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Masculinity (Renaissance and Reformation)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. The question of masculinity lies at the heart of masterpieces of Renaissance art, philosophy, and literature. Proscriptive and prescriptive literature formed a discourse of ideal fathers, priests, courtiers, and warriors, and these ideals were then reified in fictional texts as well as in pigment and marble. Such textual and artistic ideals of masculinity were by nature not obtainable by real men, a matter that was the cause of a gender anxiety that has received much scholarly attention. Furthermore, masculinity in the Renaissance was frequently discussed in contrast to its negative effect, effeminacy. For example, the development of the civilized man, tempering emotion and demonstrating politeness, was also at risk of being condemned as effeminate. In this case, men would have been slandered for their concern with decorum rather than action. In other instances, the censure of effeminacy was used in contexts quite far from our own modern understandings of the term. For example, the term was often directed toward men who exhibited extraordinary heterosexual desire. Thus, to study masculinity in the Renaissance is to consider historical context as well as rhetorical modes. It is a field that comprises the investigation of the characteristics of manhood as well as the language that condemned effeminacy. There is a general consensus that Renaissance masculinity studies owe their beginnings to feminist scholarship of the past several decades. It is also notable that Renaissance scholars working on masculinity often do not exhibit much affinity with the larger academic field of so-called Masculinity Studies, possibly because of the latter’s propensity to consider only modern questions. Because Renaissance investigations of masculinity typically address the same topics that one would expect in any critical analysis of the period (war, honor, economics, love, sexuality, religion, etc.), it is necessary to determine a working definition of what is included in this bibliography. In sum, this bibliography seeks to indicate publications that address any discourse that arises when one considers “men” in the Renaissance and that engage such discourses with particular questions regarding gender formation. Primary works have not been listed, except when part of anthologized readers. However, those seeking a reader for primary sources might note that the secondary literature does point to an unwritten canon in literary, visual, and material cultures.
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  5. General Overviews
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  7. While there is yet to be a definitive overview of Renaissance European masculinity, there are some monographs and essay anthologies that cover a broad scope of subject and period. Works of non-European masculinity during the period are notably scarce. Pan-European works are typically anthologies, and Lees 1994 is one of the first studies to attempt to capture the expansive notion of European premodern masculinity. Hadley 1999 and Kiefer 2009 similarly offer essays on late medieval Europe, while Hendrix and Karant-Nunn 2008 is a long-needed addition on the Reformation era. The best monograph on European masculinity is Karras 2003. Mosse 1996, an important work on modern masculinity, offers a description of the development of medieval masculinity into its modern form.
  8.  
  9. Hadley, Dawn M., ed. Masculinity in Medieval Europe. London: Longman, 1999.
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  11. An early contribution to the field of European masculinity. It is a collection of essays that cover a wide geographical range and span from the 4th to the 15th centuries. Swanson’s essay on clerical masculinity is notable since the field of studies on religion and masculinity is still relatively small. The book is suitable for students and scholars alike.
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  13. Hendrix, Scott H., and Susan C. Karant-Nunn, eds. Masculinity in the Reformation Era. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008.
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  15. The book is divided in two parts, with the first devoted to men in civic and religious duties, and the second devoted entirely to essays on masculinity and Martin Luther. Essays focus on reformed France, Switzerland, Germany, and northwestern Spain.
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  17. Karras, Ruth Mazo. From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
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  19. A highly useful book that examines the transition from boyhood to manhood for three groups in medieval Europe: knights, university students, and urban craftsmen. Focuses on physical prowess for knights, Aristotelian moderation for university students, and autonomous authority of workshop and household for artisans. It is well suited to classroom use and is useful for students and specialists alike.
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  21. Kiefer, Frederick, ed. Masculinities and Femininities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 23. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009.
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  23. A collection of accessible essays based both on historical and literary texts. They cover a wide range of topics such as clerical masculinity, the male body in French chivalric tales, sex and the Renaissance pet, and homosocial relations in Quattrocento Florence.
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  25. Lees, Clare A., Thelma Fenster, and JoAnn McNamara, eds. Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
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  27. This groundbreaking volume was crucial to the establishment of a subfield of research on masculinity in premodern periods that was not focused on sexuality. The volume discusses a pan-European heterosexual masculinity, using the terms established by historical feminist criticism, and it avoids psychoanalytic or theoretical approaches. The introduction is still very useful, and the volume is still one of the more frequently cited works in premodern masculinity.
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  29. Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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  31. A study of modern masculinity that seeks to identify an important shift between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The book identifies modern stereotypes of masculinity as well as the development of the ideal of modern masculinity in history in the late 18th century. The greatest difference between modern and medieval/early-modern masculinity for Mosse is the modern emphasis on the body itself.
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  33. Journals
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  35. Although there are no journals dedicated to masculinity in the Renaissance, there are several relevant journals one might consult. The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and Gender and History all contain articles attentive to gender issues in a historical context. For more theoretical articles that are often limited to modern questions, one can consult Men and Masculinities.
  36.  
  37. Gender and History.
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  39. A superb journal that consistently contains top-quality studies on the history of gender, including femininity and masculinity. It is often historical in nature but spans regions and epochs.
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  41. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.
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  43. A relatively new journal that offers a welcome forum to articles on masculinity and gender in the Renaissance and early modern period.
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  45. Journal of the History of Sexuality.
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  47. An excellent and well-established journal that provides a forum for critical, historical, and theoretical research in sexuality studies of the past to the present. The journal is cross-disciplinary and often has articles pertaining to the European Middle Ages.
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  49. Men and Masculinities.
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  51. A continuation of one of the early journals in the field of masculinity studies. Articles come from various theoretical camps and are typically geared toward contemporary sociological questions.
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  53. Visual Arts
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  55. Most works on masculinity in the visual arts focus on Italian works, including Saslow 1986 on representations of Ganymede, Simons 2008 on the Italian representations and reception of Hercules, and Levy 2006 on the fear of masculine effacement in Italian widow portraits. Berger 2007 provides an excellent study on the anxiety of male portraits in Rembrandt, and Kettering 1997 discusses the connection between male dress in Dutch portraiture and cultural mores regarding effeminacy.
  56.  
  57. Berger, Harry, Jr. Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and Other Dutch Group Portraits. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.
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  59. The study traces the development of group portraiture from the 1580s to the late 1660s and gives particular attention to the performance anxiety in group portraits, where figures often seem to pose competitively and separately. Berger’s chapters on the marriage portraits specifically confront matters of gendered labor and men’s attempts to control women, children, and domestic virtue.
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  61. Kettering, Alison McNeil. “Gentlemen in Satin: Masculine Ideals in Later Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraiture.” Art Journal 56.2 (Summer 1997): 41–47.
  62. DOI: 10.2307/777677Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  63. The essay discusses masculinity in late-17th-century Dutch portraiture, giving particular attention to manhood in terms of profession, rank, and class. It traces the change from men dressed in black, sober garments to the Van Dyckian courtly style. The author associates this change to the social aspirations of men at the time and notes the closeness between signs of effeminacy and the representations of powerful men.
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  65. Levy, Allison. Re-Membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence: Widowed Bodies, Mourning, and Portraiture. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  67. Levy’s work is a deeply theoretical text that argues for a new category of portraiture, the widow’s portrait. At its core, the book addresses the tensions between loss (of body, fame, memory) and remembrance. Of particular interest to masculinity studies is the author’s reading of the fractured and anxious male subject, who is fearful of effacement.
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  69. Saslow, James M. Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.
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  71. This study approaches the Ganymede myth in major artists of the Italian Renaissance, including Michelangelo, Parmigianino, Giulio Romano, and Cellini. Ganymede, for the artists studied, is shown to represent the delight in young boys as well as implicitly signifying man’s superiority over women.
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  73. Simons, Patricia. “Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic Libido.” Art History 31.5 (November 2008): 632–664.
  74. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00635.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  75. Long a scholar of masculinity in Italian art, Patricia Simons addresses the figure of Hercules, an exemplar of moral and civic virtue, in this exciting article. Representations of Hercules provide visual proof of the burdens and tensions of idealized masculinity. This article specifically focuses on Hercules’s struggle with Antaeus in the Florentine Picture Chronicle, Pollaiuolo, Mantegna and his circle, and Michelangelo.
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  77. Literary Criticism
  78.  
  79. Perhaps the most dynamic area of scholarship in premodern masculinity has taken place in literary studies. However, it has been limited to the Anglo-American context with some exceptions. As early as the early 1980s, a psychoanalytic lens was turned onto the literary canon to investigate manhood in the Renaissance. Since those first works, other approaches such as cultural criticism, queer studies, and philology have been employed to mine the texts of masterpieces as well as nearly forgotten manuscripts. What is considered literary criticism and what is not becomes difficult to decipher, since the lines that separate disciplines are no doubt murky. Even those studies that are primarily historical will look to the literature of the period, and, arguably, most of the works listed here under the heading “literary criticism,” are also cultural and historical criticism in some form or another. Thus, the subsections below indicate those works that focus primarily on masculinity in literary texts or that use literary texts for the majority of their evidence. Differences of methodology in the language tradition are notable, with English often paving the way for psychoanalytic and cultural studies. Other differences are likely reflective of larger trends in these fields, such as the prominence given to theater both in Spanish and English, philology in Italian, and contemporary theory in French.
  80.  
  81. English
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  83. The majority of critical attention in Renaissance masculinity has been given to English literature. This may be partly due to the origination of cultural studies in England as well as the more conservative nature of Renaissance studies in other language traditions. English masculinity will distinguish itself from southern Europe on many counts. The departure from the Catholic Church, the cult of politeness, the reign of a female monarch, and the lack of women on the theatrical stage will all contribute to a particular English masculinity.
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  85. Non-Theatrical
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  87. While most scholarship on English literature does not completely ignore theater, there are many texts that focus primarily on lyric, narrative poetry, and other non-theatrical texts. Two early works, Rosen 1993 and Breitenberg 1996, discuss the fundamental matter of gender anxiety and the gap between real and ideal versions of masculinity. Davis 2007 is a collection of essays on urban masculinity in the late Middle Ages, while the essays in Williams 1999 take up the question of masculinity in texts from the 17th and 18th centuries. Bates 2007 and King 2004 utilize gender and psychoanalytic theory to discuss male subjectivity. Vaught 2008 discusses the often-neglected matter of affect and emotion in masculine representations, and Biberman 2004 addresses the fascinating topic of the correlation between anti-Semitism and the discourse of effeminacy. MacFaul 2010 focuses instead on canonical poetic texts to discuss the crucial matter of paternity.
  88.  
  89. Bates, Catherine. Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
  90. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511483455Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  91. Relying on psychoanalytic and gender theory, this book considers the male poet who figures himself as defeated and often abandoned, a position in contrast to masterly masculinity. Bates argues that critical interpretations that seek to recuperate a competent masculine writing subject are misdirected. Suited to specialists in the field.
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  93. Biberman, Matthew. Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.
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  95. This study challenges the notion that Jews have been transhistorically feminized in Christian European cultures. The most suggestive chapters argue that the Jewish man was first characterized as hypermasculine and that this figure developed into the satanic trope of later years. The effeminate Jew emerged later as a means of shoring up anxious masculinity caused by a growing capitalist economy.
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  97. Breitenberg, Mark. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  98. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511586231Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  99. A smart study of the dialectic of anxiety and desire in English literature and medical writings, including Burton, Bacon, Shakespeare, and Jane Anger. Breitenberg explores the ideological contradictions that are the causes of masculine anxiety, as well as the productive ways that such anxieties perpetuated the patriarchal system. An influential book that is particularly geared to specialists in the field of gender studies.
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  101. Davis, Isabel. Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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  103. A fascinating study of literary texts from 1360 to 1430. The primary figures considered, William Langland, Thomas Usk, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Thomas Hoccleve, are seen to offer nonheroic versions of masculinity that are rooted in the ethos of labor. Particularly interesting are the author’s discussions on authority, paternity, and the middling masculinity of the urban center.
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  105. King, Thomas A. The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750. 2 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.
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  107. A provocative two-volume publication that moves among queer theory, literary criticism, and cultural studies. An ambitious project that adds much to the study of pederasty, insisting on the consideration of class and race when looking at discussion of favorites. The first volume includes a generous chapter on the politics of effeminacy in English literature, which provides an interesting analysis of multiple sources to show the complex and changing use of the discourse of effeminacy.
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  109. MacFaul, Tom. Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Johnson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  110. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511761089Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  111. This study of canonical poetic texts argues that in verse as in life, paternity is a complex matter and subject to contradictions of potency and impotency, authority and submission. The book is subtended by the argument that paternity establishes itself through a poetic paradox, one that eliminates the female. Particularly interesting is the chapter on Ben Johnson, which discusses the patriarchal and homosocial aspect of the poet.
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  113. Rosen, David. The Changing Fictions of Masculinity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
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  115. Rosen’s provocative work is one of the first important studies of masculinity in English literature. It focuses on six great works: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Hard Times, and Sons and Lovers. It particularly focuses on the tensions between real, lived masculinities and ideal ones as inherited from cultural and literary traditions.
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  117. Vaught, Jennifer C. Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
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  119. This study is structured according to professions: scholars, kings, knights, and family men. It analyzes literary texts to show how men in these professions are actually empowered by the expression of emotion, particular by weeping. It covers various genres as well as canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Johnson, and others.
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  121. Williams, Andrew P., ed. The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature: Viewing the Male. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999.
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  123. This collection of nine essays encompasses English prose, poetry, drama, and translations from the 17th and 18th centuries. Williams’s introduction foregrounds the essays, with two perspectives on the representation of masculinity: the first, repression of a perceived inferior, be it effeminate men or women, and the second, the understanding that the social and political context of early modern England was significant in the creation of competing and contesting masculine identities.
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  125. Theater
  126.  
  127. Not surprisingly, theatrical texts and performances have garnered much attention since the beginnings of Renaissance masculinity studies. Kahn 1981 is one of the first studies on masculinity and Shakespeare, and it employs the psychoanalytic approach so popular in its day. Smith 2000 is an excellent study that focuses primarily on the social context of Shakespeare in order to read masculinity in his plays, while Wells 2000 looks for a changing representation of masculinity within Shakespeare’s works. Menon 2011, on the other hand, offers a collection of brief essays that place queer theorists in conversation with Shakespeare’s corpus. Frequently cited, Orgel 1996 looks particularly at the performative aspects of Shakespearean drama. Botelho 2009, Digangi 1997, and Low 2003 consider the works of various English playwrights in order to discuss rumor, homoerotics, and the duel, respectively.
  128.  
  129. Botelho, Keith M. Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
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  131. A witty study of early modern English stage; specifically, plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Cary, and Johnson. The author contextualizes earwitnessing, or judicious listening, to discuss the central concept of rumor. He approaches the works through sound and gender studies and shows that men’s anxieties are incited by fear of the sounds created by other men, specifically male rumor mongering.
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  133. Digangi, Mario. The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  134. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511585319Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  135. A theoretically informed study of homoeroticism in English drama. The work contains a highly useful introduction on modern critical debates around sexuality of the premodern era. In its last chapter on tragicomedy, the book moves toward a broad study of masculinity and addresses issues of militarism, courtly culture, and politics. Discusses numerous playwrights, including Chapman, Middleton, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher.
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  137. Kahn, Coppélia. Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
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  139. A lucid and thoughtful book that uses psychoanalytic tools to analyze masculinity in Shakespeare. The book is structured by the ages of man, and its most useful discussion is likely that of the power conceded to women to validate men’s identities. Particularly persuasive are Kahn’s discussions of Romeo and Juliet and Coriolanus.
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  141. Low, Jennifer A. Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
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  143. Focusing on duels in England between 1580 and 1620, this book addresses multiple masculinities through an analysis of fencing manuals, anti-dueling tracts, and women’s conduct books. Low shows how the act of dueling and the discourse surrounding it reveals much about masculinity in the period, both on and off stage. The work is both a study of theater, Shakespeare and Johnson in particular, and a cultural phenomenon.
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  145. Menon, Madhavi, ed. Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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  147. A collection of forty-eight essays that puts queer theory in conversation with Shakespeare’s works. Includes contributions from some of the top queer theorists.
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  149. Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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  151. This influential work begins with the question of the exclusion of female actors from the stage of Shakespeare’s England. One of its most tantalizing arguments is that the transvestite boy actor may have had little to do with homosocial discourse and instead reflected the cultural anxiety that feared powerful women. The discussion on boy actors is deepened by an analysis of the apprenticeships of the profession, as well as some biographical sketches.
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  153. Smith, Bruce R. Shakespeare and Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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  155. An excellent, scholarly work that considers masculinity from a different critical approach in each of its five chapters. The book uses 16th-century conduct manuals and medical treatises as well as modern theorists to construct a context through which we can read Shakespeare. The last chapter merits particular attention, because it is a brilliant step toward moving beyond the deconstructionist views of gender.
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  157. Wells, Robin Headlam. Shakespeare on Masculinity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  159. A study of Shakespeare’s male heroes, particularly showing how Shakespeare’s plays are responses to contemporary debates on heroic masculinity, a heroism informed by, among other things, Protestantism. Wells argues that Shakespeare becomes increasingly critical of this brand of militant masculinity, turning at the end of his career to different, more peace-loving heroes.
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  161. French
  162.  
  163. Research on French literary texts is distinguished by an exceptional breadth and a large number of monographic studies. Ferguson 2008 considers the uneasy reception of male sexuality in ancient Italian literature and then moves on to consider queer moments in Montaigne and others. Freccero 1991 is just one of many important works by this author on gender, and it offers a theoretical reading of Rabelais to discuss the subjective imposition of fathers and the textual resistance of sons. LaGuardia 2008 discusses the ways that storytelling shores up masculinity in 15th- and 16th-century literature, and Schachter 2008 discusses the matter of voluntary servitude in terms of erotics and masculine self-control. Reeser 2006 provides a wonderful study on the reception of the classical theme of moderation and its relation to masculine gender construction, and Seifert 2009 turns the author’s focus to the construct of effeminacy to discuss the elusiveness of masculine ideals. There are also two important anthologies, Long 2002 and Ford and White 2006, which provide a broad range of studies on 16th- and 17th-century literature.
  164.  
  165. Ferguson, Gary. Queer (Re)readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
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  167. This excellent study takes a deconstructionist approach, reading literary moments that might seem queer to the modern reader and assessing what the Renaissance reception might have been. Ferguson’s chapters consider French rewritings of Boccaccio, representations of French dress and hairstyles at court, Henry III’s relationship with his favorites, Montaigne’s essays of friendship, hermaphrodites and androgynes, and finally the homoerotic within religious devotion.
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  169. Ford, Philip, and Paul White. Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century France: Proceedings of the Eighth Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium, 5–7 July 2003. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge French Colloquia, 2006.
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  171. A provocative collection of essays that considers masculinity in literary texts as well as cultural history and artistic creations. Authors consider, among other themes, the use of the hermaphrodite in political satire, Ronsard’s poetry, Montaigne’s reading of Plato’s sexuality, and 16th-century renderings of Homeric warriors.
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  173. Freccero, Carla. Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
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  175. An energetic, theoretical, and provocative book that analyzes male genealogy in Rabelais. The central argument of the book is that the son configures his father for himself and, in so doing, establishes a claim over his past. The text reflects on broad issues of Renaissance masculinity such as fathers’ abilities to impose meaning on signs, as well as the mechanics of homoerotics through male bonding.
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  177. LaGuardia, David P. Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature: Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
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  179. This is a historical and theoretical study of literary texts that argues that normative masculinity in Renaissance France relied on shared practices of reading, writing, telling, and retelling. The author focuses on masterpieces of literature that include stories told by men to other men from the 1460s to the 1580s. He shows how the process of telling of stories participates in the shoring up of masculinity.
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  181. Long, Kathleen P., ed. High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002.
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  183. This group of essays was one of the first to contribute an extended analysis of masculinity in French literature. The book is divided fairly equally among texts from the 16th and 17th centuries. Each essay confronts a different anxiety of masculinity through a close reading of a text. Authors considered include Montaigne, Ronsard, Labé, Molière, and others.
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  185. Reeser, Todd. Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
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  187. A brilliant study of the binding of masculinity to the concept of moderation. The work seamlessly moves between close readings of Montaigne and prescriptive literature of the 16th century to sections devoted to reading Aristotle and Foucault.
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  189. Schachter, Marc D. Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship from Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
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  191. An exciting and erudite study that focuses on three early modern French authors (La Boétie, Montaigne, and de Gournay) to explore the erotics and politics of voluntary servitude. The work is both philological and theoretical in its approach. Paying particular attention to Foucault’s concept of governmentality, the author provides insight into pederasty, male friendship, and self-control.
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  193. Seifert, Louis C. Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.
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  195. An excellent study of canonical and minor texts that explores the historical creation of non-normative masculinity in 17th-century France. The book focuses on the notion of effeminacy to expose variations of masculine ideals as well as the instability of the masculine construct. Topics and authors include honnêteté, the playwright Vincent Voiture, Madame de Scudéry, and the Chansonniers de Maurepas.
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  197. Italian
  198.  
  199. While there has been much ink spilled to discuss the question of the effeminate Italian in European Renaissance culture, the only monograph dedicated to masculinity in Italian literature is Finucci 2003. There are several essays that compose a scholarly tradition on masculinity in Castiglione’s Courtier. Richards 2000 places the Courtier in its Ciceronian context, while Milligan 2006 discusses the correlation between politics and effeminacy and provides a summary of much of the scholarship on masculinity and Castiglione. Milligan 2007 is a general discussion of masculinity in Machiavelli’s writings. Vignali 2003 is a translation of the dialogue on the penis and provides an excellent introduction to erotic literature and its political context. Gallucci 2003 is a monograph on Cellini that considers his literature as well as figural arts. Milligan and Tylus 2010 is a collection of essays on masculinity in Italian and Spanish literature, with a detailed introduction to the field of masculinity in Italian literature.
  200.  
  201. Finucci, Valeria. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
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  203. One of the first studies to address masculinity in Italian Renaissance literature. The book considers several authors (including Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Tasso) to argue its central point that manliness in Renaissance Italy placed much emphasis on paternity. At times the work depends heavily on psychoanalysis, but at others it offers more accessible readings of literary moments. Particularly interesting is the last chapter on the castrati.
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  205. Gallucci, Margaret A. Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy. New York: Palgrave, 2003.
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  207. A brief book that discusses Cellini’s artistic production and gives primary attention to his poetry and autobiography. The most interesting discussion is the author’s chapter on violence and masculine rhetoric.
  208. Find this resource:
  209. Milligan, Gerry. “The Politics of Effeminacy in Il cortegiano.” Italica 83 (Fall–Winter 2006): 345–366.
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  211. Provides a new approach to the perceived effeminacy of courtiers in the Book of the Courtier. It first summarizes thirty years of gender criticism of Castiglione, which describes the male courtier as effeminized. The essay argues that the rhetoric of effeminacy is used a means of controlling behavior and that women are shown not to be an effeminizing presence but rather a force that might propel men’s masculinity, most importantly in the realm of arms.
  212. Find this resource:
  213. Milligan, Gerry. “Machiavelli and Masculinity.” In Seeking Real Truths. Edited by Patricia Vilches and Gerald Seaman, 149–172. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007.
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  215. This essay addresses the discourse of effeminacy in Machiavelli’s most important texts: The Art of War, Discourses, The Prince, and The Mandragola. The essay pays particular attention to the way in which Machiavelli himself uses the word “effeminate,” in order to argue that the term was not only incoherent but intentionally variable so that Machiavelli could use the discourse of effeminacy to control the behavior of others. Intended for students and specialists alike.
  216. Find this resource:
  217. Milligan, Gerry, and Jane Tylus, eds. The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2010.
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  219. A collection containing seven essays dedicated to Italian topics and several others to Spanish translations or adaptations of Italian texts. The introduction to the work provides a summary of masculinity in the period, and the essays themselves cover topics as varied as the discourse of pederasty and pedagogy, the gendering of the vernacular, the masculine warrior maiden, the representation of same-sex desire in romance, women’s role in the mobilization of men’s militarism, and the eroticism of mercantile masculinity.
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  221. Richards, Jennifer. “‘A Wanton Trade of Living?’: Rhetoric, Effeminacy, and the Early Modern Courtier.” Criticism 42.2 (2000): 185–206.
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  223. A subtle and erudite article that analyzes effeminacy in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Richards explains that the extolling of accommodating manners in the text has been perceived by moderns as dependency and effeminacy. By putting the work in the context of Cicero’s De officiis, she explains that these manners were more likely understood to be a tempering of manly hubris.
  224. Find this resource:
  225. Vignali, Antonio. La cazzaria: The Book of the Prick. Translated and edited by Ian Frederick Moulton. New York: Routledge, 2003.
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  227. An excellent translation of and introduction to Vignali’s dialogue between speaking genitalia. Moulton provides a sharp introduction that highlights the link between sexuality and power, as well as explains the allegorical reading of the text with regard to 16th-century politics. Text is of great use to all researchers working on sexuality in the Renaissance.
  228. Find this resource:
  229. Spanish
  230.  
  231. Most studies on Spanish masculinity focus on theatrical texts. A highly cited text is Donnell 2003, a work that addresses the effeminization of the Other in Imperial Spanish drama. Cartagena-Calderón 2008 discusses the crisis of masculinity in Golden Age drama, and Thompson 2006 specifically discusses the actor Juan Rana and the discourse of sexuality that surrounded his career. Velez Quiñones 2001 particularly focuses on attitudes of homosexuality among Spanish troops as well as on a play by Lope de Vega, while Martínez Góngora 2005 looks at non-theatrical texts to discuss the masculine ideals of self-control and temperance. Milligan and Tylus 2010 provides several essays on masculinity in Spanish theater, treatises, and lyric, as well as an introduction to the field in general.
  232.  
  233. Cartagena-Calderón, José Reinaldo. Masculinidades en obras: El drama de La Hombría en la España imperial. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2008.
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  235. An excellent study of masculinity in Spanish theater of the 16th century. Readings are accessible but also underpinned by extensive gender theory. The first chapter in particular provides an introduction to the crisis of masculinity in Golden Age Spain, where contemporaries wrote with frequency of the effeminacy of men. The text is in Spanish and has an impressive bilingual bibliography.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Donnell, Sidney. Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003.
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  239. A very accessible and exciting study of Spanish comedy of the 16th and 17th centuries. The work not only addresses the effects of transvestite drama but asks the vexed question of why transvestite comedy appealed to the Spanish at the height of the empire. Donnell’s provocative first chapter on the feminization of the enemy/other sets up his analysis for the subsequent plays. Recommended for students and scholars.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Martínez Góngora, Mar. El hombre atemperado: Autocontrol, disciplina y masculinidad en textos españoles de temprana modernidad. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.
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  243. Addressing a neglected field of masculinity in early modern Spain, this study provides an analysis of non-theatrical texts. The book’s thematic focus is moderation and the tempering of passions. Chapters cover the reception of Erasmus in Spain, the discourse of the moderate king, Cervantes, and the body of the “other” in texts on ethnic difference.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Milligan, Gerry, and Jane Tylus, eds. The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2010.
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  247. Three essays discuss the translation and reception of canonical Italian texts by Petrarch, Castiglione, and Della Casa in Spain, while another three discuss topics in Spanish theater: honor comedies, queer soldiers, and the lindo. The book contains a lengthy introduction that raises the issue of the translation and transmission of masculinity across borders between Italy and Spain, and the work is concluded by a brief epilogue by Josiah Blackmore.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Thompson, Peter. The Triumphant Juan Rana: A Gay Actor of the Spanish Golden Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
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  251. A biography of Cosme Pérez, alias Juan Rana, 17th-century Spain’s most famous transvestite actor. The book considers the actor’s life, the roles created for him by famous dramatists including Calderón de la Barca, cross-dressing and its implications, and homosexuality in the period.
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  253. Velez Quiñones, Harry. “Deficient Masculinity: “Mi puta es el Maestre de Montesa”” Journal of Spanish and Cultural Studies 2.1 (2001): 27–40.
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  255. A lucid and exciting essay that provides a swift historical overview of attitudes towards homosexuality among Spanish troops. It then provides a brief textual reading of same-sex desire among soldiers in Lope de Vega’s El rufián. The article argues that by reconsidering masculinity in Golden Age Spain we can modify our perceptions of the military and the process of Spanish nation building.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Comparative
  258.  
  259. Two monographs that distinguish themselves for their comparative approach to masculinity in Renaissance literature are Enterline 1995 and Guy-Bray 2002. Enterline’s provocative and theoretical book discusses the melancholic subject in Italian and English literary traditions, while Guy-Bray is concerned with the reception of classical homoeroticism in Italian and English literature.
  260.  
  261. Enterline, Lynn. The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
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  263. An impressive, lucid, and sophisticated study of melancholy and masculinity in Tasso, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Webster. The text depends heavily on psychoanalytic theory, particularly Lacan and Kristeva, and has garnered both detractors and admirers.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Guy-Bray, Stephen. Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
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  267. A lucid and intelligent study of the reception of classical homoeroticism in Renaissance literature. The book offers a close study of classical texts by Theocritus and Virgil and then continues with a discussion of Renaissance authors: Castiglione, Milton, Surrey, Spenser, Shakespeare, and others. The book contains a highly useful introduction on the critical history of sexuality and literature, which includes a revisionist approach to Alan Bray’s work on homosexuality.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Sexuality
  270.  
  271. Renaissance texts that addressed women’s sexual behavior often included discussions of men. These treatises, dialogues, and narratives frequently commented on the degree of men’s sexual desire or even the double standard that applied to chastity. Despite sexuality’s fundamental role in the formation of gender, men’s sexuality has often received much less critical attention than that of women’s. On the other hand, within the genre of homosexuality scholarship, the subject of study has almost exclusively been men. The works in this section will thus primarily discuss homosexuality, and as is evident from the subject headings, they reflect the highly influential field of study that investigates legal regulation of sexual acts.
  272.  
  273. History of Legal Regulation
  274.  
  275. There has been a relatively important corpus of scholarly writings on court records from sodomy and sex-crime trials. The field owes much of its impetus to Rocke 1996, a formidable and meticulous study of Florentine sodomy court records. Although differing in scope and purpose, there are three other works that address sodomy trials: Garza Carvajal 2003 investigates Andalusian and Mexican court records; Berco 2007 examines the court records of Valencia, Zaragoza, and Barcelona; and Puff 2003 provides a study on Swiss tribunals and literature. Ruggiero 1985 offers a broader study of sex crimes, while Merrick and Ragan 2001 provides a useful source-reader that includes court documents as well as treatises on homosexuality in France.
  276.  
  277. Berco, Christian. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy and Society in Spain’s Golden Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
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  279. This brief and interesting book examines the Inquisition records of 626 sodomy cases in Valencia, Zaragoza, and Barcelona between 1540 and 1776. Berco provides access to much documentary evidence as well as includes some discussion of the cultural context of sodomy. His analysis suggests that all male sexual relations could be characterized by passive and active partners that reflected a destabilization of social hierarchies.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Garza Carvajal, Federico. Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
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  283. A most useful book for its gleaning of 175 court cases brought by secular courts in Andalusia as well as several brought by the authorities in Mexico City in 1657 and 1658. Although much fault has been found in the analysis provided by the author, there is substantive worth in his impressive archival research. For those working on effeminacy, for example, one finds a case for the association of effeminacy and homosexual behavior in early modern Spain.
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  285. Merrick, Jeffrey, and Bryant T. Ragan Jr. Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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  287. An excellent collection of source documents on homosexuality in early modern France. The documents are translated into English and divided into thematic sections, and each is introduced with brief historical notes. The book provides sources from confessional manuals, criminal proceedings, court registers, and important journals as well as readings from philosophers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot. The final section of the book presents the moment when France considered the decriminalization of sodomy in 1791.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Puff, Helmut. Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
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  291. A fascinating social history on the concept of sodomy in the German-speaking part of what is now Switzerland. It examines historical documents as well as literary texts. The chapters are divided among sodomy trials, legal judgments against sex offenders, and the discourse of sodomy in edifying literature of the pre-Reformation era and then those of Reformist authorities. In its final chapters, the book turns to a focus on published insults, contextualizing the discourse authorized by Martin Luther.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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  295. A fundamental book in the history of homosexuality. The text analyzes a staggering number of primary documents from the 15th and 16th centuries, primarily taken from Florence’s Office of the Night, a civic office charged with the responsibility of investigating and prosecuting sodomy. Rocke shows that homosexual relations were rarely between equals and can inform us about the complexity of power relations in the Renaissance.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Ruggiero, Guido. Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
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  299. A fascinating study on sex crime in Renaissance Venice. The work considers five areas of criminality: fornication, adultery, rape, crimes against God, and sodomy. The book pays close attention to judicial rhetoric, in order to show how the prosecutors of these sex crimes were seeking to establish a sexual norm. Highly readable and suitable for students and specialists alike.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Cultural History of Homosexuality
  302.  
  303. Perhaps the most controversial historical work on homosexuality in the medieval and early modern period is Boswell 1980, a text that discusses homosexuality in the early Christian era. Another influential book, Bray 1982, considers homosexuality in a later period and, like Foucault, argues for a distinction between homosexual practice and identity. Halperin 2002 confronts the historiography established by these scholars to consider the possibility of a premodern homosexual identity. Delgado and Saint-Saëns 2000 is a collection of essays on homosexuality in Spanish literature, while Daniel 1994 is one of the few works on homosexuality in premodern Arab culture and literature. Gerard and Hekma 1989 is a collection of essays on European homosexuality in history and literature, and O’Donnell and O’Rourke 2003 contains essays that focus primarily on affect in male sexuality.
  304.  
  305. Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
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  307. An influential and controversial book on the study of premodern sexuality. The four main points of the book are that Christianity had come into existence in a period of tolerance for same-sex eroticism, that Christian scriptures had been misinterpreted as hostile to homosexuality, that Christians in the Middle Ages had been relatively tolerant of homosexuality, and that such hostility developed only in the 12th and 13th centuries. Still a foundational text for premodern sexuality.
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  309. Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982.
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  311. A groundbreaking text that is still influential in that it helps, along with Foucault, to establish one of the most lasting historiographies of early modern sexuality, the distinction of sexual practice and identity. Bray outlines English attitudes toward homosexuality in the 16th and 17th centuries as well as asking how the individuals involved in homosexual activity would have felt in such a hostile society.
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  313. Daniel, Marc. “Arab Civilization and Male Love.” In Reclaiming Sodom. Edited by Jonathan Goldberg, 59–65. New York: Routledge, 1994.
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  315. This brief and accessible chapter offers a short overview of attitudes toward homosexuality in the Arab world before, during, and after Muhammad. It is an ideal summary for nonspecialists or those first coming to studies on sexuality in Arab literature and culture.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Delgado, María José, and Alain Saint-Saëns, eds. Lesbianism and Homosexuality in Early Modern Spain. New Orleans, LA: University Press of the South, 2000.
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  319. A collection of fifteen essays on same-sex desire in Renaissance Spain. The first third of the book is a very lengthy historical essay on the history of homoeroticism in Europe, by Saint-Saëns. The essays themselves focus more on literary works and are written by some of the most important scholars in Spanish Renaissance culture. The topics discussed include Góngora, Cervantes, and Golden Age theater.
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  321. Gerard, Kent, and Gert Hekma, eds. The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989.
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  323. A collection of essays that discusses sodomy in literature and historical documents across Europe, with five articles being devoted to the Netherlands. The essays contribute important discussions to the history of male homosexuality. One common thematic thread is that cultures could both demonstrate hostile attitudes toward homosexual acts while also demonstrating a remarkable tolerance for people engaging in homosexuality.
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  325. Halperin, David M. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
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  327. An important and controversial text that confronts Foucault’s thesis on the lack of premodern sexual identities to suggest that premodern persons might have made connections between those people who participated in same-sex acts. The essays, all of which have been published previously, are opened with a useful introduction. Although the book focuses on ancient sexuality, there is also substantial attention given to literature on Renaissance sexuality, particularly to Rocke 1996 (cited under History of Legal Regulation).
  328. Find this resource:
  329. O’Donnell, Katherine, and Michael O’Rourke, eds. Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
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  331. A collection of eight impressive essays, with an introduction by David M. Halperin. The book is underpinned by a common desire to bring affect into the history of male sexuality. While most of the essays focus on subjectivity rather than the physicality of homosexuality, some articles directly address physical expression of same-sex desire.
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  333. Queer Studies
  334.  
  335. The field of queer studies is one that avoids definition by design, and consequently the works in this subsection of sexuality may not resemble one another in methodology or scope. These works thus appear in this subcategory out of deference to their authors, who have chosen to use the word “queer” to describe their scholarship. Perhaps Jonathan Goldberg (Goldberg 1992, Goldberg 1994) is the most influential voice in advocating for a queering of our reading of Renaissance texts. Blackmore and Hutcheson 1999 changed Spanish criticism definitively when this collection of essays was published on the queerness of Iberia, a culture that was on the margins and outside much of normative Renaissance culture. Freccero 2006 is a monograph that seeks to change the focus of queer studies from identity politics to a critical practice. And finally, Nardizzi, et al. 2009 provides a review of the swift and fertile field of queer Renaissance historiography.
  336.  
  337. Blackmore, Josiah, and Gregory S. Hutcheson, eds. Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
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  339. A classic and foundational collection of essays that analyze how Iberia is both queer and “other” in the early modern period. Articles cover topics of ethnic identity, effeminacy, sodomy, and nationhood, among others. Sources used are both documentary and literary. The book is highly readable and contains a useful introduction that is suitable for students and specialists.
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  341. Freccero, Carla. Queer/Early/Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
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  343. A highly theoretical study of sexuality and subjectivity in early modern literature and culture. Using French literary texts as well as others, the book argues for a reconsideration of how we conceive of early modern subjectivity. Freccero’s approach is to reorient the term “queer” away from identity politics and toward a critical cultural practice. Suitable for specialists in gender theory.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.
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  347. A sophisticated book owing much of its theoretical framework to Alan Bray and Eve K. Sedgwick. The author investigates unexpected texts to argue that sexual orientation did not exist in the English Renaissance. He finds the term “sodomy” to be an incoherent discourse that could be used to condemn some same-sex relations while allowing the same behavior—albeit in different contexts—to flourish.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Goldberg, Jonathan, ed. Queering the Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
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  351. A fascinating and important collection of essays that seek not to discover homosexual practices in the past but to liberate the reading of Renaissance texts from a compulsorily heterosexual critical practice. Most essays address English literature and history, with a few exceptional moments discussing Renaissance France.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Nardizzi, Vin, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton, eds. Queer Renaissance Historiography. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009.
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  355. A collection of eleven essays that analyze both Renaissance texts and history as well as discuss the queer historiography of the past decades. Essays consider literary texts by Cavendish, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Katherine Philips as well as historical matters such as the erotics of women’s relationships and the erotic spaces formed around the mythological figure of Diana.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Cultural and Historical Studies
  358.  
  359. The still-nascent stage of masculinity studies in Renaissance scholarship is characterized by an extraordinary fluidity of discipline. Scholars who approach the formation of the masculine subject in the period are thus apt to cite lyric poetry and court tribunals in the same breath as they seek to better understand this elusive topic. The works that are listed in this subheading represent those studies that particularly use a cultural studies approach. That is, these works are not concerned primarily with questions of literary or visual representations of masculinity, but rather with cultural and historical concepts of bachelorhood, violence, paternity, etc. Each of these topics is deserving of its own bibliographic heading but is limited here for a question of space. English scholarship is again the most voluminous, and yet the issues that concerned manhood in Continental Europe are equally as fascinating.
  360.  
  361. Europe and the New World
  362.  
  363. Within the studies on Continental Europe there are several works that focus on marriage and procreation. Behrend-Martínez 2005 discusses the pressures placed on nonreproductive men in Spain, while Velasco 2006 focuses on representations of pregnancies of Spanish men. Cavallo 2008 is an important essay that shows that the prolonged bachelorhood of artisans was relatively condoned in early modern Italy. Trexler 1995 is a highly influential book on the practices and representation of men during Spanish conquest of the new world, and Lehfeldt 2008 considers the anxiety of manhood during the Spanish decline. Two essays devoted to Italy discuss the integral issues of sexual desire and male violence. Baker 2010 is an enlightening study of how monogamy was perceived as virile in 16th-century Florence, and Muir 1994 discusses the problem of the vendetta and the double bind for “honorable” men. Milligan 2007 is a useful summary of Renaissance masculinities that provides an introduction to the field for students and scholars alike.
  364.  
  365. Baker, Nicholas Scott. “Power and Passion in Sixteenth-Century Florence: The Sexual and Political Reputations of Alessandro and Cosimo I de’ Medici.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19.3 (September 2010): 432–457.
  366. DOI: 10.1353/sex.2010.0020Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367. An interesting article on the perceived effeminacy of Alessandro and Cosimo I de’ Medici. The essay shows that Alessandro was criticized as effeminate for uncontrolled heterosexual desire, while Cosimo’s famous monogamy was characterized as virile. The essay also provides substantial general commentary on effeminacy and sexuality in the 16th century, citing several literary and theatrical texts.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Behrend-Martínez, Edward. “Manhood and the Neutered Body in Early Modern Spain.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (2005): 1073–1093.
  370. DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2005.0046Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  371. A fascinating study that discusses the increasing scrutiny placed on the male body in early modern Spain. Such scrutiny served the purposes of parishes and towns that sought to cleanse themselves of nonreproductive men. Documentary evidence (often medical in nature) is taken from Spanish marriage litigation documents between 1650 and 1750.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Cavallo, Sandra. “Bachelorhood and Masculinity in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy.” European History Quarterly 38.3 (July 2008): 375–397.
  374. DOI: 10.1177/0265691408091465Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  375. A historical analysis of artisan diaries of barber-surgeons and other historical documents. The text examines the social status of artisan bachelors in Renaissance Italy to determine if they were perceived as second-class citizens as in other parts of Europe. The study finds that extended bachelorhood was common among artisans and that masculinity and male status was more dependent on professional development than becoming head of household.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Lehfeldt, Elizabeth A. “Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-Century Spain.” Renaissance Quarterly 61.2 (2008): 463–494.
  378. DOI: 10.1353/ren.0.0024Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  379. An excellent study of how hagiographers, moralists, arbitristas, and some narrative writers depicted the ideal nobleman during the decline of Spain in the 17th century. The essay argues that the texts that depicted such masculine ideals were often nostalgic and were consequently not adapting to new models of masculinity. Particular emphasis is given to the representations of male militarism.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Milligan, Gerry. “Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender.” In Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England. Edited by Diana Maury Robin, Anne R. Larsen, and Carole Levine, 249–253. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007.
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  383. A lengthy encyclopedia entry on masculinities in the European Renaissance that provides a general overview of the topic as well as a short bibliography. Provides a suitable introductory summary for scholars and students who are approaching the field for the first time.
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  385. Muir, Edward. “Double Binds of Manly Revenge in Renaissance Italy.” In Gender Rhetorics and Postures of Submission in History. Edited by Richard Trexler, 65–82. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994.
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  387. An excellent essay that examines the importance of the vendetta or revenge killings to the construction of manhood among men in the early modern Mediterranean. It also explores how such vendettas were in opposition to the laws of state, which could lead to arrest and even execution for such killings. Hence, men were in a double bind, where they could lose honor by seeking revenge through the legal process or lose their own life by maintaining honor through dueling.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Trexler, Richard C. Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.
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  391. This foundational work describes American homosexual practices and the transvestitism often associated with them, as described in Spanish sources from the 17th century. The text discusses sexual practices in ancient Mediterranean cultures as well as the Americas. It includes a fascinating study of the berdache (indigenous transvestites that Europeans claimed to have found amid the military of Native Americans), and the violence imposed by colonizing forces, including rape and forced transvestitism.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Velasco, Sherry. Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.
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  395. An entertaining book that discusses textual preoccupations of early modern male pregnancy. The sources are somewhat scant, limited to a comic interlude of Juan Rana and four broadside ballads. The book depends greatly on current gender jargon, but it also provides a contextual apparatus of medical treatises, confessional manuals, and legal statutes.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. England
  398.  
  399. Compared with the rest of Europe, English Renaissance masculinity has garnered an exceptional amount of scholarly interest. Summaries of English masculinity can be found in Shepard 2003, a monograph that gives particular attention to the importance of age and gender, and Amussen 1995, an early article that still provides an excellent starting point for students and scholars. Carter 2001 is a monograph that focuses on the importance of politeness for English masculinity, while Bailey and Hentschell 2010 is a collection of essays that focus on the centrality of vice. Fletcher 1995 is an important study because it considers the relationships of women and men in gender construction, and Hitchcock and Cohen 1999 provides a useful introduction to masculinity as it is determined by homosocial behavior, sexuality, and violence. Foyster 1999 is still an influential text that describes masculinity within the context of women’s and men’s relations.
  400.  
  401. Amussen, Susan. “The Part of a Christian Man: The Cultural Politics of Manhood in Early Modern England.” In Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown. Edited by Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky, 213–233. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995.
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  403. A frequently cited article on manhood in early modern England. It uses historical documents and literature to explain that there was a reformation of manners that defined masculinity in the period. The article focuses particularly on matters of dress, violence, and autonomy. An excellent source for students and those new to Renaissance masculinity studies.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Bailey, Amanda, and Roze Hentschell, eds. Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
  406. DOI: 10.1057/9780230106147Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  407. This intriguing collection of essays approaches masculinity in Renaissance London by focusing on the importance of geography to the construction of gender. The essays are particularly focused, as the title suggests, to places of vice, gaming houses, brothels, sewers, and even churches and universities. All the authors are scholars of English literature, and as a result the scholarship is typically more focused on cultural studies than on historical studies.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Carter, Philip. Men and the Emergence of Polite Society Britain, 1600–1800. New York: Pearson Education, 2001.
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  411. This fascinating cultural study of politeness in 17th- and 18th-century Britain convincingly argues that the development of politeness extends far beyond manners, where men were required to navigate the mean of extremes. The urban male needed to show his wealth while not seeming foppish. He was to be learned without seeming to be a pedant, and he had to know about a variety of topics without expressing too strong an opinion on them.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
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  415. This groundbreaking and erudite study focuses on gender, primarily in 16th- and 17th-century England. Fletcher gives much attention to the construction of masculinity, particularly in terms of medicine and philosophy and within the realms of family and the public school. Among the wealth of sources that inform the book, some of the most interesting are the case studies of nine marriages and the exertion of power in these families.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Foyster, Elizabeth A. Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage. London: Longman, 1999.
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  419. One of the foundational texts in the historiography of English masculinity. The study focuses on documentary evidence from the 17th century and emphasizes the historical interdependence of men and women. The book demonstrates that men’s reputations were reliant upon their temperance of emotion as well as on the chastity of their wives.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Hitchcock, Tim, and Michèle Cohen, eds. English Masculinities 1600–1800. New York: Longman, 1999.
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  423. This collection of essays by some of the leading scholars on English masculinity is opened by an excellent introduction that provides an overview to the historiography of early modern masculinity. The collection addresses four areas of research: male sociability, virtue and friendship, violence, and sexuality. The introduction as well as several of the essays argues that the middle of the 17th century was witness to the breakdown of codes of masculinity, particularly with regard to homosocial acts such as embracing and sleeping together.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Shepard, Alexandra. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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  427. An accessible work that analyzes medical treatises, prescriptive literature, and Cambridge court documents from 1560 to 1640 to depict ideal and variant modes of masculinity. The analysis shows how men placed a striking emphasis on age as critical in determining a gendered worth for independent householders. The text also describes how men sought worth in alternative meanings of manhood typified by violence and sexual activity among youth, as well as professional dependence and financial credit among older men.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Material Culture
  430.  
  431. Scholars working through questions of masculinity have shown much interest in material culture, and unsurprisingly, much of this attention is given to clothing. Jones and Stallybrass 2000 is the most comprehensive work on clothing and material culture of the period, and much of it turns to questions of masculinity. Fisher 2006 instead focuses exclusively on masculinity in England, by looking at clothing and hairstyles of men. Kuchta 2002 offers a more diachronic study of fashion and English masculinity. Mentges 2002 focuses exclusively on a Swiss costume book to discuss masculinity and consumption of fashion. Roper 1994 is an interesting study of the manifestation of masculine excess in clothing and codpieces, and Springer 2010 is a comprehensive look at the connection between masculinity and armor in Italy and the Hapsburg Empire.
  432.  
  433. Fisher, Will. Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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  435. A thoughtful and exciting study of material objects (e.g., handkerchiefs, codpieces, gloves) and their role in the shaping of gender. Specific to masculinity, Fisher shows how beards, codpieces, and even tonsorial practices are integral to our understanding of early modern masculinity.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  439. A beautifully illustrated and profoundly erudite study of the making and unmaking of the subject by clothing. Several of the components of the book directly inform our understanding of masculinity, including the study of theatrical clothing of boy actors. The entire work merits consideration for masculinity studies for discussions, such as the ability of starch to reshape men into women and to redefine the body politic.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Kuchta, David. The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
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  443. A fascinating contribution to material culture and masculinity. This study examines the aesthetics of masculinity during the 16th century and its development in the 17th century. New masculine ideologies were linked particularly to dress, and Kuchta’s book goes on to show how this ideology was maintained and reinforced in later centuries. It is both a study of fashion and the relations of dress to political, religious, and concomitant gender crises.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Mentges, Garbriele. “Fashion, Time and the Consumption of a Renaissance Man in Germany: The Costume Book of Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg, 1496–1564.” Gender and History 14.3 (2002): 382–402.
  446. DOI: 10.1111/1468-0424.00274Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. This exciting article focuses on a costume book from the Renaissance compiled by Matthäus Schwarz (b. 1496–d. 1574), which contains 137 drawings portraying Schwarz in various dress from birth to old age. The study discusses the connection among fashion, consumption, and the construction of a masculine self.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Roper, Lyndal. Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion, and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 1994.
  450. DOI: 10.4324/9780203426296Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. A collection of nine essays, two of which focus exclusively on masculinity in early modern Germany. The essay “Blood and Codpieces: Masculinity in the Early Modern German Town” (pp. 107–125) is an exciting examination of masculine excess and its manifestation in male clothing.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Springer, Carolyn. Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
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  455. An insightful and accessible theoretical analysis of the cultural significance of armor in the Renaissance. The study includes an analysis of artistic design, material production, political propaganda, literary representations, and gender significance of armor. Particular attention is given to the Della Rovere and Medici courts as well as to Emperor Charles V.
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