Poetry is by no means the only literary medium of the English Renaissance which tries to textualize the idea of paternity. There is a considerable range of prose writing in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period which attempts to create an ideology of patriarchal fatherhood. Whilst the common theme of this is a rather dull and pious insistence on religious, domestic and social duties, the very fact that fatherhood needs to be so discursively entrenched implies certain anxieties. Medical, religious and politico-social tracts overlap in some of their concerns, but they also have their own distinctive emphases. What they have in common is the desire to fashion a settled and harmonious order in which paternal identity can happily rest: given our current belief that they involve condescension, it is worth noting that the concepts of paternalism and patriarchalism, with their affective connotations, were always regarded in such texts as basically benign. Yet it is also clear that patriarchy was more limited in practice than in theory. Different genres present different views of familial duties: political texts emphasize obedience, but more pragmatic household manuals emphasize more consensual modes of family organization. Mothers are thus given a certain amount of authority in the household, but their primary role was of course biological. Natural science and theology are presented as the ultimate authorities for the centrality and importance of paternity, but controversies within (and between) both fields mean that no really secure basis can be found: the very meaning of the word ‘father’ is a matter of considerable uncertainty.