James Grantham Turner

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of English

Marvell’s commendations of Milton prove him a perceptive critic of the Latin prose and the epic verse. Not merely summarizing the content or intoning conventional praise, he invents a structural or architectonic mode of reading, articulates a subjective and emotional reader-response, connects Milton and the sublime for the first time, and evokes an...

Milton’s relation to Lucretius has been ignored, interpreted as hostile, or reduced to a few spectacular moments in the epic descriptions of Chaos and Creation. This article shows, contrarily, that Milton’s engagement with this Roman poet-materialist was intimate, systematic, and lifelong. To this end, it brings together the well-known Lucretian mo...

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write in the characters of women? What happens when philosophers take sexuality seriously and the sex-writers present their outrageous fantasies as an educational, philosophical quest? Schooling Sex is the first full history of early modern libertine literature and its reception,...

‘Petrus Arretinus vir acerrimi iudicii’ – Pietro Aretino, a man of most acute mind – went down in history as an intimate of Agostino Chigi (1466–1520), the great banker and patron of the arts. In his letters and drama, Aretino frequently evokes the golden years he spent as a protégé and household member. He recalls his brief but formative residence...

The frescoes of Peruzzi, Raphael and Sodoma still dazzle visitors to the Villa Farnesina, but they survive in a stripped-down environment bereft of its landscape, sealed so it cannot breathe. Turner takes you outside that box, restoring these canonical images to their original context, when each element joined in a productive conversation. He is th...

Latin poems by Egidio Gallo and Blosio Palladio, set within a cluster of other verses, literary allusions and archival documents, let us grasp what might have been seen before the villa was complete, and how Chigi’s circle imagined his projected works. Using lost material brought to light in Chapter 3, plus legal records, visitors’ accounts of the...

Peruzzi’s next figurative project after the Stanza del Fregio was to decorate the exterior of the new villa. This astonishingly ambitious design task involved not only the three-dimensional elements that still variegate the plain façade – austere pilasters and window-cases, topped by the spectacular cornicione or ‘great cornice’ with its acanthus b...

Most of the Farnesina’s canonical wall paintings – Peruzzi’s illusionistic salone or Sala delle Prospettive, Sodoma’s Roxana and Alexander in the nuptial bedroom, and the story of Psyche by Raphael and his team – are the product of a distinct second phase of remodelling and decoration, not conceived from the start but put in motion when Agostino Ch...

The frescoes of Peruzzi, Raphael and Sodoma still dazzle visitors to the Villa Farnesina, but they survive in a stripped-down environment bereft of its landscape, sealed so it cannot breathe. Turner takes you outside that box, restoring these canonical images to their original context, when each element joined in a productive conversation. He is th...

This chapter examines the early evolution of Peruzzi’s own wall-painting and architectural decoration, including the St Helena Chapel in S. Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome, the Castello in Ostia, and the first of his frescoes for the Farnesina itself, in the Sala or Stanza del Fregio (‘the room of the frieze’). It will also review the influences studied...

Hints for the genesis of the Farnesina may be found in ancient and Renaissance literature, in earlier projects commissioned by Agostino Chigi and his family, and in Peruzzi’s own development. This opening chapter traces the influences, ancient and modern, that converged to form the precocious architect-painter, within the larger context of Chigi pa...

Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500–1700. Walter S. Melion, Joanna Woodall, and Michael Zell, eds. Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 48. Leiden: Brill, 2017. xlii + 770 pp. $287. - Volume 72 Issue 3 - James Grantham Turner

This is a book review not an article.

Since the publication of his novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded in 1740, Samuel Richardson's place in the English literary tradition has been secured. But how can that place best be described? Over the three centuries since embarking on his printing career the 'divine' novelist has been variously understood as moral crusader, advocate for women, pion...

The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature offers an introduction to key debates in the study of erotic literature from antiquity to the present. It addresses one of the longest standing controversies in literary history: the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable treatments of human sexuality. Whether scurrilous Roman satire, irreverent Re...

Eroticism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Magic, Marriage, and Midwifery. Ian Frederick Moulton, ed. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 39. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. xvi + 172 pp. €70. - Volume 70 Issue 2 - James Grantham Turner

This essay has a twofold purpose, evidentiary and interpretive. First, it reconstructs three erotic compositions from the Fossombrone sketchbook that had been effaced by a censor. These drawings from Raphael's circle are released, first from their heavy coats of obliterating paint and ink, then from the prevailing assumption that they merely copy t...

Christopher Thacker eludes the usual categories. He is a Europeanist who gives no allegiance to any European intellectual tradition, an academic who eschews footnotes and adopts a brisk, colloquial style (‘dear chevaliers . . , how d'you do it? ... the dreary Sartre’), and a garden historian sufficiently versed in literary and intellectual history...

This essay scrutinizes seventeenth-century uses of the word ‘Romance’, together with the actual texts designated by that term and the specific emotions, identifications, and binding passions that readers associate with it. I find that it coexisted with ‘Novel’ in a promising state of flux: both keywords denoted fiction-in-general, neither adhered t...

This landmark collection of newly-commissioned essays by leading international scholars, offers expert close readings of Shakespeare and other early modern authors. The book is an intervention into current critical methodology as well as an invaluable tool for all students of the literature of the period, exemplifying the possibilities of close rea...

The title of this intriguing book runs counter to its thrust. Rakes! Highwaymen! Pirates! Johnny Depp in full swashbuckling mode, cruising between Merry England and the Caribbean! But Mackie lures us into a critique of those associations, a withering attack on the tendency to jollify or romanticize the elite rogue male. Mackie’s complex analysis of...

James Grantham Turner is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1993 was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library. In addition to editing Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose (1990), Robert Paltock's Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1990), and Sexuality and Gender in...

This book reconstructs the "fascination" of the prostitute, as manifested in whore biographies and fictional episodes set in the sexual underworld; Rosenthal's chosen texts are mostly English, with a few Irish memoirs. It adds to a significant group of scholarly projects that take nonmarital or illicit sexuality as their field, as mined from legal...

Espionage and LibertinageThe Erotics of the NovelScenes of ReadingThe Hard Core and the Soft

The 'benefit of books promiscuously read' haunts Milton's conception of toleration, and in Areopagitica he frequently cites bawdy or erotic authors such as Petronius or Pietro Aretino, 'promiscuous' books in another sense. Even the Bible 'describes the carnal sense of wicked men not unelegantly'. The heart of Milton's argument involves, not merely...

“though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton,” wrote Virginia Woolf in a famous diary entry of September 1918, I mean to write down my impressions of Paradise Lost while I am about it. Impressions fairly well describes the sort of thing left in my mind. I have left many riddles unread. I have slipped on too easily to taste the full f...

The 17th century was a time of significant cultural and political change. The era saw the rise of exploration and travel, the growth of the scientific method, and the spread of challenges to conventional religion. Many of these developments occurred in England and North America, and literature of the period reflects the intellectual and emotional f...

Among Charles II’s first political initiatives was an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, but most recent scholars of the early Restoration have tried to undo both the ‘Oblivion’ and the ‘Uniformity’ mandated by the new regime. Literary history no longer separates Milton and Marvell from their context, nor does it confidently proclaim a new ‘Age of Dryd...

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write in the characters of women? What happens when philosophers take sexuality seriously and the sex-writers present their outrageous fantasies as an educational, philosophical quest? Schooling Sex is the first full history of early modern libertine literature and its reception,...

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write in the characters of women? What happens when philosophers take sexuality seriously and the sex-writers present their outrageous fantasies as an educational, philosophical quest? Schooling Sex is the first full history of early modern libertine literature and its reception,...

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write in the characters of women? What happens when philosophers take sexuality seriously and the sex-writers present their outrageous fantasies as an educational, philosophical quest? Schooling Sex is the first full history of early modern libertine literature and its reception,...

James Grantham Turner is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at Oxford, Sussex, Liverpool, Virginia, Northwestern, and Michigan. In addition to editing Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose (Cambridge, 1990) with David Loewenstein, Robert Paltock's Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (Oxfor...

This chapter will situate the satirical portraiture of Marvell’s great poem within the history of erotic representation, in both its abject and sublime forms. By this I mean the ‘popular’ depiction of sexual acts and organs, and the eroticized visual culture of the absolutist court. As my title implies, the starting point for this history is the se...

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Preface and acknowledgements Introduction: a history of sexuality? 1. Marriage, love, sex, and Renaissance civic morality 2. Typology, sexuality and the Renaissance Esther 3. Artifice as seduction in Titian 4. Renaissance women and the question of class 5. Venetian women and their discontents 6. The ambig...

What specifically distinguishes Restoration culture and society from what went before and came after? And how did early modern British women and men accommodate themselves to the dramatic historical changes of the seventeenth century? This study, which brings together recent work by leading historians as well as literary and cultural critics of the...