HIST 358: Libertinage and Liberty (HC): Masculinities

Le sujet peut prêter à sourire. Est-ce bien sérieux pour un historien que de traiter de barbes et de moustaches ? De nos jours où la barbe est un indice de fondamentalisme ou d'archaïsme, l'avenir est au glabre. Mais qu'en était-il sous l'Ancien Régime ? Dans la lignée d'une certaine histoire du corps, Jean-Marie Le Gall est intimement convaincu qu'hier comme aujourd'hui elle reste un identificateur social chargé de sens. Si le glabre domine en Europe à la fin du Moyen Age, la pilosité faciale devient au début du XVIe siècle un phénomène de mode, né dans les cours princières d'Italie. Les défaites subies par la péninsule ont en effet mis à mal la virilité des Italiens, qui redéfinissent un nouvel idéal masculin et chevaleresque. Un idéal qu'incarnent à la perfection trois jeunes souverains arborant fièrement barbes et moustaches : François Ier, Henri VIII et Charles Quint. Vite adoptée par la noblesse puis par la bourgeoisie, cette prolifération du poil envahit tous les visages d'Europe pendant plus d'un siècle avant que le lisse ne l'emporte à nouveau à la fin du XVIIe siècle.

The relationship between men and the domestic in eighteenth-century Britain has been obscured by two well-established historiographical narratives. The first charts changes in domestic patriarchy, founded on political patriarchalism in the early modern period and transformed during the eighteenth century by new types of family relationship rooted in contract theory. The second describes the emergence of a new kind of domestic interior during the long eighteenth century, a 'home' infused with a new culture of 'domesticity' primarily associated with women and femininity. Domesticating Patriarchy shifts the terms of these debates, rescuing the engagement of men with the house from obscurity, and better equipping historians to understand masculinity, the domestic environment, and domestic patriarchy. Karen Harvey explores how men represented and legitimized their domestic activities. She considers the relationship between discourses of masculinity and domesticity, and whether there was a particularly manly attitude to the domestic. In doing so, Harvey suggests that 'home' is too narrow a concept for an understanding of eighteenth-century domestic experience. Instead, focusing on the 'house' foregrounds a different domestic culture, one in which men and masculinity were central.

"Manning the Marginsis provocative, timely, and very original and makes a significant contribution to a variety of fields, including French literary studies, early modern history of ideas, women's and gender studies, and masculinity studies. There is no other work that explores these questions in such depth and is so wide-ranging in its implications for a reevaluation of the period as a whole. Seifert's work is groundbreaking." ---Faith Beasley, Dartmouth College

Masculinity is an expanding area of gender history. Man's Estate is the first book to focus on a particular social group, the English landed gentry, and to cover a time span of several hundred years. The authors move beyond the study of printed conduct literature, which dominated earlier accounts, by examining the values expressed in family correspondence in order to get closer to social practices. Letters between parents, children, siblings, and other relatives reveal the ways in which masculine norms were produced through everyday interactions and judgements, and help to reconstruct the subjective experiences of elite masculinity in this period. Man's Estate concentrates on four important periods in the life-course for the reproduction of these masculine values: schooling,university, foreign travel, and marriage and family life. These illustrate that there is only limited evidence of sharp-edged differences in values between generations in these families, and that these changes appear not to correspond to the deep 'hegemonic shifts' so often emphasized in existing accounts.

This interdisciplinary volume includes essays and workshop summaries for the 2006 Attending to Early Modern Women ”and Men symposium. Essays and workshop summaries are divided into four sections, "Masculinities," "Violence," "Childhood," and "Pedagogies". Taken together, they considers women's works, lives, and culture across geographical regions, primarily in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, the Caribbean , and the Islamic world and explore the shift in scholarly understanding of women's lives and works when they are placed alongside nuanced considerations of men's lives and works.

"The significance of human anatomy to the most physical of art forms, the theatre, has hitherto been an underexplored topic. Filling this gap, Christian Billing questions conventional wisdom regarding the one-sex anatomical model and uses a range of medical treatises to delineate an emergent two-sex paradigm of human biology. The impact such a model had on the staging of the human form in English professional theatre is also explored in appraisals of: (i) the homo-erotic significance of a two-sex paradigm; (ii) social and theatrical cross-dressing; (iii) the uses of theatrical androgyny; (iv) masculine corporality and the representation of assertive women; and (v) the theatrical poetics of human dissection. Billing supports cultural and scientific study with close-readings of Lyly, Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Ford. The book provides a sophisticated and original analysis of the early modern stage body as a discursive site in wider debates concerning sexuality and gender."--BOOK JACKET.

Sex and Drugs Before the Rock 'n' Roll is a fascinating volume that presents an engaging overview of what it was like to be young and male in the Dutch Golden Age. Here, well-known cohorts of Rembrandt are examined for the ways in which they expressed themselves by defying conservative values and norms. This study reveals how these young men rebelled, breaking from previous generations: letting their hair grow long, wearing colorful clothing, drinking excessively, challenging city guards, being promiscuous, smoking, and singing lewd songs. Cogently argued, this study paints a compelling portrait of the youth culture of the Dutch Golden Age, at a time when the rising popularity of print made dissemination of new cultural ideas possible, while rising incomes and liberal attitudes created a generation of men behaving badly.

"Erin Mackie explores the shared histories of the modern polite English gentleman and other less respectable but no less celebrated eighteenth-century masculine types: the rake, the highwayman, and the pirate. She traces the emergence of these character types to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when traditional aristocratic authority was increasingly challenged. She argues that the development of the modern polite gentleman as a male archetype can only be fully comprehended when considered alongside figures of fallen nobility, which, although criminal, were also glamorous enough to reinforce the same ideological order." "In Evelina's Lord Orville, Clarissa's Lovelace, Rookwood's Dick Turpin, and Caleb Williams's Falkland, Mackie reads the story of the ideal gentleman alongside that of the outlaw, revealing the parallel lives of these seemingly contradictory characters. Synthesizing the histories of masculinity, manners, and radicalism, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century aristocratic male."--BOOK JACKET.