ABSTRACT
In 1673, Richard Allestree, regius professor of divinity at Oxford and provost of Eton, lamented his failure to convince 'the more impregnable, masculine part of the gentry' of the need to live a religious life, and he described those who neglected religion as 'our masculine atheists', echoing contemporary opinion that scoffers against religion were more likely to be men. This led him to place his hopes on what was widely perceived to be a surer link between femininity and religious piety. '[T] 0 speak an impartial Truth', he concluded, 'tis not to be denied, that the reputation of Religion is more kept up by women than men.'l In the light of Allestree's comments it might be thought that the two co-ordinates of this essay, 'masculinity' and 'religion', are rather ill-paired. Much recent eighteenth-century scholarship has implicitly agreed with his premise of a negative correlation between men and religion, and has suggested that men were in the vanguard of atheism, although few scholars have shared Allestree's assumption that this was a matter of concern.2 Instead they have tended to celebrate this implicit association between masculinity and irreligious - perhaps even areligious - attitudes. If religion is mentioned at all, it is what Randolph Trumbach has labelled the 'religion of libertinism', which,
apparently, was characterised by 'the new meaning attached to sexual relations between males'.3 Acknowledgement of this negative association between masculinity and religion has been encouraged by the standpoint of most historians dealing with the topic. By and large they have taken an unabashedly 'modernist' tone, which has led them to concentrate on men as secular beings without any reference to religious considerations. For these historians, the interest of the period after 1660, and especially after 1700, is that it saw the origins of current-day gender definitions.4 Trumbach, for example, has argued that 'the modern system of gender and sexual relations' emerged precisely in this period, when this-worldly hedonism and sexual gratification replaced outmoded Christian priorities. Furthermore, according to Anthony Fletcher, a whole new series of printed genres from about 1670, such as conduct books, medical literature, periodical literature, and the novel, were related to, and underpinned, these new gender relations, and their preoccupation with the here and now. is
While there may be something to say in support of all these suggestions, it seems clear that, although a new area for historical enquiry, the history of masculinity is fast developing a periodisation, which will force studies of manliness to ape the increasingly outmoded characterisations of more traditional political and social history. As England supposedly moved from a religious to a secular world, the 'godly man' of Stuart England is seen as being replaced by the 'polite man', the 'sentimental man' or the 'sexual man' of the Hanoverian period,6 and interest lies in these new men and not
in the older religious ideals which had governed men's lives and expectations in the past. Ironically, a project which began in an attempt to uncover varieties of masculinity and in challenging some of the assumptions of more conventional history, may end up in marginalising strands of masculine behaviour, as well as certain discourses of masculinity, from the historical record.
