Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford Studies in Social History) [Hardcover]

Alexandra Shepard's book complicates the standing definition of an early modern English patriarchy as argued by those involved in contemporary gender studies. Unlike most gender historians, Shepard contends that patriarchy and manhood stood as separate ideas in early modern England and therefore they should be examined accordingly. While many of these critics contend that a dominant feature of patriarchy is "men's systematic domination over women" (3), Shepard argues that it was not a "monolithic system", but rather, it was a "muddled, contradictory, and selectively invoked" ideology (1). Accordingly, Shepherd's definition of patriarchy moves away from male-female dichotomy, positing instead that patriarchy was a code of beliefs produced by elite English society; a code which instituted a hierarchical system that privileged the married male member of the gentry while excluding other males of varying age and social status. In this respect, patriarchy becomes an exclusive and exclusionary tool affecting the vast majority of females, but also marginalizing those male members of the population who do not, or cannot fit within this narrow demographic.
While ideals of womanhood may have been thoroughly examined by gender historians, Shepard points out that the "ways in which normative codes of manhood were constructed" has failed to received similar attention. Examining the various paradigms of manhood that existed during the eighty year period between 1560 to 1640--a transitional period during which patriarchal manhood shifts its focus from age and marital status to class-related issues--Shepard elucidates models that resisted or ignored the patriarchal standard. Shepard's argument is that patriarchy is not entrenched, rather it is the product of an anxious elite that is concerned with differing conceptions of manhood, and so generates and attempts to maintain, through the various media available, its own conception of manhood.
The book is divided into two sections, with the shorter first section framing the various moral, political and social literatures that work to communicate this elite conception of normative manhood. Identified within the first section of the book are "three principal gateways to patriarchal privilege: age, marital status, and, more obliquely, social status" (9). Within this tripartite model, Shepard elucidates the place of age and social status in the patriarchal worldview through evidence culled from Galenic and Parcelsian based medical tracts, both of which subordinate youth and old age to a secondary tier in this normative ideal of manhood. Although rival systems, each contained overlapping sets which compartmentalized the life of a man into distinct categories beginning with intemperate youth, progressing toward an apex of temperance that encompassed anywhere from twenty-five to sixty years of age before descending rapidly into old age and infirmity. Beyond the use of medical tracts, parenting manuals, domestic conduct literature, advice tracts, sermons, and other such media that are used to construct an conception of manhood. Shepard reminds the reader that since education was restricted to those with wealth and social standing, these medical tracts were intended for an elite readership who understood that manhood, at least patriarchal manhood, was reserved for the elite social class
While youth and old men are presented as extreme opposites within this elite patriarchy, unlike the elderly men who are viewed as authorities in cultural matters, the youth is posited as a primary site of passive and active resistance against patriarchal culture. This resistance is explored in great detail in the second section of the book via a four chapter -long case study of Cambridge that is itself grounded in the court records of the university. The court records examined prove to contain a wealth of information not only of the university, but also the town of Cambridge, which fell under the university's jurisdiction.
Within the Cambridge case study Shepard attempts to frame males who fraternize solely with their own sex as somehow subverting the patriarchal imperative of marriage. Although she spends six pages attempting to include homosexual activities within the scope of her investigation, she can only conclude that the evidence available "sheds little light" on the subject (119). Likewise, Shepard's linking fraternal camaraderie to the "rejection and inversion of patriarchal codes" seems odd when it's the only game in town at an all-male school that forbids the courting of females (125). However, what Shepard is really after are the "extremes of fraternal camaraderie which permitted and encouraged [...]the misappropriation of authority[...]and the rejection and inversion of patriarchal codes of conduct"( 125). In this respect, the case study works quite well in its examination of this aspect.
What is of further interest in Shepard's examination of the Cambridge court records is the role that an inchoate capitalism played in undermining early modern patriarchy. In the chapter entitled "Credit, Provision and Worth", Shepard examines and attempts to articulate the reasons behind the vast number of suits for libel. One reason that seems well suited for her study concerns the increasing role that credit (and with it, economic worth) came to play in determining a person's worth. The rise in credit-based relations also facilitates the rise of women's roles in the economy as married women took on what had heretofore been seen as the manly duties of buying and selling, directly countering counters patriarchal belief of the married male as provider.
The wealth of information contained in a book that encompasses somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred and sixty pages works well to facilitate Shepard's view of an early modern England awash in a sea of paradigmatic manhoods; patriarchy, as Shepard shows us, wasn't the only game in town. This book therefore is a necessary contribution to gender history in the English renaissance, and its re-imagining of patriarchy as simply one of a host of other options for defining manhood would seem to leave the door open for further work in this field.