ABSTRACT
The first introduction interrogates the history and usage of the terminology that is crucial to the definition of the term private honour, namely private and masculine. The book opens with a clear delineation of the various critical interpretations of privacy and manliness and how they operated amongst the different strata of society. Investigating these integral components of Early Modern gender performance demonstrates the necessity of having a tangible definition of private masculine honour in order to form a basis of identification of manly behaviour in the private sphere. Privacy was traditionally connoted in terms of spatial boundaries (with only a few scholars associating it with the presence of other people); this book veers away from this classic approach and proposes another use of the term: as a function of audience, location and circumstance. The second section of this introduction reviews the different influences on Renaissance masculinity, which include Roman virtus, Medieval Christianity, chivalry, and Early Modern humanism, establishing how these many ideologies ultimately led to the appropriation of feminine virtues by masculine performance, which found its eventual representation amongst the nobility in the form of private honour.
