Alexandra Shepard

What Have Historians Done with Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History, circa 1500–1950

I is now over ten years since John Tosh asked the question, “What should historians do with masculinity?” The history of masculinity was then emerging as, and has since become, a burgeoning field of enquiry, with close (although not always uncontested) links with women’s history, gender history, and the history of sexuality. This seemed a good point to take stock of the central themes and questions that have emerged. The articles in this special section survey the findings of historians of masculinity in Britain from the early sixteenth to the late twentieth centuries in order to assess what has been achieved and where the main gaps lie, where the field might be going, and what insights into the relationship between gender and change are yielded by a long-term chronological perspective. The articles that follow originate from a one-day colloquium, held at the University of Sussex in September 2003. Contributors with expertise in a range of different periods were invited, although it was intended that each contribution should overlap chronologically to aid the identification of key themes. Contributors were asked to reflect on four central questions. First, in what ways has masculinity (as both represented and experienced) been defined as a concept and deployed as an analytical category by historians? Second, what methodologies have been employed by historians of masculinity, and how have different approaches influenced

From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700

T history of masculinity is still very much a nascent field for historians of early modern Britain, but there have been some important foundations laid by a few key publications. On the basis of such work, it would not be surprising if a student attempting an overview of the period were impressed by a profound change in the meanings of manhood between 1500 and 1700. Yet this is perhaps attributable more to methodological differences among historians than to a dramatic shift in male identities over the course of the early modern period. It will be argued here that despite the semblance of a transformation in concepts of manhood, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were marked as much by continuity as by change. Although there was an increasing plurality of and fluidity to male identities between 1500 and 1700, they remained focused—if variously reconfigured—around many of the same fixed points. Most of the terms used to identify both normative and deviant manhood remained current throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most profound change witnessed during the early modern period was, therefore, not in the available repertoire of male identities themselves but in different men’s

Worth, Age, and Social Status in Early Modern England

This article introduces a new source for assessing the distribution of wealth in early modern England derived from witness depositions taken by the church courts. It discusses the accuracy of statements of worth provided by thousands of witnesses between the mid-sixteenth and later seventeenth centuries, and uses the monetary estimates of worth in goods that the majority of deponents supplied to assess the changing distribution of personal wealth. We argue that this data supports recent claims that the pre-industrial English economy experienced significant levels of economic growth, while showing that its benefits were increasingly unevenly distributed between different social groups. In particular, the century after 1550 witnessed spectacular increases in yeoman worth that outstripped inflation by a factor of 10. The relative wealth of yeomen was also underpinned by its more secure distribution over the life cycle which further compounded the differences between them and other social groups.

Honesty, Worth and Gender in Early Modern England, 1560–1640

In January 1600 Beatrice Swynney, the wife of a Cambridge tailor, was produced as a witness in a defamation case brought by the minister of her parish against a fellow parishioner, the baker John Fidling, in the course of which her honesty, and that of many of her neighbours, was brought into question. Walter House, who was a fellow of Queens’ College as well as minister of St Andrew’s parish, complained that John Fidling had denounced him as ‘a scald and scurvy priest… a beast… a Raskall a knave & a troblesome fellowe’. Fidling had also accused House of bringing his parish to ‘such a glameringe & troble as never was before’, and objected that House had made a presentment against ‘one of the honestest men of the parishe’.1 Consequently, according to the allegations against him, Fidling had wished ‘a home plague’ upon House to ‘fetche him out of the parishe’, adding ‘the devill brought him into the parishe & his dame [will] fetch him out’, before declaring that ‘I will never turne my tonge to my tayle for such a Jack as he is.’2

MINDING THEIR OWN BUSINESS: MARRIED WOMEN AND CREDIT IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON

Taking a micro-historical approach, this paper explores the business activities of Elizabeth Carter and Elizabeth Hatchett, two married women who operated together as pawnbrokers in London in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Based on a protracted inheritance dispute through which their extensive dealings come to light, the discussion assesses married womens lending and investment strategies in a burgeoning metropolitan economy; the networks through which women lenders operated; and the extent to which wives could sidestep the legal conventions of ‘coverture’ which restricted their ownership of moveable property. It is argued that the moneylending and asset management activities of women like Carter and Hatchett were an important part of married womens work that did not simply consolidate neighbourhood ties but that placed them at the heart of the early modern economy.

Litigation and locality: the Cambridge university courts, 1560–1640

The importance of legal institutions as mediators of social relations in early modern towns has long been recognized. However, opinion differs over the extent to which early modern courts generated social conflict or resolved it through promoting consensus. This article brings to light a neglected jurisdiction and argues that while the university courts inevitably generated conflict when pursuing their regulative agenda, they nonetheless offered Cambridge inhabitants a considerable resource which was used extensively in both the speedy resolution and the vexatious prolongation of a wide range of disputes which tended to cut across rather than deepen town–gown hostilities.

Crime and mentalities in early modern England. By Malcolm Gaskill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+377. ISBN 0-521-57275-4. £40.

Records of crime are one of the richest sources available to historians of early modern England, not simply because of the light they shed on the patterns and processes of prosecution, but because of the wealth of incidental detail they contain. They have proved particularly valuable to scholars seeking to reconstruct history ‘ from below’, not least in recent approaches to the state from the bottom up. In this book Malcolm Gaskill probes such records even further in search of a history ‘ from within ’. He is less interested in reconstructing the deeds of relatively humble social actors than the more elusive thoughts which informed them, in order to produce ‘a history of social meanings ’ or ‘ the way ordinary folk thought about their everyday lives ’ (p. ). While administrative records (particularly assizes depositions) are privileged as most revealing of such mentalities, Gaskill places them alongside a wealth of other printed and manuscript material illustrative of both normative and impressionistic opinion. This extensive range of evidence is handled with considerable nuance, drawing on the approaches of the annales school, ‘new’ social history, and historical anthropology to show that early modern mentalities were more complex and contingent than has often been allowed by different master narratives. Issues of change are not sidelined, however, and the central argument of the book is that the early modern period witnessed a fundamental transition from mental worlds governed by belief in transcendent supernatural forces to a new sense of certainty about human agency. Gaskill focuses on three felonies – witchcraft, coining, and murder – and has new things to say about each. Rejecting previous generalizations about patterns of witchcraft prosecution, he argues that the differences between cases are more striking than their similarities. Each case was context-dependent and usually revolved around some sort of competition for resources. The only overriding theme admitted, therefore, is that of interpersonal strife, which rekindles a view of late sixteenth and early seventeenthcentury English society as characterized by ‘malice, jealousy, and bitter conflicts of interest ’ (p. ). Even gender is treated as an incidental rather than integral part of witchcraft prosecutions, although given the disproportionate numbers of women involved and an emphasis on the contextual importance of the household, there was perhaps a missed opportunity here to shed further light on vexed issues such as the gendered use of space, the perceived sources of women’s power and the ways in which it was circumscribed. In detailing the broad spectrum of meanings attached to witchcraft, Gaskill scrupulously avoids plotting particular beliefs against standard axes of difference. Thus he emphasizes both the potential for overlap in the assumptions of accusers and the accused, and the inadequacy of explanatory models based on diverging elite and popular opinion. While acknowledging the emergence of deepening cultural fissures