Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England

Focusing on a largely unknown type of popular print culture that developed in the late 1600s - the coffee house periodical - Helen Berry here offers new evidence that the politics of gender, far from being a marginal or frivolous topic, was an issue of general interest and wide-spread concern to the early modern reader, and that the mass media was from its infancy an important means of communicating powerful messages about gender norms. Topics addressed in the 'agony column' of the Athenian Mercury - for example, the body, courtship, and sex - are of enduring interest across the centuries. Berry's study provides the first full length analysis of John Dunton's Athenian Mercury (1691-97), an influential specimen of the coffee-house periodical genre, as well as the original question-and-answer publication which addressed both men's and women's issues in one journal.