Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period

Regulating Selves and Others

Jacqueline Van Gent, Susan Broomhall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409432388
• eBook ISBN: 9781317125648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Documenting lived experiences of men in charge of others, this collection creates a social and cultural history of early modern governing masculinities. It examines the tensions between normative discourses and lived experiences and their manifestations in a range of different sources; and explores the insecurities, anxieties and instability of masculine governance and the ways in which these were expressed (or controlled) in emotional states, language or performance. Focussing on moments of exercising power, the collection seeks to understand the methods, strategies, discourses or resources that men were able (or not) to employ in order to have this power. In order to elucidate the mechanisms of male governance the essays explore the following questions: how was male governance demonstrated and enacted through men's (and women's) bodies? What roles did women play in sustaining, supporting or undermining governing masculinities? And what are the relationship of specific spaces such as household or urban environments to notions and practice of governance? Finally, the collection emphasises the power of sources to articulate the ideas of governance held by particular social groups and to obscure those of others. Through a rich and wide range of case studies, the collection explores what distinctions can be seen in ideas of authoritative masculine behaviour across Protestant and Catholic cultures, British and Continental models, from the late medieval to the end of the eighteenth century, and between urban and national expressions of authority.

Chapter 1
Civic Manliness in London, c. 1380–1550

Stephanie Tarbin¹

Moral regulation was an important element of the administrative duties of London’s late medieval governors. During the fourteenth century, the mayor and aldermen tried to control prostitution and investigated instances of sexual misconduct among the clergy and laity. Juries of householders reported on individuals suspected of ‘evil life’.² In 1382, civic legislation defined penalties for sexual offenders, including male and female bawds, whores, unchaste priests, adulterers, and adulteresses.³ The city’s fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century records show that bawds, whores, priests, and adulterous spouses were routinely investigated and corrected. During this period, the city rulers concentrated attention on heterosexual activities: there are few unequivocal examples of same-sex relationships between men in the city records and none involving women.⁴ While the numbers of offenders and the types of offence prosecuted varied over this period, the judgements of the civic authorities became more physical.⁵ By the mid-sixteenth century, the penalties of whipping and ducking in the Thames for whoredom joined customary sentences of the pillory, shaming processions, and banishment. The authors and compilers of London chronicles occasionally recorded examples of punishments, suggesting that the city’s inhabitants viewed them as a noteworthy aspect of urban life and government.⁶

The regulation of morals in late medieval London provides valuable evidence about how the civic elite viewed sexuality as an aspect of masculinity, and especially the authoritative maleness identified with good governance. This masculinity was implicitly heterosexual, although pre-modern society did not categorize sexual identities in terms of the orientation of sexual desires.⁷ Instead, thinking about sexuality was constituted in relation to concepts of chastity and lechery or moderation and excess. In Christian morality, sexual desires and pleasures were sinful unless expressed within the bounds of heterosexual marriage, and then only in moderation under closely prescribed conditions; abstinence from pleasure and the restraint of desire were ideals for all, though few might attain them.⁸ In late medieval London, the justifications for prosecuting sexual misconduct, as well as the categories of offence and language of prosecutions, constructed an ideal masculinity in terms of self-discipline and sexual restraint. Prosecution records also show remarkable stability in the creation and reiteration of this ideal between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, despite shifts in attention to particular offences and offenders. We can also detect other models of authoritative masculinity, which excused or allowed male sexual licence, in London’s records but the official stance of the city’s governors rejected them emphatically. In this essay I refer to the first ideal of masculinity, defined in terms of chastity and self-control, as ‘civic manliness’.

The place of sexuality in the constitution of masculine authority requires investigation. Feminist and social historians have begun to examine competing versions of masculinity in pre-modern society, finding that sexual misbehaviour could damage men’s public reputations, and that a single standard of sexual conduct for men and women featured in programmes of religious reform.⁹ On the other hand, male sexuality was constructed as active, even aggressive, which helped protect men, particularly those in authority, from the consequences of raping and sexually exploiting women.¹⁰ While sexuality never defined male identity as decisively as it did female identity, the evidence from London nonetheless raises questions about civic manliness as an ideal of masculinity, particularly the social range of its appeal and its persistence into the sixteenth century (and beyond). Research on the history of sexuality more generally also has implications for our understandings of governing masculinities. In some historical societies, such as classical Athens, for example, homoeroticism was the privilege of older male citizens, but the development of state-operated brothels of women instituted a normative heterosexuality in order to provide poorer citizens with access to (hetero)sexual pleasure.¹¹ In relation to late medieval and early modern Europe, it is still unclear to what extent same-sex sexual relations were accepted, or even recognized, in the absence of modern sexual identities such as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’. Prosecutions of sodomy in Renaissance Florence, for example, show the co-existence of official condemnation of same-sex practices and a sexual culture where homosexual relations were a common feature of youthful masculine experience and identity.¹² The evidence from early modern England, where sodomy was officially censured but prosecutions were rare, is more ambiguous about the extent and acceptance of male-male sexual relations. Recent work suggests that the boundaries between social and sexual intimacy were not sharply defined in normal household and pedagogic relationships between males, creating spaces for homoeroticism between men of different social status.¹³ Can the evidence from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century London shed light on the extent to which governing masculinities were constituted in relation to homosexual, as well as heterosexual, activities?

In the following, I examine how London’s governors appropriated moral and religious discourses to formulate a vision of authoritative masculinity that was enacted through the regulation of sexuality. Although the sexual misconduct prosecuted by civic authorities mostly involved relations between men and women, I contend that the production of civic manliness was more concerned with the discipline and control of male desire than with the orientation of that desire towards women or men. I will suggest that the notion of civic manliness resonated with men in a range of authoritative roles, from married men and humble householders to the mercantile elite of the city. I also explore the extent to which civic manliness represented a rhetorical and political construct, as opposed to a lived ideal in the self-perceptions and subjectivities of London men, and consider the impact of religious and intellectual developments of the early sixteenth century.

London: Government and People

Who were the people governed by London’s mayor and aldermen and to what extent were the ideals of civic manliness relevant to them? London was a city of some forty to fifty thousand people in the fifteenth century, the majority living in or around the area bounded by the old Roman walls north of the river.¹⁴ This area approximated the territorial jurisdiction of the mayor and aldermen of London and was the centre of the city’s commercial activities. However, there were significant exemptions to the regulatory powers of the city’s rulers. For instance, the suburbs of Southwark and Westminster, where residents were largely engaged in service industries, were beyond the territorial jurisdiction of London’s civic authorities.¹⁵ Within the territory governed by the mayor and aldermen, there were residents who were not answerable to civic jurisdiction. Nobles and gentry held townhouses but were responsible to the authority of the king, while the church exercised separate jurisdiction over the clergy.¹⁶ London contained more than 100 parishes, some 20 religious houses, and a cathedral within its walls, so the clergy were a sizeable minority in the resident population.¹⁷ Some Londoners lived in ‘liberties’, such as the precincts of religious houses like St Martin Le Grand and St Katherine by the Tower, which were exempt from civic oversight.¹⁸ There were many groups who were not subject to civic authority.

Within the London population governed by the mayor and aldermen, there were crucial status distinctions that suggest different degrees of access to, and investment in, the ideal of civic manliness. The most important was citizenship, which was synonymous with membership in one of the city’s merchant or craft guilds. The freedom of the city could be achieved by means of patrimony (inheritance), redemption (purchase), or apprenticeship (training). All of these methods required social networks and the ability to pay substantial entry fees, at least until the 1530s when the costs of citizenship were reduced.¹⁹ Citizenship entailed responsibilities and privileges: citizens contributed to the charges of civic government through taxation and public service, but they also enjoyed a range of legal, economic, and political benefits, such as the right to open shops and sell goods, freedom from tolls throughout England, security of tenure over city property, and participation in civic politics.²⁰ The political dimension of citizenship was also a prerogative of maleness. Wives and daughters of citizens shared the social standing and prestige of their men; widows exercised some of the legal and economic privileges and fulfilled the financial duties, of the freedom, but women rarely took up the freedom and no women held public office, participated in civic assemblies, or chose office-holders.²¹

Among the non-citizen adult male population, those born outside England were designated ‘aliens’, while Englishmen, including those born in the city itself, were accounted ‘foreign’ or ‘strangers’. The unfree of the city belonged to the full socio-economic spectrum of the urban population, from wealthy alien merchants, to independent craftsmen, humble labourers, and the indigent, vagrant poor. Historians have estimated that citizens and their households may have accounted for slightly more than half the city’s population; non-citizens and their households, who were engaged in trades, crafts, and service industries in the city, may have constituted another quarter of the urban population.²² This meant that, before the franchise was extended in the sixteenth century, perhaps between four and five thousand adult males were citizens and bound by oath to uphold the civic government.²³

Only the most prosperous citizens participated in the upper levels of civic office, where the ideal of civic manliness was articulated. A council of 25 aldermen governed the city on a day-to-day basis, led by a mayor elected annually from their number and assisted by a small permanent staff of salaried officials.²⁴ A larger assembly of citizens, the common council, met less frequently to consider matters requiring broad consensus, such as taxation. This body increas...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Civic Manliness in London, c. 1380–1550
• 2 Masculine Republics: Establishing Authority in the Early Modern Venetian Printshop
• 3 Jean Martin, Governor of the Grand Bureau des Pauvres, on Charity and the Civic Duty of Governing Men in Paris, c. 1580
• 4 Codpieces and Potbellies in the Songes drolatiques: Satirizing Masculine Self-Control in Early Modern France and Germany
• 5 The Obligations of Governing Masculinity in the Early Stuart Gentry Family: The Barringtons of Hatfield Broad Oak
• 6 Militant Masculinity and the Monuments of Westminster Abbey
• 7 Between Corporate and Familial Responsibility: Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen and Masculine Governance in Europe and the Dutch Colonial World
• 8 Raiding the Patriarch’s Toolbox: Reading Masculine Governance in Cases of Male Witchcraft, 1592–1692
• 9 Side-wounds, Sex, and Savages: Moravian Masculinities and Early Modern Protestant Missions
• 10 Alternative Hierarchies: Manhood and Unbelief in Early Modern Europe, 1660–1750
• 11 Men Controlling Bodies: Medical Consultation by Letter in France, 1680–1780
• 12 Attitudes towards Male Authority and Domestic Violence in Eighteenth-Century London Courts
• 13 Policing Bodies in Urban Scotland, 1780–1850
• Bibliography
• Index