Revisiting Jonathan Edwards and the “Bad Books” Controversy - The2025 AAS James Russell Wiggins Lecture Delivered By Christopher J. Looby
The Liaisons sub-committee is proud to co-sponsor this lecture.
Location: American Antiquarian Society and Online
Aristotle’s Compleat Master Piece. Printed for, and sold by the Booksellers,1748. American Antiquarian Society
Revisiting Jonathan Edwards and the “Bad Books” Controversy
In 1744 Jonathan Edwards learned that several of the young men of his Northampton congregation had in their possession certain “bad books,” with content evidently of a sexual nature, and were using information gleaned therefrom 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. This lecture 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.
Dr. Christopher Looby, Professor of English at UCLA
2025 James Russell Wiggins Lecture Presenter
Christopher J. 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.
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).