The Fifteen Plagues of a Maidenhead  

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The Fifteen Plagues of a Maidenhead (1707) is a collection of erotic poetry on maidenhead.

In 1708, James Read and Angell Carter of England are found guilty by the Queen's Bench of publishing The Fifteen Plagues of a Maidenhead but not sentenced (eroticabibliophile).

On its censorship history, Alec Craig notes in Suppressed Books A History Of The Conception Of Literary Obscenity (1963):

The power of the ecclesiastical courts was gradually eroded by custom and legislation, although it was not until 1876 that the desuetude of their jurisdiction over the laity was judicially recognized in Phillimore v. Machin. Today their activities are confined to cases of clerical discipline. In the early eighteenth century they seem to have been impotent to deal with indecent writing and there had not so far been developed any doctrine which firmly established the legality of prosecutions before the civil courts. This is quite clear from the remarks of Mr. Justice Powell in 1708 when discussing a common law indictment 8 against a man named Read for printing a book entitled The Fifteen Plagues of a Maidenhead:

This is for printing bawdy stuff, that reflects on no person, and a libel must be against some particular person or persons, or against the Government. It is stuff not fit to be mentioned publicly. If there is no remedy in the Spiritual court, it does not follow there must be a remedy here. There is no law to punish it: I wish there were: but we cannot make law. It indeed tends to the corruption of good manners, but that is not sufficient for us to punish. As to the case of Sir Charles Sedley, there was something more in that case than showing his naked body in the balcony.

The Eighth Plague

Now I am young, blind Cupid me bewitches,

I scratch my Belly, for it always itches,

And what it itches for, I've told before,

'Tis either to be Wife, or be a Whore;

Nay any thing indeed, would be poor I,

N'er Maiden-heads upon my Hands should lie,

Which till I lose, I'm sure my watry Eyes

Will pay to Love so great a Sacrifice,

That my Carcass soon will weep out all its Juice,

Till grown so dry, as fit for no Man's use. -- MADAM B[RAN]LE, 1707 via [1]