In Carnal Knowledge, Martin Ingram offers an in-depth view of the legal regulation of sexual behavior during the long sixteenth century, the crucial period before, during, and following the Reformation in England. This work summarizes and expands on Ingram’s previous publications, and provides an excellent overview of the scholarship of the field.

Ingram’s study primarily uses the records of ecclesiastical courts and secular courts. The church had jurisdiction over both sexual sin (fornication, adultery, prostitution, out-of-wedlock births, bawdry, etc.) and the regulation of marriage (breach of contract, bigamy, consanguinity, irregular marriages, and so on). Secular courts also punished sexual misbehavior, especially in larger towns, as it was viewed as causing social disorder. Ingram reveals an intricate and complex system, where both church courts, wardmote proceedings, courts of aldermen, and, during the Elizabethan period, the court in Bridewell Hospital in London punished sexual offenders. Overlap and sometimes disputes over jurisdiction existed, but in general church courts focused on correcting sin and enforcing repentance, while secular courts primarily focused on punishing recalcitrant offenders and expelling them from the ward or city. Both before, during, and after the Reformation, sexual regulation operated from the bottom-up as well as top-down. The systems reflected the community’s desire to pressure their neighbors to live godly and orderly lives, as much as authorities wished to control sinful disorder. As Ingram illustrates, the courts tried both office (introduced by the court) and instance (one individual suing another) causes, and thus relied heavily on intimate communal knowledge and cooperation to proceed.

Ingram argues against the traditional view that sexual regulation was laxer in the later Middle Ages and that the Reformation ushered in a stricter moral regime in England. He is not alone in this view in recent years, but provides a more nuanced argument, based on a larger range of court documents than other studies. In short, Ingram believes that “sexual regulation was not a creation of the Reformation but was nonetheless inflected by it” (406). He finds that church courts in the late 1400s were quite active, bringing a significant number of cases, although the punishments were lighter than in the 1300s, as the public humiliation of penance was often replaced with the payment of a fine or private penance. In the early decades of the 1500s, the number of cases dropped somewhat, but that slack seems to have been picked up by secular courts, especially in urban areas. During the Reformation decades (1530s–1560s), the primary concern of the church courts shifted from illicit sex to heresy, and sexual regulation moved increasingly into the secular courts and new institutions, like Bridewell Hospital in London, where the punishments were often more severe, often including public whipping and being put in the stocks or carted around town as a form of humiliation. 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.