Abstract
Edited by Jacqueline Murray, Patriarchy, Honour, and Violence: Masculinities in Premodern Europe is one of two publications resulting from the international Masculinities in the Premodern World conference, hosted by the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium in 2020. The collection highlights the multiplicity of discourses that have articulated hegemonic values of manhood, regularly in competition with the behaviour of men. Featuring new methods, lesser-known source material, and innovative questions, the volume succeeds in advancing our understanding of premodern masculinities.
After a brief theoretical overview, the 13 articles are organized into three thematic parts. Part One, ‘Tensions in Hegemonic Masculinity’, features work on gender performance in the context of law and order. Shannon McSheffrey's chapter utilizes sixteenth-century court cases to demonstrate how Italian merchants strategized their masculine performances to shame their English rivals. An investigation of the literary and historical figure of Giovanni Battista Grimaldi also reveals how these rivals strategically and ‘situationally wielded’ different sexual standards (p. 41). A different late sixteenth-century Italian rivalry takes centre stage in Aaron Miedema's investigation of a property dispute between an archpriest and rural noble in the village of San Polo. This vivid case study demonstrates how honour and reputation influenced men's legal standing in court and incited acts of violence – all of which played out amidst larger contests for power between town and state. Cultural transformations are central to Mireille J. Pardon's examination of late medieval bailiffs’ financial records from Bruges and Ghent. These records show that the practice of negotiated payments for violence committed to preserve honour – a category of homicide considered ‘necessary killing’ – contrasted with proscriptive literature promoting public peace (p. 77). Pardon's analysis attentively interprets legal changes that ended composition payments in connection to transformations of how people viewed ‘honourable violence’ (p. 83). Isabel Harvey's contribution also considers evidence for men's violence. Harvey utilizes a vast collection of letters sent from the dioceses of the Papal State to Rome following the Council of Trent, which reveal that secular and religious men aggressively defended their honour, and bishops often mitigated the consequences of violence (such as relocating victims) rather than trying to halt violence altogether. Local customs regarding male honour, therefore, outweighed Tridentine efforts to reform masculine identity.
Part Two, ‘Men in Groups: Homosociality’, begins with Emilio Caputo and Dana Wessell Lightfoot's contextualization of choices made by the Spanish military orders, amidst the necessities of colonization and conquest. They argue that orders developed a ‘pragmatic vision of masculinity’ that outweighed prescriptive norms, as seen in the Order of Santiago's acceptance of conjugal chastity (p. 136). Likewise focusing on western martial men, Savannah Pine's article proposes a queer reading of relationships between select brothers in arms, citing a connection between homosociality and homoaffectivity because ‘ritual brothers might have impugned their masculine identities because their loving relationship and some of their intimate actions might possibly have been considered sodomitic’ (p. 161). Although Pine's evidence demonstrates that accepted ‘manly’ behaviour of men at arms included mutual love and support, whether or not their contemporaries needed convincing of that fact is not substantiated here.
The next two articles investigate groups of clerical men. Andrew E. Larson inspects student violence at Oxford, as shown in Coroners’ rolls, Oxfordshire Eyre Rolls, and the Chancellor's Book. These sources show that armed young men with limited resources or status violently clashed with each other and townspeople. The cause of violence, Larson argues, was students’ ‘conflicted gender identity’ – positioned between laity and clergy (p. 182). The next contribution by Derek Neal, however, challenges neat distinctions between religious and secular masculinities. Through a close reading of a lawsuit over an English will, dated to 1557, Neal surmises that clergymen's family ties were not abandoned at ordination, but rather priests favoured their kinfolk above ecclesiastical networks despite efforts to separate lay and clerical realms.
Part two concludes with John M. Hunt's investigation of male sociability in Italian courtly gambling in the early 1600 s. Hunt's expert reading of the trial records of a case which concerned a tag team of card sharks who defrauded a naïve gentleman proves that gambling was a unique site of ‘mixed forms of male sociability’ (p. 217). Commoners, consequently, manipulated the expectations of performative masculinity to deceive their targets.
Part Three, ‘Patriarchy, Honour, and Lineage’, highlights how masculine cultures shaped standards of worth. Jennifer Maria DeSilva's study examines patronage systems as shown in visual representations of elite clerical households. Reading patronage ‘as a proxy or as a barometer for masculinity’, the images show that elite clergy and laymen expressed shared values in their roles as head of household (p. 247). Next, Erin J. Campbell's article draws readers into household spaces to showcase the topic of domestic masculinities in Italy. Campbell's close reading of the visual program displayed in the sala grande of Palazzo Magnani suggests that the subjects of the friezes and frames played a role in the formation of elite masculinity.
The final two articles explore the topic of progeny. Yael Manes's chapter examines five early Renaissance biographies of artists in order to show how early biographers prioritized an artist's ability to produce artistic heirs, in contrast to later authors, like Giorgio Vasari, who stressed their creative genius. Lastly, Maria F. Maurer's study of archival evidence, including letters and visual representations, shows how illegitimate children at the Italian courts engaged in masculine values. Despite moralizing ideals of restraint and sin, these men – greatly outnumbering legitimate children – actively contributed to their families’ dynastic honour.
There are a few notable limitations in this collection. Eight of the 13 articles focus on Italy and/or Italians, and half of the collection uses legal and criminal cases as central evidence, resulting in a narrower scope than one might anticipate. Surprisingly, only John M. Hunt touches on the significant interconnections between performances of masculinity and femininity. Lastly, the collection includes some distracting proofreading oversights.
Considered collectively, however, this work offers readers several new vantage points. Its authors show that prescriptive rules on manhood were varied, constructed, and seemingly made to be broken – or at least heavily negotiated. Such elasticity invites scholars to reconsider concepts of normative and transgressive masculinities. The collection also underscores the interdependence of class, status, and gender performance, while also exposing slippages that pervaded between different types of masculinities. Therefore, to borrow a masculine standard of the early biographers of Italian artists, a key strength of this collection lies in its generative potential to create its own scholarly ‘heirs’ – as it inspires its readers to explore the significant topic of premodern masculinities.