ABSTRACT
In this passage from Johannes Jhan’s School Ordinance, we seem to possess a clear statement of how sixteenth-century people understood the difference between men and women. Female virtue is understood in bodily terms and it ultimately means chastity; male virtue, by contrast, is plural and concerns a host of qualities which must be manifested in public, ‘when he goes amongst people’. Such contrasts seem to be the very stuff of sixteenth-century wisdom about the sexes: male is opposed to female, public to private, activity to passivity, and female honour, by extension, is primarily a matter of chastity, male honour, of deeds. Here, it seems, in the comfort of cliché, is the place to start an analysis of the meaning of manhood. We might proceed to investigate masculinity as a group system, structured around the axioms of honour and celebrated in ritual. In such a project, gender history and a social history heavily influenced by anthropology might, from their different directions, converge. Such a study would analyse masculinity as a socially learnt system of behaviour, paralleled by a sexually bifurcated system of meanings, which assured men dominance and upheld a male-dominated social order. And it would satisfy a political imperative too, for if we understood the nature of masculinity, we might have the key to unlock the strongbox of patriarchy. However, I want to suggest that such an approach is misconceived. What first strikes the historian of the early modern town about masculinity is its sheer disruptiveness. Men posed a serious public order problem, young bloods endangering the safety of the streets at night, drunken husbands beating their wives to within an inch of their lives, guilds fostering a male brotherhood which might even foment political unrest. Masculinity and its
routine expressions were a serious danger to civic peace rather than a prop of patriarchy. Important as the worlds of guild and public life were to masculinity, an investigation which confined itself to these phenomena would be misleading. The quotation I have just offered is an equally unreliable guide to sixteenth-century sexual identities, for masculinity, just as much as femininity, concerned the management of the body. In this chapter, I want first to sketch the public urban culture of masculinity, a culture which is increasingly familiar to us, and then go on to investigate the paradox of masculinity more closely by examining not the archetypal male virtues but those disruptive masculine sins, fighting and drinking. From there, I shall consider the understandings of the male body such writings elaborate, in order to take us closer to masculinity, seeing it not as a set of vices or virtues ‘which a man must allow to appear in him’, but as a psychic phenomenon which has a history none the less.2
