Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660-1740

A major survey of representations of adultery in later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England brings together a wide variety of literary and legal sources, it charts and explains shifts in the understanding of marital infidelity. It examines, in particular, challenges to religious perceptions of sexual sin and the development of a more rational understanding of the causes and consequences of adultery.