Touching Stories: Richard Braithwait, Thomas Cranley and the Origins of English Pornography

Abstract

Literary theorists and the authors of conduct books began writing with new urgency in the 1630s about the impact on men’s bodies and selves of ‘wanton discourse, or Lascivious Bookes’. Richard Braithwait issued a stark warning in his advice book A Nursery for Gentry (1638). Describing the fortificatory benefits to young noblemen of reading well, and the hazards of reading irresponsibly, Braithwait explains that impressionable boys inevitably find themselves drawn to unprofitable books and,

when they fall upon any passage that complies with the lightnesse of their fancy, so highly affect it, as nothing more delights them, than to discourse of such ayry pleasures, as present themselves in a cursorie manner to their deluded conceits. These are altogether for Stories of Love; where every line workes such moving impressions in their unsteady fancies: as they reduce every period of Loves discourse, to a Sceane of Action; wherein they wish themselves Prime-actors, to close in a personall re-greet, with so light and sensuall a Relation.¹