on to say: Cryle and O'Connell's aim is to get away from the focus less on thinkers than on conventionally 'great' thinkers, and in sympathy with this aim they also would replace the idea of the 'Enlightenment' by the idea of 'multiple enlightenments.' However, this endorsement of the multiple over the monolithic is quickly qualified by the further thought that 'libertine enlightenment(s?)' might do as well as any single term to capture the totality, so long as we understand that 'libertinism—the self-aware, philosophically oriented practice of more or less sexualized freedom—merges into libertinage—the vernacular, dissident freedoms of everyday life.' Adam Rounce in The Cambridge Quarterly commented on the misleading title of the book: "this essay collection inverts the old-fashioned idea of hiding erotica under a dull and pious title, so that politics and liberty get equal attention with sex." Rounce did offer qualified praise for the book, stating that despite its unevenness, "the best parts ... would stand very well on their own, while some of the others would benefit from less rigidity." Kevin L. Cope, writing in Eighteenth-Century Life, reviewed Libertine Enlightenment alongside Sophie Carter's Purchasing Power: Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture and Frances Ferguson's Pornography, the Theory. Cope called Libertine Enlightenment "most ambitious and successful of the three ... Libertine Enlightenment ... expands the standard concept of the place of Enlightenment." However, Cope found Libertine Enlightenment, as well as the two other books under review, diminished by a certain timidity in addressing their topics: "All three of these books suffer from a pervasive nervousness, whether a highly professional concern to please the aging power-brokers of our profession or a quiet tension about taking up the tawdry side of life as one’s topic in a 'tenure' book or an affected trembling about the injustices of sex in the exploitative city or some other form of hypertrophic worry. These books remind readers that the long eighteenth century may well be larger than our wits (or our lusts) and that its seeming preoccupation with sexuality may only symptomatize its vivacity." See also Libertine novel References Sources Books about literature 2003 non-fiction books Books about literary theory