Early Modern fun for Father’s Day!
Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England
Shepard, Alexandra
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Summary
This path-breaking study explores the diverse and varied meanings of manhood in early modern England and their complex, and often contested, relationship with patriarchal principles. Using social, political and medical commentary, alongside evidence of social practice derived from court records, Dr Shepard argues that patriarchal ideology contained numerous contradictions, and that, while males were its primary beneficiaries, it was undermined and opposed by men as well as women.
A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England
Tosh, John
Publisher: Yale University Press
Summary
Domesticity is generally treated as an aspect of women’s history. In this fascinating study of the nineteenth-century middle class, John Tosh shows how profoundly men’s lives were conditioned by the Victorian ideal and how they negotiated its many contradictions. Tosh begins by looking at the experience of boyhood, married life, sex, and fatherhood in the early decades of the nineteenth century—illustrated by case studies representing a variety of backgrounds—and then contrasts this with the lives of the late Victorian generation. He finds that the first group of men placed a new value on the home as a reaction to the disorienting experience of urbanization and as a response to the teachings of Evangelical Christianity. Domesticity still proved problematic in practice, however, because most men were likely to be absent from home for most of the day, and the role of father began to acquire its modern indeterminacy. By the 1870s, men were becoming less enchanted with the pleasures of home. Once the rights of wives were extended by law and society, marriage seemed less attractive, and the bachelor world of clubland flourished as never before. The Victorians declared that to be fully human and fully masculine, men must be active participants in domestic life. In exposing the contradictions in this ideal, they defined the climate for gender politics in the next century.
Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire
Tosh, John
Publisher: Longman
Summary
Manliness and Masculinities presents an innovative series of studies in the cultural and social history of nineteenth-century Britain. The book documents the rapid emergence of a new and increasingly important field, and takes forward the definition of this new field. John Tosh addresses the big issues of theory and periodisation, exploring the relationship between masculinity and patriarchy, and between men¿s public role and their emotional and domestic lives. These insights inform his sensitive treatment of the history of the Victorian family. In the final section of the book John Tosh re-examines some of the major themes of British imperial history, arguing that the empire needs to be seen as a specifically male enterprise answering to masculine aspirations and insecurities.
The history of masculinity does not deal with a neglected group. It potentially modifies our view of every field of history in which men are the principal subject-matter ¿ most of written history. History is still predominantly about men, and this book shows what a difference it makes to our understanding of history to put their masculinity under scrutiny.
Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture
Low, Jennifer A.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Summary
As cultural practice, the early modern duel both indicated and shaped the gender assumptions of wealthy young men; it served, in fact, as a nexus for different, often competing, notions of masculinity. As Jennifer Low illustrates by examining the aggression inherent in single combat, masculinity could be understood in spatial terms, social terms, or developmental terms. Low considers each category, developing a corrective to recent analyses of gender in early modern culture by scrutinizing the relationship between social rank and the understanding of masculinity. Reading a variety of documents, including fencing manuals and anti-dueling tracts as well as plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and other dramatists, she demonstrates the interaction between the duel as practice, as stage-device, and as locus of early modern cultural debate.
Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England
Wiener, Martin J.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Summary
This book examines the treatment of violence by men against women in nineteenth-century England. Criminal law came to punish violence more systematically and severely during Victoria’s reign because it was promoting a new, more pacific ideal of manliness. Yet, this apparently progressive legal development triggered strong resistance, not only from violent men but others who engaged in arguments about democracy, humanitarianism and patriarchy to establish sympathy with “men of blood.”
A masterwork. Weiner traces the intricate process by which English manliness shifted from brutal and bloody viciousness to restraint and self-mastery. Deeply grounded in murder trials, he finds the social, political, and cultural threads to this broad cultural shift…Bringing in the latest scholarship from several disciplines, the reader feels to be in the reassuring hands of a wise and compassionate master. Martin Weiner’s book will stand as a stunning achievement for years to come
