ABSTRACT
Historical work on English masculinities stands at something of a cross-roads. A small body of high-quality and varied work has been carried out, but with a very uncertain sense of how the field is constituted, and how these specialist contributions might inform our received readings of the past. This uncertainty is not, however, due to intellectual timidity, but stems rather from the nature of gender itself. Feminist scholarship has demonstrated beyond question that gender permeates all cultural and social forms and all human experience. As the implications of that proposition have been explored, so women's history has fragmented, undermining the confidence with which only a few years ago scholars invoked 'patriarchy' or 'difference' as comprehensive conceptual frameworks.2 Masculinity, like femininity, is historically expressed in complex and confusing variety, with comparable dangers to conceptual coherence. But there is a further problem which applies to masculinity specifically. Because men have historically been dominant in the public sphere, masculinity carries public meanings of great political moment, in addition to its bearing on personal conduct and self-imagining. Whereas femininity has often been defined to exclude women from economic activities and civic responsibilities, representations of masculinity have necessarily straddled the publici private divide, covering the entire spectrum from men's domestic
conduct at one extreme, to the manly virtues which should characterise the body politic at the other. In tackling the subject of masculinity in such different ways, historians have shown no less than a proper respect for its complexity - and its multiple points of contact with the conventional content of their subject.
