if you ask any of my colleagues who work on the Restoration, if you read any books about the 1660s written in the last 100 years, really, the story is the same. It's all the same. Which is to say, in 1660, after a series of mishaps, after the death of Oliver Cromwell, Charles II is invited to return to England to take up his father's crown after a decade of republican rule. And when he does so, he inaugurates an entirely, as I say, entirely new kind of political culture in England, which is to say, he comes back, he deals with many of the chief malefactors who were responsible for his father's death. Partially. So there's a series of trials in which prominent contributors to the execution of his father are tried and put to death. But otherwise, he embraces a very different kind of, I guess you could call them, reactionary politics. And what Charles II does in particular is, he says, okay, the Puritans, those abstemious Hypocritical moralists. We're done with that, right? We're done with the adultery act. And instead we're going to embrace a new kind of politics, one in which we recognize, as Charles's royalist partisans had done in the 1650s. We celebrate life, we celebrate the world. We celebrate celebration. And one of the things, the chief thing that Charles becomes known for is his embrace of promiscuity, right? This apparent willingness that he has to license sleeping around. He himself is a famous philanderer. He becomes known as the merry monarch, right, because he's quite open about his affairs, his illegitimate children. He's quite welcoming at court of people who similarly transgress what we might think of as conventional sexual norms. And historians have looked at this for a long time and said, okay, that's very strange, right? And they've attributed it, for the most part, to the personality of this new king, who again comes in and says, I'm going to do things differently. And I don't disagree. I mean, I think there are reasons why there's validity to that argument. But the case I make in this book is that what we're actually seeing is not Charles's personal predilections triumphing in 1660, but instead the natural result of 20 years of debate over what. What English sexuality ought to look like. And then what we see in 1660 is the triumph of this 1650s Royalist attitude towards sex, which says, okay, we're going to embrace this stuff precisely because those Puritans who've caused us so much trouble seem to think it's wrong. And. And we think that for. For various reasons, they are, you know, completely out of their minds. And so you get. It's a natural progression from, again, 20 years of sexual politics. It is a natural. I think it's very strategic on Charles II's part, acceptance of a world in which now sex is everywhere. And that, I think it's a very strategic thing for Charles II to say, look, I know based on what people have been writing about all of my forebears, Cromwell to my father, that people are going to talk about my sexualized body. I might as well, you know, allow them to do so on my own terms. I might as well encourage a certain kind of reading. And ultimately, what we see over the rest of the century is that that strategy works to some effect, but it doesn't necessarily work totally in the sense that debates really rooted in these same polarities of religious difference, of political. Different political commitments, all of them tied back to the sexual politics of the Revolution. Those debates continue to unfold through the end of the century and beyond. And so in that sense, the sort of overarching argument is that what happens in the 1640s doesn't stay in the 1640s. Right. That it, it is, generates this legacy that contemporaries continue to wrestle with until the end of the 1600s.
- [48:03]
Yana Byers
All right, that feels like a pretty good place to put a pin in this to close our interview. And I've taken up tons of your time, so I just have one more. One last question. What are you working on now?
- [48:16]
Samuel Fullerton
Yeah, well, let me say it's a pleasure to be here. I'm really grateful for your time. It's been wonderful to talk about the book. It's been out for a while now, about a year, and I was really happy to, once it. Once the book entered my hands, to sort of set it down and not think about it. So it's been a delightful thing to revisit it after taking, I think, a much needed sabbatical. I'm currently in the middle of a couple of projects. The first one is a history in similar terms, although with, I think, different goals and ultimately the product itself will be different. I'm thinking about libel, So a kind of broader category of transgressive discourse in this period that stems from this work in lots of obvious ways. Much of this book is about sexual libel, but which I think has a lot more to do with big questions, not so much about sex, but about things like freedom of speech, about censorship, about the politics of personality. And which I think that question of libelous politics, I think resonates with our. Our present moment in a way that. That few, few early modern subjects do. And so I think it's a really interesting time to be thinking about defamation and civility and, and the nature of. Of personality politics. So that's one book, and then I'm in the process. This book is this. This book we're discussing right now is mostly about England. While working on it, I had a chance to think a little bit about how developments on other parts of Europe are related or connected to this one and the next. The long term project I'm interested in working on or working in now is a continuation of some of these ideas across the Channel, and mostly to think about transnational Anglo French politics, the politics of libel, the politics of the press in this period and France, some folks may know, has its own civil war in the 1640s. And there, I think, are really interesting connections that have really not been touched by anyone between these two contexts. So that's the sort of long term, you know, 10 or 15 years from now. That's the big project.
- [50:32]
Yana Byers
Right on. Cool. And. Yeah, and France has its own proud pornographic tradition as well.
- [50:37]
Samuel Fullerton
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [50:38]
Yana Byers
Ton of work. All right, thank you so much for joining me today, Sam. It's been really a pleasure.
- [50:42]
Samuel Fullerton
Thank you, Yanni. I've had a wonderful time. As I say, it's a pleasure to talk about the book, and I'm really grateful for giving me a chance to talk about it again. Yeah.
- [50:53]
Yana Byers
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