In fact, you would not even have had to work that hard.

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,

so is my beloved among the sons

I sat down under his shadow with great delight,

and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

This is, of course, from the Song of Songs, that baldly erotic Hebrew poem that snuck into the Tanakh under the justification of a traditional attribution to Solomon's authorship and the allegorical interpretation that it "really" represented the love between God and Israel. Late antique and medieval Christianity in the west, which tended towards deep suspicion of the human body and sexuality, preserved the book's inclusion in their Old Testament and maintained the allegorical interpretations. The Song of Songs depicts the love between Christ and the Church--or Christ and his mother Mary (yes, for real), or Christ and the human soul.

In the later Middle Ages, that last layer of interpretation undergirded a rich strand of mystical writing. Celibate men and women--nuns, monks, beguines, widows hungered for the humanity and the divinity of Christ. Erotic language, that some scholars have called sublimated sexual desire, is used to talk about moments of "mystical union" with Christ:

"Lord, now I am a naked soul

And you in yourself are a well-adorned God.

Our shared lot is eternal life without death."

Then a blessed stillness that both desire comes over them.

He surrenders himself to her [the soul]

And she surrenders herself to him.

What happens to her then--she knows--

And that is fine with me.

-Mechthild of Magdeburg, "Flowing Light of the Godhead," 13th century

It's a scholarly and popular commonplace to say that the coming of the Reformation valorized marriage and sexuality, as long as it was sexuality within marriage. Maybe it's too accepted. Because while the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs is often seen as a defining feature of medieval Christianity, we forget that the tradition did not die off with Luther and Calvin. In early modern Spanish Catholicism, in German Pietism, in the shifting confessional ground of England, Christian writers continued to turn to the Song of Songs to structure their relationship with Christ.

But a really interesting shift has occurred. Medieval interpretations tended towards the mystical, essentially using orgasm or fullness as an analogy for the idea of mystical union. In the Puritan worldview, the all-important moment was not mystical union but the reception of God's grace. Familiar with the medieval interpretive tradition through devotional texts that continued to circulate, Puritan preachers turned to the Song of Songs to model God's grace as an erotic gift.

Married and sexually experienced, they had no qualms about using sexual intercourse within marriage as an analogy for the reception of grace. Puritan pastor Richard Sibbes wrote a series of sermons taking this as its theme, for example, as did John Cotton and Hugh Peter. Scholar George Scheper notes that there are more than 500 commentaries on the Song of Songs from the 17th century alone!

Importantly, the erotic/sexual analogy of the Song of Songs in sermons influenced lay writers as well. Leslie Lindenauer finds the text popping up all over the place in the everyday writing of American Puritans, from diaries to letters to more formal literary works.

Lord! read the Riddle: Shall a gracious heart

The object of thy love, be sick of Love?

And beg a kiss under the piercing Smart

of want thereof?

Lord, pity from above.

~~

What hath thy Godhead, as not satisfide

Marri'de our Manhood, making it its Bride?

Oh, Matchless Love! filling Heaven to the brim!

O're running it: all running o're beside

This World! Nay, overflowing Hell; wherein

For thine elect, there rose a mighty Tide!

[...]

Oh! that they Love might overflow my Heart!

To fire the same with Love: for Love I would.

But oh! my streight'nded Breast! My Lifeless Sparke!

My Fireless Flame! What Chilly Love, and Cold?

In measure small! In Manner Chilly! See.

Lord blow thy Coal: Thy Love Enflame in me.

-Edward Taylor, "Meditations"

In Puritan England and New England, the erotic/sexual nature of the Song of Songs was openly embraced--it was preached from the pulpit, it was disseminated in devotional books. The surviving writing--the people who wanted a public record of their thoughts--is religious interpretations, as we might expect. The important thing is that this book of the Bible was widely propagated, and widely propagated in erotic and sexual terms. Puritan preachers and writers had no qualms about depicting/understanding their relationship with God in sexual terms, and it was considered not just acceptable but pious.

Puritan adolescents must have felt quite fortunate about that.

The real efflorescence of English-language pornography took place during and after the Restoration, so 1655 is a cut-off date that would limit the amount of material you could find. If you were living in the 1680s, on the other hand, an intrepidly randy teenager could probably get his hands on The London Jilt and other bawdy works that depicted the English demimonde of the time.

In his study of book inventories in late seventeenth-century New England, Jules Paul Seigel classified several titles as the "literature of roguery, picaresque and low-life incidents," and described their contents as "basically crude: the humor is gross and not a sordid stone is left unturned to get a laugh." Several of these titles he considered crassly "erotic", with a tendency toward anal humor. He also noted that the literary tastes of New Englanders at this time were essentially the same as those of their cousins across the Atlantic, despite the reputation of Puritan prudishness.

And while most of these erotic titles would have dated from the last quarter of the seventeenth-century, Sarah Toulalan has argued that there were numerous bawdy books published earlier in the century - particularly during the period of the English Civil War - and that erotic Restoration texts were a continuation and expansion of "an already existing tradition of writing and production of printed matter of a sexual nature."

Sources: Jules Paul Seigel, New England Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Jun., 1964), pp. 185-199; Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

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