Download PDF | Professor Konrad Eisenbichler (editor), Jacqueline Murray (editor) - Premodern Masculinities in Transition (Gender in the Middle Ages, 23)-Boydell Press (2024).
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CONTRIBUTORS
Thomas V. Cohen (emeritus) taught History and Humanities at York University. He writes on the political and cultural anthropology of early modern Rome, often in a microhistorical vein. He investigates the fine structure of coalitions, the impromptu rituals of everyday life, the shape of popular memory, the rhetoric of values, and vernacular epistemologies. His books include Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (2004) and Roman Tales (2019).
Hilary Doda teaches global dress history in Dalhousie University’s Costume Studies program, and her research focuses on the material culture of dress and textiles in the early modern Atlantic world. She holds an Interdisciplinary PhD from Dalhousie, and her recent work engages with textile use in diaspora communities. Her first book, Fashioning Acadians (2023), examined the development of new clothing vernaculars and the shaping of colonial identity in pre-deportation Acadia.
Konrad Eisenbichler, CM, OMRI, FRSC is Professor Emeritus from the University of Toronto. Eisenbichler works on the intersection of literature, politics, and religion in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. He is the author, editor, or translator of more than thirty books, including the prize-winning monographs The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785 (1998) and The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena (2012). More recently, he is the editor of Masculinities and Representation: The Eroticized Male in Early Modern Italy and England (2024).
Martha Hollander is Professor of Art History at Hofstra University. She is the author of An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Art (2002), as well as essays on seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture, digital pedagogy, digital humanities, early modern fashion, and costume in art, film, and television. She is currently at work on a book about masculinity and fashion in seventeenth-century Holland.
Benjamin Lukas received his PhD from the University of Toronto after completing his master’s degree at McMaster University. His research focuses on the study of published early modern military literature, such as treatises, memoirs, and biographies written by veterans. His dissertation examined the relationship between military reforms and martial gender norms among the French nobility in the sixteenth century.
Gerry Milligan is Professor of Italian and Director of Honors at the College of Staten Island-CUNY. His research focuses on the rhetorical construction of effeminacy and masculinity in Italian Renaissance literature. His books include a volume of essays, co-edited with Jane Tylus, The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain (2010) and the monograph Moral Combat: Women, Gender, and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (2018).
Jacqueline Murray is University Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on sexuality and gender in premodern Europe, with a specific focus on men, masculinity, marriage and the family. She is editor of Patriarchy, Honour, and Violence: Masculinities in Premodern Europe (2022), The Male Body and Social Masculinity in Premodern Europe (2022) and co-editor of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Italian Renaissance (2019).
Jonathan M. Newman is Clif and Gail Smart Professor of English at Missouri State University. He has published on the interplay of gender, social discourse, and literary and rhetorical form in medieval Latin, Middle English, and Old Occitan works. He is currently working on a monograph about masculinity and education in medieval Latin letters and poetry.
Danielle Ross is an Associate Professor of Islamic and Russian history at Utah State University. Her research focuses on the social history, religious practice, and literature of the Muslim communities of Russias Volga Basin and the Kazakh Steppe. She is the author of the monograph Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia (2020).
Patricia Simons is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and Professor Emerita, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her books include The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (2011) and the co-edited Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy (1987). Her work on gender and sexuality in visual culture ranges from fourteenth-century Italy to contemporary Australian art.
Sarah Wilk, a student of the martial and emotional values of medieval military men, was educated at the University of Lethbridge, the University of Toronto, and York University. Her PhD thesis was entitled “The Measure of a Medieval Man: The Emotional Community of Military Men in the Fourteenth Century.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In bringing together this collection of articles, we have incurred many debts with the many colleagues and institutions that have generously and enthusiastically supported both this particular endeavour and the larger project from which it sprang.
The Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium hosted the international conference on Masculinities in the Premodern World: Continuities, Change, and Contradictions we held on 12-14 November 2020 with their usual generosity and wisdom. The pandemic obliged us to transform the planned in-person event into a virtual congress (long before these became conventional) that spanned three continents and crossed twenty-two time zones, but this did not dampen the spirit of the international group of scholars who presented their research and engaged with one another in lively and productive discussions. Their contributions built upon but also challenged recent decades of research on premodern men and masculinities and, in so doing, moved the field forward in new and exciting ways. Their work pointed especially to the flexibility of masculinity and the expectations placed on men over the premodern period. This collection of chapters, focusing as they do on this flexibility, is one of the outcomes of that splendid (and, as it happened, itself also rather flexible) conference.
The conference was made possible through the generous support of many institutions, first among them the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose Connections Grant supported not only the conference but also the editing of this volume. We received essential support from Victoria University through its President’s Office and its Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies. The ever-capable Eva Chivite managed the entire virtual side of the conference. We are also grateful to the Office of the President at the University of Saint Michael’s College and to the Praeses of the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies.
Many units within the University of Toronto supported the conference, in particular the Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies, the Centre for Medieval Studies, the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, the Centre for Comparative Literature, the departments of English, French, History, Religion, Spanish and Portuguese, and the Institute for Islamic Studies. We also received considerable support from partners at the University of Guelph through the Dean of the College of Arts, the Department of History, and the Work-Study program. At Saint Jerome's University the Academic Dean and the DRAGEN Lab also came to our assistance. And we are grateful to the Royal Ontario Museum for sponsoring the participation of Professor Patricia Simons and including her plenary presentation in the ROM Connects series of talks.
As editors of this collection, we were fortunate to benefit from the various contributions of Emma Hoffer-Weinper, Susan K. Riggs, and Dr Rachel Stapleton. Dr Dana Wessell Lightfoot also graciously provided us with excellent advice at the eleventh hour.
The double-blind peer reviewers who read through the collection made excellent suggestions that strengthened the chapters and the volume as a whole. Theirs is a thankless job, partly because they are shrouded in anonymity, but it’s also a critical contribution to the scholarly enterprise. We appreciate their sharing their wisdom and their time.
We are especially grateful to Caroline Palmer, Editorial Director at Boydell and Brewer, and to the entire team for their support and expertise in bringing this collection into print.
Finally, we would like to acknowledge and thank the colleagues who have contributed their research to this volume, as well as all the conference participants whose research continues to inspire and expand this important area of historical research.
Konrad Eisenbichler Jacqueline Murray University of Toronto University of Guelph
INTRODUCTION
Jacqueline Murray
In recent decades, scholars have been re-examining the experiences of men across every historical period and culture, motivated in part by the current so-called “crisis of masculinity.”! This has involved moving away from previous universalizing perspectives that considered men as both preeminent and normative human beings. Women were gendered, men were human. Happily, this perspective has now evaporated and current historical research approaches men as gendered and masculinity as an historical phenomenon informed by context and subject to change over time. Like femineity, masculinity is intersectional and malleable. Yet, there is little recognition, much less agreement, about the various manifestations of masculinities and what kind of social changes impacted men’s internal sense of self and their external performance of masculinity. To what extent does conventional periodization map onto changes in masculinities? Or, put another way, to what extent does masculinity, as gender and as identity, appear resilient and resistant to historical pressures?
Embracing the premodern period as broadly defined, this collection of essays explores questions about masculinities, incorporating the psychological and social perspectives, leading to re-evaluations of the meanings and permutations of masculinity that eventually signalled the transition into a new historical era. Thus, masculinities have a history that can be set against other histories, particularly notable in the transition from the culture and society of the late fourteenth century, through to the end of the sixteenth century. This was a period of radical change, of rupture and upheaval in almost every area of European, and indeed, global society. Christendom, that concept that had united Europe for a millennium, was no longer a unifying force. The Protestant Reformation transformed the Age of Faith into an age of the Wars of Religion.
Printing fundamentally changed communication, facilitating the spread of new ideas in science and religion, and new values of humanism and law, new forms of art and literature. Innovations in military technology fundamentally altered how wars were fought and destabilized the warrior class and the warrior code; the knights of chivalry were relegated to the pages of romance or dreams of a heroic past. Medieval kingdoms disappeared and nation-states emerged to radically alter the map of western Europe, while the expansion of the Ottoman Empire did the same for eastern Europe and beyond. Neither of these geopolitical changes was quite as dramatic as that occasioned by the oceanic voyages that, within a few decades, opened a global world and new political, economic, and human systems.” The sixteenth century, in particular, was also a time of profound transformation of the values and performance of masculinities as men and societies were required to adapt to new circumstances.
It is common to consider the end of the sixteenth century as the beginning of a new historical period, the age of modernity. Such historical labels, however, and indeed the very notion of periodization itself, is a fraught issue. It has very little to do with the past per se. Rather, it is an artificial construction, a means to make sense of the seemingly continuous beginning-ness and ending-ness of the flow of history. It is an attempt to contain time and space and make sense of it, an imposition by the observer in order to divide past and present into manageable, sensible pieces. The fraughtness of periodization is evident in the demarcation of modern and postmodern so noticeable in this millennium.’ But, as Fredric Jameson has observed, without periodization we cannot perceive change.* Our very definition of history, as change over time, is based on periodization and the discontinuities that make one period discernable from another, much like those factors that distinguish the sixteenth from the seventeenth century. While conventional periodization makes sense for many areas of historical research, the traditional demarcations are not always applicable or relevant despite the enduring structuralism of historical research. Arguably, the sweeping economic and political changes that reconfigured the meta-historical systems in the long term had more measured short-term effects on the modes of life at local and modest social levels. So it is with histories of gender: it is both remarkably resilient and resistant to change while also being fluid and transformative.
Gender, the social and cultural identities of men and women, is amorphous and fluid and tends not to align nicely with the standard political, religious, and economic markers of historical change. Gender expectations differ not only between men and women, but also across classes and cultures. Yet, for all that, gender is remarkably stable, as much subject to historical continuity as to change over time. Consequently, gender pushes against conventional periodization. For example, the traditional division between “Medieval” and “Renaissance” privileges certain intellectual and cultural perspectives linked to antiquity and its embeddedness in the nineteenth-century views of Jacob Burckhardt.> “Medieval” and “Early Modern” have proven equally unsatisfactory, pulling the latter away from the Middle Ages and linking it more closely with the “Modern” through emphases on alterations in political or economic regimes, among other factors.°
The discontinuity between medieval and early modern, however, is perhaps more imagined than real in many areas of culture and society that are characterized by similarity and continuity, for example, in daily life or in the experiences of non-elites.? For this reason, social and gender historians have long preferred the notion of the “Premodern” in order to stress areas of “social and cultural continuity” from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries.* Premodern might be considered a more organic but fuzzy mode of periodization that can variously integrate centuries stretching from the Fall of Rome to the Enlightenment, depending on topic, perspective, and an individual historian’s inclination. It does, however, permit a focus on similarity and continuity that fits well with the assessment of gender throughout the premodern period.
Premodern masculinity was always multivalent and dynamic, a series of intersecting, conflicting, and malleable identities that, nevertheless, were distinct and recognizable to individual men and women and their societies. This has been evident since the earlier studies of men and masculinities that appeared in collections throughout the 1990s.? This volume, and a number of others that were published in the 2010s and 2020s, represent a virtual second wave of studies about men, less focused on the individual men or the universal “man,’ and moving instead beyond gender binaries, sensitive to the multivalence of masculinities and male intersectionality.!° Aligned with this subtle “second wave” approach to masculinities, the articles collected in this volume examine a variety of means by which masculinity was constructed, deconstructed, and transformed across time and cultures. They reveal how masculinity was inculcated, performed, and accommodated during the premodern period, a period when masculinities were in transition. They challenge the dichotomous notions of hegemonic masculinity, demonstrating how traditional expressions of masculinity were eroded under pressure from the shifting landscape of sixteenth-century society, making way for new men and new masculine values.
The fundamental premise of this collection is that masculinity is adaptable and adjusts continually to new circumstances and changing values. Together, the articles embrace a chronological and geographical breadth moving across the premodern world from twelfth-century France to sixteenth-century Italy, from the cloister to the world, from the Persian Empire to the Mongol Empire, and from Muslim to Christian cultures. They are in dynamic conversation with each other and with the societies and cultures they examine, united by an understanding of the attentiveness of masculinities to social and cultural diversities and the ability to accommodate both continuity and change.
SHIFTING MASCULINITIES
In order to avoid the pitfalls of universalizing or essentializing, much current scholarship concentrates on specificity and carefully constructed case studies. It is equally important, however, to trace the continuities of masculinities across time, space, and cultures.!! Premodern masculinity is frequently construed as displays of male dominance; “to be a man” entailed demonstrating power over women and subordinates. This, then, reinforced the patriarchal social structure while validating the masculinity and honour of individual men. Thus, premodern masculinity has been conceived as hierarchical, as a quality that adhered to virile elite secular leaders who wielded socially sanctioned power and authority. The articles in this section challenge this stereotype. Newman demonstrates the appreciation of diverse masculinities within monastic literary circles. Cohen argues for a more nuanced assessment of masculine values that could cross social status, culture, and even sex. Ross traces the shifting nature of masculine qualities conveyed by a single poem that spoke across multiple temporal and cultural divides. Ultimately, in all these examples, masculinity was respected when appropriate to a person's place in the world. Such status-based masculinity was flexible but remained recognizable across multiple mutable contexts.
Jonathan H. Newman opens this collection with a study that explicitly challenges periodization by stretching the premodern world back into the twelfth century. Far from being an outlier among studies of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Newman's study of Baudri of Bourgueil and his circle of friends consciously confronts the artificial periodization that separates the Middle Ages from the Early Modern, finding commonality between the classicism and textual communities of Baudri and his friends with those of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists. For all these premodern men, monastic poets and secular humanists alike, textual composition was a demonstration of intellectual prowess, a means to fashion and exhibit their masculinity into the world. In his lyric poetry, Baudri developed his masculine identity as an able administrator and paterfamilias of the monks of his abbey/household. Two aspects of writing emerge, the mental work of composition and the material work of book production, both of which required masculine skills and competence but of different sorts. While Baudri appreciates the masculine competence of the craftsman who fashions the pens and the scribe who wields them, transcribing his words onto the physical page, it is nevertheless the wordsmith, the administrator, the abbot who exercises the greatest masculine authority. This hierarchical masculinity, based on skill or competence, traces across multiple statuses — poetic, clerical, administrative, scribal — was recognized across the premodern world. Thus, masculinity must be assessed from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives in order to identify both contextual specificity and evolution.
The appreciation of competence highlighted by Newman is similarly foregrounded by Thomas V. Cohen in his study of testimony delivered before the criminal courts in sixteenth-century Rome. Cohen considers the distinctive quality of this masculinity to have been fede, trustworthiness, challenging the extent to which historians of masculinity focus on honour and violence.'? He argues that masculinity and femineity were not binary opposites but rather shared many of the same values and behaviours generally attributed to one gender or the other. These could include tact, a sense of timing, loyalty, generosity of spirit, and good sense. Cohen further argues that this wider, values-driven approach allows premodern masculinity to be decoupled from dominant males in their prime. He uses this perspective to analyze the evidence of sixteenthcentury Roman court records and reveals the overlapping complexities of gender and the fundamental instability of traditional hegemonic masculinity. Examples of competence, which he identifies with fede, could be found in young and old, among both the rich and the poor, between master and servant, as well as in the actions of both men and women. Thus, while premodern masculinities were flexible and multivalent, crucially Cohen challenges the gender and class binaries that continue to dominate scholarship on the social expectations of premodern men and women.
Like Newman, Danielle Ross uses literature as a point of entry and a means to reflect the values of masculinity in the surrounding societies. Ross examines the shifting of masculinity across time and culture, taking the Persianate poem Qahramdan-I Qatil as her starting point. She follows the poem’s discursive evolution across the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries as it travelled from Persia into Russia’s Volga-Ural region. While transitioning across time, geography, religion, peoples, and cultures, the poem continued to be relevant as it was appropriated and reinterpreted across the cultural divides that separated the urbanized Eastern Mediterranean and the nomadic Mongolian steppes. Masculinity was significantly reinterpreted, as well, moving from an urban working class in the original Persianate version to watrior-aristocratic values in the Volga-Ural areas that were more affected by Mongol influences. This cycle of appropriation and refinement, as the poem was adopted by different social and cultural cadres, echoes the hierarchical and class-based observations about masculinity identified by Newman and Cohen. Masculinity could differ according to the individual man’s social and cultural position, while still reflecting overarching masculine values. Ross also identifies transitions in the poem’s presentation of masculinity as the society of the Mongol warrior incorporated Muslim practices of inclusivity; together they merged into a masculinity that promoted grace and a moral compass. The inclusion of, and interaction with, other peoples in successor states culminated in the incorporation of Russian-Christian values and a masculinity based on inner virtue and self-discipline. Ultimately, the poem Qahram4an-i Qatil reveals normative masculinity moving from urban Persia, through the warriors of the Golden Horde, Mongol Muslims, and Russian Christians, all the while shapeshifting to incorporate masculine norms that aligned with different cultural contexts, at once reflecting multiple hegemonic masculinities while also demonstrating their fundamental flexibility.
FLUID MASCULINITIES
If, as David Gilmore argues, masculinity needs to be externally visible and recognized by other men," then it follows that premodern society recognized various manifestations across the lived experience of diverse men. At some level, then, premodern people accepted that masculinity was fluid much as contemporary scholarship identifies the multivalence of masculinities. Certainly, men employed various strategies in their presentation of self, an embodied self that could be both conventional and shapeshifting.' The articles in this section discuss how social artefacts and visual culture expressed the fluid dynamics of masculinity between subject and viewer. Premodern men were able to assert, manage, and modify their masculinity through embodied symbols, such as the absence or presence of beards explored by Simons. Sartorial artefacts also functioned as symbols of masculinity, easily assumed or discarded. Thus, Doda’s discussion of spurs and Hollander’s discussion of swords both reveal a fluidity of self-presentation as men employed art and artefacts to convey their masculinity.
The mutability of how masculinities were performed and manifested across time and cultures provides the basis for Patricia Simons’ examination of the meanings of men’s facial hair in images from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, in northern Europe and the Mediterranean, men demonstrated a definite preference to be clean shaven but in the sixteenth century beards came to dominate in paintings and images. Simons explores the ways in which the meanings of beards, their presence or absence, could signal age, status, religious, political, or social contexts. One notable example is found in the great Greek scholar Bessarion, who moved to Italy, left Greek Orthodoxy behind and became a Roman Catholic cardinal. Once touted as a papal candidate, he was ultimately passed over, perhaps because he continued to sport his Greek beard at a time when Latin prelates were clean-shaven, thereby underscoring his “otherness.” Protestant Reformers also wore beards to differentiate themselves from their Catholic rivals. Among fifteenth-century secular men, a clean-shaven face indicated “masculinity that was contained, controlled, normative, honourable,’ while long bushy beards were linked to a more uncontained sexuality and even sinfulness. These perceptions changed in the sixteenth century when a cluster of young rulers - Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England, and Suleiman the Magnificent in the Ottoman Empire - succeeded to power and used facial hair as a means to overcome their youth.!5 By sporting permanent beards, they asserted their authority and virility. Simons’ discussion is provocative and important for reading the changes from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries in men’s sense of themselves and their self-presentation, and in the image and meaning they chose to communicate through facial hair.
Hilary Doda similarly examines the fluid meaning of symbols of masculinity, this time in the context of English society. Doda focuses on the external appropriation of artefacts intended to reflect both internal and external aspects of masculinity. Spurs were important external symbols of a constructed masculinity, symbols that were transformed over time from the “Middle Ages” to the end of the “Early Modern” period. The spur survives in various forms from physical artefact through images in paintings and etchings to literary representations. While the specificities of the masculinity represented by spurs was mutable, they were nevertheless always associated with manhood. Moreover, spurs denoted a masculinity that was stable and hierarchical; it could exercise control over the self and over others. While superficially spurs appear to have been linked to knighthood and chivalry, in fact, they were accessible to men of lower stations and different occupations, although the objects themselves might vary in materials and decoration. In the later Middle Ages, spurs were linked to the assumption of full manhood - a boy would “earn his spurs” - later they were sometimes functional and sometimes merely decorative. Moreover, across the period they gradually replaced the codpiece as the symbol of masculine prowess, as Sarah Wilk notes in her own essay, citing a reference to “golden spurs” as a sign of knighthood. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, spurs had lost their association with rank and respectability, transitioning to become symbols of the chaotic and uncontrolled behaviour at dance halls, images of entertainment rather than knighthood. As Doda puts it, spurs were transformed from being armour to being “the leftover symbolism of armour”
Martha Hollander continues the examination of the fluidity of meaning in the depiction of objects worn by men, in this case, swords that were originally associated with military masculinity. From the sixteenth century onwards, swords were a ubiquitous European male accessory and a sign of masculinity not only for the nobility but also for middle-class men, military men, and civilian men. Consequently, the presence of a sword, or its absence, was laden with meaning. Hollander examines paintings and portraits from seventeenthcentury Dutch artists to decode the symbolism of discarded and unworn swords.
In paintings of love scenes, or scenes suggestive of eroticism, swords were shown lying abandoned or placed suggestively on tables, leaning against furniture, or hung on hooks, with or without the cloaks that often accompanied swords in art as in life. Discarded swords were also portrayed with groups picnicking out-ofdoors or dining in household scenes. Together, these images portray how men could take off their public masculine identity by simply removing their sword, perhaps assuming in the process other aspects of private masculinity such as lover, husband, or householder. Thus, Hollander reaffirms that masculinity was indeed transitional, something men could put on or take off as easily as a sword, that most potent and phallic symbol of masculinity’s power and performativity. The symbolism of beards, swords, and spurs says much about how men portrayed their masculinity and how their society perceived it.
TRANSFORMING MASCULINITIES
There is a consensus among gender historians that premodern masculinity/ masculinities were a product of time and place, people and values. But masculine norms and the experience of their contextual mutability were also lodged in premodern men’s unconscious, informing their decisions and experiences, although perhaps not always consciously appreciated. Textual sources allow access to the conscious and unconscious tensions that underlay the traditional and the transformative experiences of masculinity. As Sara Wilks demonstrates, challenges to elite masculinity were reflected in disjunctions between, for example, knightly ideals and the realities of war that were being challenged and transformed as early as the fourteenth century. Moreover, as Lukas argues, these changes had, by the sixteenth century, transformed, and perhaps diminished, the military masculinity that had hitherto epitomized traditional masculinity in the person of the elite noble warrior. Gerry Milligan reflects on how, for some men, the outer self that performed masculinity could also be in tension with the inner self and a mans sense of identity.!° The transformations of normative and performative masculinities resulted in social and individual anxiety.
Analyzing the portrayal of Bertrand du Guesclin in a fourteenth-century chanson written to celebrate his military masculinity, Sarah Wilk reflects on the personal values required for a man to be considered a good knight. While Guesclin was a valorous warrior for the French crown during the Hundred Years’ War, he was also a trusted advisor to the king. Indeed, the poem stresses that Guesclin risked opprobrium and accusations of cowardice by providing honest and temperate advice that contradicted that of more hotheaded and less able knights who were motivated by an ideology of honour rather than pragmatic military strategy. The poem portrays one critical aspect of military masculinity: unconditional loyalty that still allows for following one’s inner moral compass, much like the fede foregrounded by Cohen. This discussion shows Guesclin’s knighthood as nuanced and refined: requiring military skill and loyalty but also allowing him to proffer unpopular advice, knowing that this too was an essential aspect of knightly honour. The strains between Guesclin and his more militant peers reveal older chivalric values being challenged by pragmatism sustained by unswerving loyalty and trust between knight and liege.
Benjamin Lukas moves the discussion of the transformations experienced by knighthood further, juxtaposing the conventional warrior-knight of chivalry with a new conceptualization of knights as leaders of men. The catalyst for this transition was the military revolution that occurred in sixteenth-century France. Lukas examines the careers of two knights, Pierre Terrail and Blaise de Monluc, to demonstrate the dramatic difference between the two. In his biography of Pierre Terrail, Jacques Mailles describes him in the context of traditional chivalric knighthood, paying attention to participation in tournaments and engaging in courtly romance. By comparison, Blaise de Monluc, who wrote his own memoir, consciously chose to echo Julius Caesar rather than the knights of chivalry. Monluc moves far beyond chivalric watrior-knights to present himself and his fellow noble knights not as individual warriors but rather as captains who lead armies of soldiers from the third estate. The transition from warrior to leader demonstrated that a new knightly masculinity had emerged, one that privileged leadership over individual prowess in battle.
The shockwaves that destabilized conventional knightly values and confidence set the scene for Gerry Milligan’s examination of its effects on sixteenth-century society. Using texts written in Italy, he provides insights into the stresses and strains that accompanied men’s attempts to embrace and embody hegemonic masculinity in times of transition and uncertainty. Milligan uses texts by Niccolo Machiavelli, Anton Francesco Doni, and Scipione Ammirato, all writers who critiqued the effeminacy of Italian men at a time of considerable social and political crisis. These writers used elite men’s external presentation of self, including luxurious dress and effeminate mannerisms, to explain the failures of Italian militancy and masculinity. As Milligan notes, “The sight, smell, and sound of men were fodder for some of the most vehement criticisms of masculine gender performance,’ also implying failures of Christian morality. The three writers suggested that the so-called effeminacy of elite Italian men had led to social breakdown and the resultant weakness that led to myriad Italian military defeats. But, argues Milligan, a social program of remasculinization would have had little realistic effect on the fortunes of war. These criticisms disguised the writers’ real concern that the effeminate presentation by elite men was destabilizing traditional, normative, hegemonic binary gender roles. More importantly, external criticisms of male effeminacy would not necessarily have reflected a man’s sense of himself and his own masculinity.!” Milligan suggests that external critiques do not necessarily reveal internal personal anxieties, even though society itself might be experiencing historical anxiety. Masculinity as the internal sense of self did not necessarily align with perceptions of a man’s external presentation.
CONCLUSION
With the historical transformation and the cultural anxiety that developed in the course of the sixteenth century, the older premodern values of masculinity became increasingly anachronistic or irrelevant. More importantly, the world had changed and so, too, had the expectations laid upon men and the strategies they used to meet these expectations. Consequently, in the sixteenth century, masculinities were in a state of transition. Diverse masculinities were assumed and enacted by diverse groups, thus redistributing masculinity among various ages, classes, religions, and genders in a way unthinkable to earlier generations. Similarly, masculine self-identity shifted from the demonstration of physical prowess found among premodern warriors and enshrined in chivalric ideals. Masculinity could be signalled by a beard or spurs or a sword. While noble warriors were sidelined, elite men could present an external effeminacy that, while condemned by other men, nevertheless did not necessarily mean they themselves experienced a sense of masculine inadequacy or failure.
Much like patriarchy, profound changes to the social organization and institutions in which masculinity was enacted did not result in its disappearance. As with the flexible and adaptable “patriarchal equilibrium,” so too masculinities experienced multiple transitions, as new values, ideals, and presentations of self were disseminated, adapting to meet new conditions but, like patriarchy, maintaining an equilibrium. By the seventeenth century, those transitions had cumulatively led masculinity to transition into something different but recognizable. However these many adaptive premodern masculinities are understood, together they point to the sixteenth century as a period of male gender transition that paralleled many of the political, economic, religious, and cultural transitions that were rocking the world. This volume sits on the cusp of old worlds and new. It reveals how masculinity experienced continuity and change, transitioning into this new world order.
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