American Antiquarian Society
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In 1744 Jonathan Edwards learned that several young men in his Northampton congregation had in their possession certain “bad books," which evidently contained content of a sexual nature. The individuals were using information gleaned from these books to harass the young women of the community. It took scholars a good while to identify the books in question—earlier lore suggested erroneously that they were novels—but they were eventually identified as the venerable anonymous sex manual Aristotle’s Master-piece (1684 and hundreds of subsequent editions) and a more recent midwifery manual, Thomas Dawkes’ The Midwife Rightly Instructed (1736). Edwards made the imprudent decision to call out the young men from the pulpit, rather than address their misdeeds privately, and by most accounts this led in a few years to his dismissal from his Northampton pulpit.
In his talk, Christopher Looby revisits this somewhat well-known controversy with several purposes: to ascertain, if possible, what the young men may have derived from these specific books; to turn this episode to account for enriching the history of sexuality; and to understand what sort of theory of sexuality these books—especially Aristotle’s Master-piece—offered to its readers.
The James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture features an expert on book history. The lecture was endowed to honor James Russell Wiggins (1903-2000), who served as AAS president (1970-1977), an editor of the Washington Post (1947-1968), United States ambassador to the United Nations (1968-69), and editor of the Ellsworth (Maine) American (1969-2000).
Co-sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America
Christopher Looby is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His teaching and research focus on connections between literary texts and historical circumstances, relations between the material form of print publication and the effects of reading, and dynamic exchanges between bodies and pleasures across the longue durée of the history of sexuality. Looby is the general editor, as well as the editor, of several volumes in the Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century series, the most recent of which is an edition of the writings of Margaret J. M. Sweat, including her novel Ethel’s Love-Life (1859). From 2010-2012 he served as the first President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He was elected to AAS membership in October 2007.
