Reading for gender

Abstract

This essay serves to introduce the collection of articles in the present issue on the subject of the ‘History of Early Modern Masculinities’. It addresses the place of masculinity in early-modern historiography, highlights neglected areas of research, outlines methodological challenges and suggests new directions in the study of gender.

Keywords::

• body
• early modern
• gender
• masculinity
• Reformation
• Renaissance
• sex
• sexuality

I

If historians have come to agree that gender is a useful category of analysis, the place of masculinity within that category remains underexplored.1 The field of early-modern European history is particularly deficient in this regard, its practitioners lagging well behind historians of the Middle Ages and of the modern era in investigating the representations and experiences of men.2 The subfield's underdevelopment is all the more conspicuous when one considers the many specialists in the literature and visual arts of early modernity who have so compellingly placed diverse interrogations and expressions of manhood at the centre of their inquiries.3 Foundational work has, of course, been undertaken, but it is unevenly distributed across geographical areas of focus. England and Germany, for instance, are comparatively rich in historical studies of masculinity; Spain and Italy are comparatively poor. Might this disparity be related to religion? We have long suspected that Catholic societies might not conform to the conclusions reached regarding Protestant polities and wondered how confessional differences within Europe might influence understandings and practices of gender.4

These chronological, disciplinary, geographic and confessional discrepancies evidence the need for collective investigation into the study of early-modern masculinities. The project that has borne fruit in these essays was conceived as a way to bring together scholars working on different parts of Europe to focus, individually and then in conversation, on manhood and to offer something of a ‘state of play’ in their respective subfields. With that in mind, we asked some historians who work on gender, and some who have not done so previously, to approach sources both textual and archival with an eye to masculinity. The interaction of veterans with newcomers to the field, we hoped, would facilitate a balance between expert insight and outsider perspective. The workshop at which early versions of these articles were first discussed, held at the University of Connecticut, was also consciously constructed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. Drafts were circulated in advance to the contributors and to colleagues working on masculinity in other periods and disciplines: medievalists and modernists; literary scholars, historians and art historians. Those colleagues in turn circulated written responses to the papers to all participants. Discussions at the workshop itself engaged both the essays and the commentaries; the extensively revised articles in this special issue are very much products of that interchange. They are intended to serve individually as examples of promising research subjects and questions and, collectively, as a snapshot of the current historiographical landscape of early-modern masculinities. To encourage readers in similar cross-chronological and interdisciplinary explorations, we include in the present collection three commentaries by literary scholars – practitioners of a related discipline that is heavily invested in the study of masculinity. We asked them for their perspectives on the assembled essays and, in turn, on the present and future of interdisciplinary explorations of the subject.5

Our literary interlocutors have underlined the varieties and mutations of gender in the early-modern imagination and urged us to move beyond a focus on manly identities or performances and to look instead for masculinity as manifested in transactions and connections. They have gently cautioned that it is tempting to search the past and make what we see there into a reflection of our present. They have also posed hard questions on fundamentals: how do we identify and isolate our object of study at this stage in its historiographical development? Are there evidentiary challenges that remain to be addressed? What even counts as evidence for such queries? And, how do we decide what constitutes an expression of masculinity when it does not come to us with a label? As a leading French historian of gender reminds us, these were precisely the questions that faced early practitioners of women's history.6

We therefore approach the history of early-modern masculinity with a profound sense of the critical and methodological challenges that such an inquiry poses. These fall into at least three categories. The first is an epistemological pitfall: the early-modern propensity to figure the masculine as the human, a habit that at its most vigorous makes men as gendered beings invisible. The second comprises methodological snares: for example, the lure of essentialism, and the temptation to affix a supposedly comprehensive definition of masculinity to just one or another of its aspects; or, to be uncritical readers, confusing discursive ideals with lived experience, normative manhood with actual men. A third set of challenges is historiographical, both macro and micro. Broadly, gender has not taken a place at the table as a factor that drives change in the political, economic or social world. Is this an analytical category fit only to describe the effects of larger forces, or can it help explain the dynamic processes of history itself? Narrowly, while historians have embraced the notion, developed by the sociologist R. W. Connell, that masculinities are plural but unequal, we have generally neglected our own disciplinary métier and failed to ask how styles of manliness come into being and fade away, and what effect such movements have on other aspects of the past.7

The articles that follow confront these challenges implicitly or explicitly in the usual way of historians: they take their questions to texts and archives where the sources make their own idiosyncratic demands. In this issue we have found evidence of gender in a wide range of sources, from the gnomic emblems and sophisticated literary reflections of intellectuals like Paolo Giovio (1486–1552) and Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) to the trials of Spanish migrants and German soldiers. Documentary and literary, visual and juridical, scientific and prescriptive sources have all yielded insights and helped to shape new questions. What we have found most necessary in reading for gender, however, are a long memory, especially where layers of intertextual allusions are at play; a sharp ear for what is excluded from the record; and a keen eye for difference where many have seen sameness.

The wide range of evidence employed in these articles (scientific treatises, poetry, prose literary works, how-to books, emblems, court records and maps among others) shows that insights about masculinity can be gleaned from multiple early-modern discourses. Given this promiscuity of sources, the studies gathered here provide some clues as to what methods of reading for gender are most helpful for historians. Fundamental, of course, is critical attention to the peculiarities of the production and circulation of each type of evidence. In some cases, it is also necessary to interrogate the existing historiography and ask why, for example, all the colonised ‘others’ have been lumped together or why ‘others’ have been found only in colonies and not at home? Particular kinds of sources may call for specific methods: personal writings, such as the autobiographical text or the mixed-media personal device (impresa), may reveal most about gender when read contextually, against the author's philosophical works or within a long symbolic genealogy. More generally, such problems as the absence of explicit discussion of gender norms for men need to be approached strategically, and time and again these studies benefit from a comparative approach. Sometimes, as in the case of weapons’ magic or sexual discipline, we learn about notions of manhood from comparing the treatment of men and women. Often, however, the authors gathered here reveal the contested and dynamic nature of early-modern masculinity by making comparisons among men: laymen and ecclesiastics, Irish and Indian, or Spanish and foreign. Whether the source is an autobiography, an impresa, a prescriptive or medical text, a set of engravings or a judicial investigation, therefore, is less important to reading for gender than the contextual and comparative approach taken by historians in its interpretation. Taken collectively, the articles that follow bring home forcefully just how crucial it is for us to situate specialised inquiries in a broader frame in order to appreciate how the efflorescence and decline of particular conceptions and practices of masculinity participate in the dynamics of historical change in early-modern Europe.

II

We present these investigations in rough chronological order, but here highlight a cluster of themes that weave among them. The reflections of early-modern men of letters on their sexual organs, both the penis and the testicles, allow a glimpse into the most intimate conceptions of the male body. Here historians analyse creations of the imagination every bit as fantastic as those studied by literary scholars. Kenneth Gouwens wonders why two sixteenth-century Italian humanists chose to associate themselves with ancient lore about beavers gnawing off their own testicles.8 What, he asks, might such a choice reveal about Renaissance notions of masculinity? The classical and medieval inheritance of beaver stories turns out to be a rich symbolic lode that enables messages both personal and political to be registered in cryptic form. John Jeffries Martin explores the meditations of one of the most highly self-conscious writers of the era, Montaigne, on the nature of the sexes and on his penis.9 As fascinated as Montaigne is by this particularly independent organ and as much as he enjoys the use to which he puts it, he does not define his manliness entirely in terms of his body. Rather, as Martin explains, he locates masculinity as much in ethical behaviour as in physiology, a move that leads him to interrogate (however gently and tentatively) the prevailing gender ideology of masculine superiority.

Male sexuality is also foregrounded in the contributions by Edward Behrend-Martinez and Julie Hardwick, but in these cases it is the challenges to institutional or community norms posed by the sexuality of subaltern men, foreign immigrants in Spain and young unmarried males in France.10 The differences are stark. In Spain foreign men are charged with heresy for saying that fornication with a willing partner is not a sin, and, if they have struck up a liaison with a local girl, the authorities intervene to separate the couple. In France, by contrast, the issues of foreignness and religious orthodoxy have no purchase in such matters, and sexual intimacy in young couples is accepted under certain conditions. In both cases, however, it is women who are the agents of discipline, instrumentalising a judicial system whose records routinely express collisions of desire like those that Jane Tylus describes in her comment.11 While marking out sexual behaviour as a site of gender conflict, these articles serve as powerful reminder that early-modern disciplinary regimes targeted not only female sexual misconduct, but male as well.

We shift from sex to violence in the contributions of Brendan Kane and Ann Tlusty, which explore the centrality of combat in the transactions that constitute masculinity.12 Kane triangulates three kinds of men and argues that conflict over the nature of manhood drove England's imperial expansion into North America and Ireland in the Elizabethan and early Stuart reigns. Teasing out the differences in the English visual and literary representations of Indian and Irish men, he anatomises the high stakes that drove the conquerors, who had been thwarted from exercising their martial capabilities in the European theatre of war and so were forced back on what was to hand in Virginia and Ireland. Could combat on distinctly unequal terms prove a sufficient test of valour? Tlusty approaches martial manhood from a different perspective: that of the common soldier who in early-modern Germany sought magical aid to protect himself from the weapons of other men. While a variety of objects promised invincibility from the sword and bullet, the body parts of dead males (infant or adult) were deemed particularly effective. But was a man who safeguarded his life, or contrived to take that of another, by supernatural means in fact behaving honourably? Or was he perhaps criminally engaged, like so many female witches, in the black arts?

No discussion of masculinity would be complete without attention to patriarchal ideology, the beliefs about masculine superiority and domination that undergirded conceptions of gender in early-modern Europe. A crucial weapon in contests between the sexes, it was also a sword that cut two ways. While securing the legal and religious grip of males over females, it cemented the governance of the many subordinate men by the few elite men.13 Manuals on running the large all-male households of Roman Catholic cardinals, studied by Laurie Nussdorfer, modelled how to rank men of diverse types on a status hierarchy and, once they were there, how to keep them in their assigned places.14 The paterfamilias of such a famiglia was not the domineering patriarch but the affable and vigilant ‘housemaster’ (maestro di casa), cloaked in the black robes that made him appear virtually indistinguishable from a priest.

Male difference is elided in these prescriptive texts, which play down the tensions between a clerical political régime and its lay male subjects by designing a model of manhood that would unite gentlemen in a common ethos. Such an ethos rejected both the sexual and the martial tests of manliness – or, to put it in the positive terms that Joseph Campana deploys in his comment, it distributed masculinity according to vectors of social status, self-control and peacefulness.15 The ‘lower’ servants were excluded, but with consequences far less severe than for excluded men in Counter-Reformation Spain. In the Roman cardinal's household footmen suffered no reprisals for spending the night in erotic escapades, whereas the Spanish Inquisition punished mere talk by low-status men about such activities as heresy. In Germany, authorities both Protestant and Catholic were more lenient toward subordinate men than were the Spanish authorities, even as they were every bit as harsh in their treatment of women who employed magical arts. In France age hierarchies compelled subordinate youths in sexually fecund liaisons to become husbands regardless of their wishes: in effect, to assume patriarchal status whether they wanted to or not.

Perhaps it was imperial adventure that gave such urgency to struggles over manhood in Spain and England. Transnational political geographies seem to have intensified – or brought to the surface – vulnerabilities in the invading power that attached themselves with particular tenacity to gender. Foreign men brought the empire back home in Behrend-Martinez's account, a disturbing and disruptive presence repressed by precisely the same institutions that subjugated colonial peoples. It was panic over their own warrior class's capabilities, not fears of the men they fought, that Kane sees as driving England's sixteenth-century conquests. If warfare was indeed one of the preferred forms of early-modern interconnectivity (as Campana suggests), it was a crucial site for the distribution of masculinity.

Politics was another privileged terrain of gender construction: privileged in the sense that it was a space that excluded most men as well as women. It is enlightening to explore the rich array of resources with which subordinated men addressed their position of powerlessness. Gouwens depicts humiliated courtiers, in a regime of increasingly oblivious princes, embracing the emblem of their apparent (but only apparent, it turns out) impotence. Tlusty details the supernatural weapons to which some common soldiers felt they had to resort in order to survive in the ill-trained and disorganised armies of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Nussdorfer analyses the ways that lower servants rebuffed their superiors in male households and fought off their efforts at control. And, if the Irish bards had to give up their lords, according to Kane they at least retained a voice, now heard from the pulpit rather than in the great hall.

III

Making masculinity a more effective tool of historical analysis can yield new insights on old questions. These articles broach subjects, like gendered disciplinary regimes, witchcraft and empire that have venerable claims on the attention of early-modern historians. In mining neglected archives, we may find regimes of discipline that are gendered in starkly different ways, as Hardwick demonstrates. When Tlusty compares prosecutions of men accused of magical practices with those of women, we catch a glimpse of gendered fantasies, at least until the judges imposed their scripts upon defendants. The contributions of Behrend-Martinez and Kane, meanwhile, make clear the urgency of continuing to produce imperial historiographies that attend to how conceptions and practices of masculinity shaped encounters both abroad and at home. Narratives of empire must take account of the repercussions that conquest had in the metropole. They must be written with awareness of our own distorting lens and with sensitivity to distinctions made by early-modern actors.

Reading for gender is not merely putting men into the mix: it promises to refine our understanding of the early-modern, across disciplines. The ‘early-modern period’ began as a scholar's term of art aimed at bringing greater specificity to the traditional tripartite periodisation of ancient, medieval and modern. Some things that were evidently not medieval nevertheless did not seem to be modern (for example, in the realms of conceptions of liberty and of one's relationship to the means of production), and so they came to be designated as early-modern. This terminology freed work on the period from the constraining frames of Renaissance and Reformation, allowing historians to present findings without having to set them within those dominating intellectual, ideological or theological categories.16 Arguments for continuity have, perhaps unsurprisingly, crept into vogue, whether they focus on the downplaying of particular events as causing abrupt ruptures with the past (say, the depiction of England in the 1640s as ‘unrevolutionary’) or on tracing supposedly modern phenomena into the distant past, for example by finding medieval origins for capitalism, or anticipations of postcolonial thought in early Renaissance humanism.17 A focus on masculinity may enable new ways of conceptualising the early-modern.

If periodisation is largely determined by the emergence and fading away of phenomena deemed uniquely defining to an age, these essays collectively may demonstrate how particular modes of manliness set the ‘early-modern’ apart from what came before and has come after. Or perhaps they argue in favour of longue durée continuities of gendered relations? Even if we assume the historical, and conceptual, coherence of an ‘early-modern period’, studies within that subfield are sure to become parochial – methodologically, geographically, theoretically and confessionally – without the injection of new modes of analysis. To that end, this special issue intends to provoke, challenge and inspire those working in the many subfields of early-modern European history to direct their gaze to masculinity and then to integrate it into a deepened understanding of the period as a whole. We even dare to hope that our collective effort at historicising masculinity may prove as useful to literary scholars as their work has proven for us. We have made our best case for the need to clarify the links between the prescriptive and the descriptive, between discourse and practice, in the study of early-modern masculinities. A responsible reading of the past, we contend, requires sensitivity to the embeddedness of our subjects in the dynamics of historical change.

As pioneers in the field have long suggested, however, reading for gender can do much more than enable more finely grained recreations of the past: it can alter the conceptual building blocks of historical research itself. We focus here on some of these: the body, sexuality, the household, warfare and empire. We invite readers to add their subjects to the list.

Acknowledgements

For their generous support of the Histories of Early Modern Masculinities Workshop in November 2013, we thank the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, the University of Connecticut Research Foundation, the Departments of English and History, the Office of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, John A. Davis (the Noether Chair in Modern Italian History), Robert A. Gross (the Draper Chair in Early American History), the Department of Languages, Cultures and Literatures, and the Center for Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. We are also indebted to Alexandra Shepard for her participation and generous and insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kenneth Gouwens

Laurie Nussdorfer is William F. Armstrong Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University. The author of Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (1992) and Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (2009), she is currently working on a book on men and masculinities in Baroque Rome.

Brendan Kane

Brendan Kane is Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. Among his recent publications are Nobility and Newcomers in Renaissance Ireland (with Thomas Herron, 2013) and The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541–1641 (2010).

Laurie Nussdorfer

Kenneth Gouwens is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, USA. His publications include Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (1998); and a critical edition and translation of Paolo Giovio, Notable Men and Women – Dialogus de viris et feminis aetate nostra florentibus (2013).

Notes

^1. , “Gender;” eadem, “Unanswered Questions.”

^2. It is interesting to note that, although her recent collection includes several contributions by early-modernists, Anne-Marie Sohn's introductory essay surveying the historiography omits the early-modern period: Sohn, “Introduction.” The historical study of masculinity in early-modern England, much of it focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is more developed than that of most regions of Europe in the period. Influential studies over the past two decades that centre on England include Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity; Foyster, Manhood; Hitchcock and Cohen, English Masculinities; , “Semiotics of Masculinity” and Three-Piece Suit; and especially Shepard, Meanings of Manhood.

^3. Among recent contributions: Campana, The Pain of Reformation; Colantuono, Titian; Gallucci, Cellini; Ellis, Old Age, Masculinity; Finucci, Manly Masquerade; Levy, Re-membering Masculinity; Long, High Anxiety; Milligan and Tylus, Poetics of Masculinity; , “Alert and Erect,” and Sex of Men; Springer, Armour and Masculinity. Notable earlier contributions by non-historians include that of the cultural theorist Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity (1996).

^4. For an early contribution on the distinctive aspects of masculinity in early-modern Catholic society, see Cavallo, “Bachelorhood;” see also the articles edited by Julia Hairston, “Gender in Early Modern Rome.” A particularly influential study of masculinity in Protestant society has been , Meanings of Manhood, which includes an extensive bibliography on early-modern England; see also eadem, “Manhood, Patriarchy and Gender.” Two important recent edited collections, largely centred on Protestant societies, are Hendrix and Karant-Nunn, Masculinity, and Broomhall and Van Gent, Governing Masculinities.

^5. To encourage readers in similar cross-chronological and interdisciplinary explorations, we include in this issue revised commentaries by Jane Tylus, Fiona Somerset and Joseph Campana. We thank them and Alexis Boylan, Rosa Helena Chinchilla, Cornelia Dayton, Micki McElya and Cathy Schlund-Vials for generously sharing their time and expertise, as well as for making this theme issue a truly collective undertaking.

^6.Sohn, “Introduction,” 24.

^7.Connell, Masculinities, 76–81. One exemplary exception is Harvey and Shepard, “What Have Historians Done with Masculinity?”

^8.Gouwens, “Emasculation as Empowerment.”

^9.Martin, “Michel de Montaigne's Embodied Masculinity.”

^10.Behrend-Martínez, “Spain Violated;” and Hardwick, “Policing Paternity.”

^11.Tylus, “Invincible Masculinities.”

^12.Kane, “Masculinity and Political Geographies in England, Ireland and North America;” and Tlusty, “Invincible Blades and Invulnerable Bodies.”

^13.Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 68–9, 87–9.

^14.Nussdorfer, “Masculine Hierarchies in Roman Ecclesiastical Households.”

^15.Campana, “Distribution, Assemblage, Capacity.”

^16. Of course, the triumph of the category “early-modern” has come at a cost: see the perceptive comments of , “Early Modern Muddle;” “Who's Afraid of the Renaissance?;” and “A Postmodern Renaissance?”

^17. For an influential application of postcolonial theory to the reading of Petrarch, see Dagenais, “Postcolonial Laura.”