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Sex and Salvation chronicles the coming of age of a generation of women in Tamatave in the years that followed Madagascar’s economic liberalization. Eager to forge a viable future amid poverty and rising consumerism, many young women have entered the sexual economy in hope of finding a European husband. Just as many Westerners believe that young people break with the past as they enter adulthood, Malagasy citizens fear that these women have severed the connection to their history and culture.

Jennifer Cole’s elegant analysis shows how this notion of generational change is both wrong and consequential. It obscures the ways young people draw on long-standing ideas of gender and sexuality, it ignores how urbanites relate to their rural counterparts, and it neglects the relationship between these husband-seeking women and their elders who join Pentecostal churches. And yet, as talk about the women circulates through the city’s neighborhoods, bars, Internet cafes, and churches, it teaches others new ways of being.

Cole’s sophisticated depiction of how a generation’s coming of age contributes to social change eschews a narrow focus on crisis. Instead, she reveals how fantasies of rupture and conceptions of the changing life course shape the everyday ways that people create the future.

Drawing on an extraordinary wealth of court records from Middlesex County of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay, Sex in Middlesex offers a richly revisionist account of social and moral life in seventeenth-century New England. Social historian Roger Thompson brings to life the forgotten men and women of colonial Massachusetts to challenge some of the most entrenched assumptions about Puritan society. Examining cases of fornication, adultery, breach of promise, premarital pregnancy, and sexual deviance recorded between 1649 and 1699, Thompson argues that the Puritan social system was far less rigid, and the relations between the sexes far less coercively regulated, than the dominant historiographical tradition, shaped by scholars such as Perry Miller and Lawrence Stone, has suggested.

Rather than a community defined by patriarchal tyranny and punitive moral control, Thompson discovers in the Middlesex records a society characterized by a striking degree of tolerance, mutual regard, and practical common sense, animated by a genuinely popular Puritan piety. The goal of the courts was not punishment and exclusion, but confession, reform, and the reintegration of offenders into the community. Structured with methodological rigor and written with narrative verve, Sex in Middlesex is at once a work of quantitative social history and a gallery of vivid individual portraits.