ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book contends that literature is a particularly valuable and dense source of information and knowledge about how masculinity was structured and how it functioned in the formation of men's identities in France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It also argues that the figure of the cuckold provides a point of entry into the complexities of what explicitly and implicitly was presented as normative masculinity in Renaissance France. Masculinity has perhaps been most influenced by Althusser's famous definition of ideological interpellation, which is the basis of the author's idea of masculinity as intertextual transmission. The book further traces the intertextual elaboration of masculinity and reaches its culmination in both Brantôme and Rabelais. Brantôme's work represents a significant departure toward perverse even 'queer' sexual practices that might be involved in the elaboration of masculinities that are well beyond the bounds of the normative model.
