Christopher Fletcher

Government and Political Life in England and France, c. 1300-c. 1500

1. The government of later medieval France and England: a plea for comparative history Jean-Philippe Genet 2. Courts Malcolm Vale 3. Kings, nobles and military networks Steven Gunn and Armand Jamme 4. Offices and officers Christine Carpenter and Olivier Matteoni 5. Royal public finance (c.1290-1523) David Grummitt and Jean-Francois Lassalmonie 6. Justice, law and lawyers Michelle Bubenicek and Richard Partington 7. Church and state, clerks and graduates Benjamin Thompson and Jacques Verger 8. Political representation Christopher Fletcher 9. Grace and favour: the petition and its mechanisms Gwilym Dodd and Sophie Petit-Renaud 10. The masses Vincent Challet and Ian Forrest 11. In the mirror of mutual representation: political society as seen by its members Franck Collard and Aude Mairey 12. Conclusion John Watts.

The Whig Interpretation of Masculinity? Honour and Sexuality in Late Medieval Manhood

The history of masculinity has recently encountered a general problem which has often arisen in the study of past societies. A number of commentators have drawn attention to the difficulty of reconciling modern categories of analysis with the cultural concepts of their object of study.1 Two divergent tendencies have been identified in the study of masculinity. Some writers, it has been suggested, have favoured a sociologically informed approach, taking their agenda from modern social theory, whilst others have followed a primarily cultural historical method, focusing their efforts on the explication of contemporary structures of ideas.2 A certain dissatisfaction with the ‘linguistic turn’ in historical studies has arguably contributed to focusing criticism on the second of these two perspectives, in that a primary cultural approach might be accused of reducing lived social realities to just so much discourse.3 Weighing up these two tendencies, commentators on recent developments in both history and ethnography have expressed similar dissatisfactions, invoking the need for a primarily sociological perspective to enable broad comparisons over time,4 or noting the limitations of ‘symbolic’ studies which are ‘often remarkable, but partial’.5