Henry VII’s New Men and the Making of Tudor England. Steven Gunn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xxii + 394 pp. $100.
The criminalization of prostitution, and the official closing of the Southwark brothels in London in 1546, ensured that a new underworld of prostitution kept the judges in Bridewell busy. In the countryside, however, the church courts continued to be the primary regulator of sexual behavior. Attempts by Reformers to introduce stricter punishments for sexual sin in statutes, and in essence to merge the state and church systems in order to create a more godly state, largely failed, as the majority of the elite in both houses of Parliament were reluctant to give too much power to the church. Therefore, the dual system survived. Both religious and secular systems of, and desire for, sexual regulation existed in pre-Reformation England, and while the Reformation period caused a greater intensity in the punishment of illicit sex, it did so largely based on already existing ideas and approaches. The broad scope of Ingram’s study is its greatest achievement. Often studies of this kind focus on a set of legal records in one diocese or in a city or during a shorter time period. Ingram’s stretches across 130 years, town and country, and both secular and ecclesiastical courts. Scholars of the history of sex and gender in early modern English culture and society will rely on, and return to, this volume for decades to come.