ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the keyconcepts discussed int he subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on Britain has dominated of early modern historical scholarship on masculinities, particularly in English-language publications. However, a number of recent studies by scholars of pre-modern Europe have opened up new ways of conceptualizing masculinities' trajectories over the early modern period. The domestic environment, family and household, formed a critical sphere for defining masculinity from at least the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Religion has been identified by several scholars as an important, but underexplored, context for power and masculinity. Finally, a consideration across all the essays in this collection is how particular source types can articulate ideas of governance, whose ideas they were, and how the extant sources shape our narratives of historical masculinities. Art and architecture generally present idealized images of male governance but correspondence shows the instabilities and fears of men expected to govern others.
