Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture

Since the dawn of humans, there has been a link between masculinity and violence, and this macho ideal is perpetuated today through culturally accepted gender norms and roles.  Thomas Page McBee wrote in The Atlantic Magazine about a new and growing trend of eschewing traditional definitions of what it means to be a man and embracing a contemporary "healthy masculinity," advocating compassion, respect, and cooperation.  Despite McBee's assertions, we are clearly living in a culture which glorifies aggression, violence, and domination while minimizing the importance of traditionally feminine characteristics.  This is not a recent turn of events, and Jennifer Feather, Assistant Professor of English at UNCG, and Catherine E. Thomas, Associate Professor of English at The College of Charleston, recently explored the issue as it relates to the Renaissance Man.

Feather and Thomas co-edited Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture, a collection of original essays that, as the publisher writes, explores the changing social expectations of men in early modern England "as the armed knight went into decline and humanism appeared".  The essays "analyze a wide-range of violent acts in early modern literature and culture – everything from civic violence to chivalric combat; from verbal attacks to masochistic suffering; from political assassination to personal retaliation; and from brawls to battles.  In so doing, they interrogate the seemingly inevitable connection between masculinity and aggression, placing it in a specific historical context and showing how differences of status, ethnicity, and sexual identity inform masculine ideals"(Macmillan).

The collection is "a strong contribution to emerging scholarship on early modern masculinities... show[ing] how the achievement of normative manhood depended on the performance of violence. In the turbulent social world of early modern Europe, these essays suggest male aggression signified differently according to distinctions of age, status, and sexuality. These compelling historicist readings of male aggression and suffering illuminate forms of violence ranging from duels to brawls to military campaigns" (Mario DiGangi, Professor of English, Lehman College and Graduate Center, CUNY, USA).

"Violent Masculinities challenges the easy association between masculinity and violence, opening up crucial new channels in early modern masculinity studies. The articles here go beyond a simple equation of fictional and historical practice to demonstrate the importance of the place of violence in the early modern mind. With a range of critical approaches, from rhetorical analysis to historical contextualization to the framing of philosophical assumptions, these essays emphasize the textuality of a broad array of critical and historical writings, and give us new insights into what constituted Renaissance manhood" (Jennifer A. Low, Associate Professor of English, Florida Atlantic University, USA).