1 See esp. Amussen, Susan D., “‘The Part of a Christian Man: The Cultural Politics of Manhood in Early Modern England,” in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Amussen, Susan D. and Kishlansky, Mark A. (Manchester, 1995), 213–33; Fletcher, Anthony, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1995); Hitchcock, Tim and Cohen, Michèle, eds., English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (London, 1999); Foyster, Elizabeth A., Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (Harlow, 1999); Carter, Philip, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2000); Shepard, Alexandra, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003).
2 This was in reaction to scholarship preoccupied with same-sex rather than heterosexual relations and, in particular, work on the emergence of the “molly” as a category of male identity in the eighteenth century. See Trumbach, Randolph, “The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660–1750,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Duberman, Martin B., Vicinus, Martha, and Chauncey, George (Harmondsworth, 1989), 129–40, and “London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Epstein, Julia and Straub, Kristina (New York, 1991), 112–41.
3 See, e.g., Hull, Suzanne W., Chaste Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino, CA, 1982); Jones, Ann Rosalind, “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women's Lyrics,” in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Armstrong, Nancy and Tennenhouse, Leonard (London, 1987), 39–72; Amussen, Susan Dwyer, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988); Wall, Alison, “Elizabethan Precept and Feminine Practice: The Thynne Family of Longleat,” History 75, no. 237 (1990): 23–38; Eales, Jacqueline, “Gender Construction in Early Modern England and the Conduct Books of William Whately (1583–1639),” in Gender and Christian Religion, vol. 34 of Studies in Church History, ed. Swanson, R. N. (Woodbridge, 1998), 163–74.
4 For a case study of the impact of a disorderly household on the public standing of a seventeenth-century peer, see Herrup, Cynthia B., A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the Second Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford, 1999). For skepticism about the value of the public/private distinction for gender analysis, see Vickery, Amanda, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History,” Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383–414.
5 Foyster, Manhood, 4. See also Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, pt. 2. Compare Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, chap. 3.
6 Foyster, Elizabeth, “Male Honour, Social Control and Wife Beating in Late Stuart England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 6 (1996): 215–24. For debates on the nature of the double standard and its impact on men, see Capp, Bernard, “The Double Standard Revisited: Plebeian Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, no. 162 (1999): 70–100; Foyster, Manhood, 148–64; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, chap. 6, and “Honesty, Worth and Gender in Early Modern England,” in Identity and Agency in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Barry, Jonathan and French, H. R. (Basingstoke, 2004).
7 See, e.g., D. E. Underdown, “The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England,” and S. D. Amussen, “Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560–1725,” both in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Fletcher, Anthony and Stevenson, John (Cambridge, 1985), 116–36, 196–217; Hodgkin, Katharine, “Thomas Wythorne and the Problem of Mastery,” History Workshop Journal 29 (Spring 1990): 20–41; Fletcher, Anthony, “Men's Dilemma: The Future of Patriarchy in England, 1560–1660,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 4 (1994): 61–81; Breitenberg, Mark, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1996). For earlier precedents of such anxieties, see Bullough, Vern L., “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Lees, Clare A. (Minneapolis, 1994), 31–45.
8 Kahn, Coppélia, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, 1981), 16. See also Foyster, Manhood, 3; Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, chap. 1.
9 For doubts about a crisis in gender relations, see Wall, “Elizabethan Precept”; Ingram, Martin, “‘Scolding Women Cucked or Washed’: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?” in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Kermode, Jenny and Walker, Garthine (London, 1994), 48–80; Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), 28; Cressy, David, “Gender Trouble and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 35 (1996): 438–65. Micheal S. Kimmel identified not one but two crises of masculinity in the seventeenth century; see his “From Lord and Master to Cuckold and Fop: Masculinity in Seventeenth-Century England,” University of Dayton Review 18, no. 2 (1986–87): 93–109.
10 Fletcher, “Men's Dilemma,” 62.
11 See, e.g., Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990); Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination; McKeon, Michael, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28, no. 3 (1995): 295–322; Wahrman, Dror, “Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 159 (1998): 113–60; Berry, Helen, Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury (Aldershot, 2003), chap. 10. Karen Harvey offers a fuller discussion of such claims in the article following this. Also see her “The Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (2002): 899–916.
12 Underdown, “Taming of the Scold,” 116. Also see, e.g., Wrightson, Keith, English Society, 1580–1680 (London, 1982); Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, “Introduction,” in Order and Disorder, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson; Sharpe, J. A., “Social Strain and Social Dislocation, 1585–1603,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. Guy, John (Cambridge, 1995), 192–211; Hindle, Steve, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000).
13 Amussen, An Ordered Society; Underdown, “Taming of the Scold”; Kimmel, “From Lord and Master.”
14 Weil, Rachel, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester, 1999); Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society; Kuchta, David, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley, 2002); Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture. For debates on the levels of gender and social inclusion tolerated by coffee houses—the primary locus of the public sphere—see Dobranski, Stephen B., “‘Where Men of Differing Judgements Croud’: Milton and the Culture of the Coffee Houses,” Seventeenth Century 9, no. 1 (1994): 35–56; Pincus, Steve, “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create:’ Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 67, no. 4 (1996): 807–34; Berry, Helen, “‘Nice and Curious Questions’: Coffee Houses and the Representation of Women in John Dunton's Athenian Mercury,” Seventeenth Century 12, no. 2 (1997): 257–76; Cowan, Brian, “What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England,” History Workshop Journal 51 (Spring 2001): 127–57.
15 For work on declining levels of male violence, see Amussen, “Part of a Christian Man”; Robert B. Shoemaker, “Reforming Male Manners: Public Insult and the Decline of Violence in London, 1660–1740,” in Hitchcock and Cohen, English Masculinities, 133–50, “Male Honour and the Decline of Public Violence in Eighteenth-Century London,” Social History 26, no. 2 (2001): 190–208, and “The Taming of the Duel: Masculinity, Honour and Ritual Violence in London, 1660–1800,” Historical Journal 45, no. 3 (2002): 525–45. Compare Brown, Keith M., “Gentlemen and Thugs in Seventeenth-Century Britain,” History Today 40 (October 1990): 27–32.
16 See esp. Laqueur, Making Sex; McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy.” Harvey, Compare Karen, “The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England,” Gender and History 14, no. 2 (2002): 202–23.
17 For examples of such exceptions, see Hunt, Margaret, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley, 1996); Meldrum, Tim, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London House (Harlow, 2000). See also Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, chap. 5.
18 See, e.g., Wrightson, English Society; Clay, C. G. A., Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500–1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1984); Sharpe, J. A., Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760 (London, 1988). See also Wilson, Adrian, “A Critical Portrait of Social History,” in Rethinking Social History: English Society, 1570–1920, and Its Interpretation, ed. Wilson, Adrian (Manchester, 1993), 9–58. Recent exceptions to this trend include Wood, Andy, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999); Walker, Garthine, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003).
19 See esp. Ann Hughes, “Women, Men and Politics in the English Civil War,” inaugural lecture, University of Keele, 1997, and “Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature,” in Amussen and Kishlansky, Political Culture and Cultural Politics, 162–88; Rachel Trubowitz, “Female Preachers and Male Wives: Gender and Authority in Civil War England,” and Susan Wiseman, “‘Adam, the Father of all Flesh’: Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and after the English Civil War,” both in Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution, ed. Holstun, James (London, 1992), 112–33, 134–57.
20 Thomas, Keith, “Women in the Civil War Sects,” Past and Present, no. 13 (1958): 42–62; Higgens, Patricia, “The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners,” in Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, ed. Manning, Brian (London, 1973), 177–222; Fraser, Antonia, The Weaker Vessel (New York, 1985); Laurence, Anne, “A Priesthood of She-Believers: Women and Congregations in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England,” in Women in the Church, vol. 27 of Studies in Church History, ed. Sheils, W. J. and Woods, Diana (Oxford, 1990), 345–63; Mack, Phyllis, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992); Crawford, Patricia, “The Challenges to Patriarchalism: How Did the Revolution Affect Women?” in Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s, ed. Morrill, John (London, 1992), 112–28; Davies, Stevie, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution, 1640–1660 (London, 1998); Capp, , When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), chap. 7.
21 For studies that have much to contribute to our understanding of men's experience of civil war, while not directly engaging with gender as a category, see Charles Carlton, “The Face of Battle in the English Civil Wars,” and Bennett, Ronan, “War and Disorder: Policing the Soldiery in Civil War Yorkshire,” both in War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650, ed. Fissel, Mark Charles (Manchester, 1991), 226–47, 248–73; Carlton, Charles, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638–1651 (London, 1992); Donagan, Barbara, “Atrocity, War Crime, and Treason in the English Civil War,” American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994): 1137–66, and “The Web of Honour: Soldiers, Christians, and Gentlemen in the English Civil War,” Historical Journal 44, no. 2 (2001): 365–89. Purkiss, Compare Diane, “Dismembering and Remembering: The English Civil War and Male Identity,” in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Summers, Claude J. and Pebworth, Ted-Larry (Columbia, MO, 1999), 220–41.
22 For a survey of some of this work, see the article by Michael Roper below.
23 For some suggestive hypotheses, see R. N. Swanson, “Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation,” and Cullum, P. H., “Clergy, Masculinity and Transgression in Late Medieval England,” both in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. Hadley, D. M. (Harlow, 1999), 160–77, 178–96. See also T. Betteridge, “The Place of Sodomy in the Historical Writings of John Bale and John Foxe,” and Webster, Tom, “‘Kiss Me with the Kisses of his Mouth’: Gender Inversion and Canticles in Godly Spirituality,” both in Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Betteridge, T. (Manchester, 2002), 11–26, 148–63.
24 See, e.g., Fraser, The Weaker Vessel; Smith, Hilda, Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana, IL, 1982); Bennett, Judith M., Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (Oxford, 1996). See also Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres.”
25 Gadol, Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Bridenthal, Renate and Koonz, Claudia (Boston, 1977), 137–64; Scott, Joan, “Women's History,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Burke, Peter (Cambridge, 1991), 42–66.
26 Tosh, John, “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History Workshop Journal 38 (Autumn 1994): 179–202. See also Roper, Michael and Tosh, John, “Introduction: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Roper, Michael and Tosh, John (London, 1991), 1–24. This approach is not dissimilar to that originally advocated by Joan Scott, treating gender as a “constitutive element of social relationships” and comprising four elements: culturally available symbols, normative concepts, social institutions, and subjective identity; see her “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–75, esp. 1067–68.
27 Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, 322–23
28 For work which has sought to engage with these issues, see Kahn, Man's Estate; Roper, Lyndal, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994); Purkiss, “Dismembering and Remembering.” See also Neal, Derek, “Suits Make the Man: Masculinity in Two English Law Courts, c. 1500,” Canadian Journal of History 37 (April 2002): 1–22.
29 Historians of early modern women have already begun to explore such differences fruitfully. See Pollock, Linda A., “Childbearing and Female Bonding in Early Modern England,” Social History 22, no. 3 (1997): 286–306; Mendelson, Sara, “The Civility of Women in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Burke, Peter, Harrison, Brian and Slack, Paul (Oxford, 2000), 111–25; Crawford, Patricia, “‘The Poorest She’: Women and Citizenship in Early Modern England,” in The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State, ed. Mendle, Michael (Cambridge, 2001), 197–218; Gowing, Laura, “Ordering the Body: Illegitimacy and Female Authority in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Braddick, Michael J. and Walter, John (Cambridge, 2001), 43–62, “The Haunting of Susan Lay: Servants and Mistresses in Seventeenth-Century England,” Gender and History 14, no. 2 (2002): 183–201, and Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, 2003). The main basis on which significant differences between men have been discussed has been sexuality. See esp. Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982), and “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop Journal 29 (Spring 1990): 1–19. Compare Cady, Joseph, “‘Masculine Love,’ Renaissance Writing, and the ‘New Invention’ of Homosexuality,” in Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. Summers, Claude J. (New York, 1992), 9–40.
30 Sheila Rowbotham, “The Trouble with Patriarchy,” and Alexander, Sally and Taylor, Barbara, “In Defence of ‘Patriarchy,’” both in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Samuel, Raphael (London, 1981), 364–69, 370–73. See also Bennett, Judith M. “Feminism and History,” Gender and History 1, no. 3 (1989): 251–72.
31 Schochet, Gordon J., Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1975); Sommerville, J. P., Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (Harlow, 1986), 27–34; Amussen, An Ordered Society. See also Ezell, Margaret J. M., The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987).
32 See, e.g., Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Women on Top,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA, 1987), 124–51; Houlbrooke, Ralph, “Women's Social Life and Common Action in England from the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of the Civil War,” Continuity and Change 1, no. 2 (1986): 171–89; Capp, Bernard, “Separate Domains? Women and Authority in Early Modern England,” in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Griffiths, Paul, Fox, Adam and Hindle, Steve (Basingstoke, 1996), 117–45, and When Gossips Meet.
33 Connell, R. W., Masculinities (Cambridge, 1995), chap. 3.
34 Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, chap. 4; Goldberg, P. J. P., “Masters and Men in Later Medieval England,” in Hadley, , Masculinity in Medieval Europe, 56–70; Jardine, Lisa, “Companionate Marriage versus Male Friendship: Anxiety for the Lineal Family in Jacobean Drama,” in Amussen, and Kishlansky, , Political Culture and Cultural Politics, 234–54. See also Wiesner, Merry, “Guilds, Male Bonding and Women's Work in Early Modern Germany,” Gender and History 1, no. 2 (1989): 125–37, and “Wandervögels and Women: Journeymen's Concepts of Masculinity in Early Modern Germany,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 4 (1991): 767–82; Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, chap. 5.
35 Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, chaps. 1–3.
36 Parish, Helen, “‘Beastly is their Living and their Doctrine’: Celibacy and Theological Corruption in English Reformation Polemic,” in The Medieval Inheritance, vol. 1 of Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. Gordon, Bruce (Aldershot, 1996), 138–52; Beier, A. L., Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London, 1985); Hughes, “Gender and Politics”; Wiseman, “Adam, the Father of all Flesh”; Gentles, Ian, “The Iconography of Revolution: England, 1642–1649,” in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution, ed. Gentles, Ian, Morrill, John, and Worden, Blair (Cambridge, 1998), 91–113; Roebuck, Graham, “Cavalier,” in Summers, and Pebworth, , The English Civil Wars, 9–26; Montrose, Louis, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (Winter 1991): 1–41; Brown, Kathleen M., Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Ohlmeyer, Jane, “‘Civilizinge of those Rude Partes’: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s-1640s,” in The Origins of Empire, ed. Canny, Nicholas (Oxford, 1998), 124–47.
37 For the seminal study on the origins of politeness, see Klein, Lawrence E., Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994).
38 Goldstone, J. A., “The Demographic Revolution in England: A Re-examination,” Population Studies 40 (1986): 5–33. See also Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1993); Hindle, Steve, “The Problem of Pauper Marriage in Seventeenth-Century England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 8 (1998): 71–89.
39 Hill, Christopher, “Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage-Labour,” in his Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1974), 219–38; Shepard, “Honesty, Worth and Gender.”
40 Crawford, Patricia, “Public Duty, Conscience, and Women in Early Modern England,” in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Morrill, John, Slack, Paul, and Woolf, Daniel (Oxford, 1993), 57–76.
41 Thomas, Keith, “Age and Authority in Early Modern England,” Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976): 205–48; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, chap. 8.
42 For similar arguments relating to the periodization of women's history, see Gowing, Common Bodies, 204–9.
