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A comprehensive study of the pervasive misogyny that left women behind while British society moved toward the Age of Enlightenment. Although the worlds of science and philosophy took giant strides away from the medieval view of the world, attitudes to women did not change from those that had pertained for centuries. The social turbulence of the first half of the seventeenth century afforded women new opportunities and new religious freedoms, and women were attracted into the many new sects where they were afforded a voice in preaching and teaching. These new and unprecedented liberties thus gained by women were perceived as a threat by the leaders of society, and thus arose an unlikely masculine alliance against the new feminine assertions, across all sections of society from Puritan preachers to judges, from husbands to court rakes. This reaction often found expression in the violent and brutal treatment of women who were seen to have stepped out of line, whether legally, socially or domestically. Often beaten and abused at home by husbands exercising their legal right, they were whipped, branded, exiled and burnt alive by the courts, from which their sex had no recourse to protection, justice or restitution. This work records the many kinds of violent physical and verbal abuse perpetrated against women in Britain and her colonies, both domestically and under the law, during two centuries when huge strides in human knowledge and civilization were being made in every other sphere of human activity, but social and legal attitudes to women and their punishment remained firmly embedded in the medieval.

This historical biography reveals how the famous diarist of Restoration England used his professional position to act as a sexual predator. Samuel Pepys is popularly known as the founder of the modern navy, a member of the Royal Society and, most of all, as a unique and frank diarist. Less well known is that he was a serial sexual offender by modern standards; a voyeur, a groper, and a rapist. Set against the London society of Charles II's restoration, and extensively using Pepys'own words, this book concerns his numerous extramarital affairs. It demonstrates how he used his position of power and influence to advance the careers of his subordinates—in return for the sexual favors of their wives. With his own descriptions, translated from the strange mix of languages and the seventeenth-century shorthand he used to camouflage the content, the reader witnesses in graphic detail how Pepys set about achieving his lascivious objectives – on occasion resorting to physical force where persuasion or bribery failed. Whether she be wife, daughter, mother, or humble maidservant, no woman was safe from his rapacious sexual appetite.