Jonas Liliequist

Laughing at the Unmanly Man in Early Modern Sweden

The aim of this essay is to draw attention to the concept of unmanliness as a productive category in the historical analysis of gender and laughter. So far, unmanliness has most often caught the historian’s analytical attention as a laughing matter with misogynist overtones in tales about cuckoldry and henpecked husbands. I wish to broaden the perspective to include how the comic effects of unmanliness have been used as rhetorical weapons in social and political conf licts, beginning with arguments about rank and civil service among the aristocracy in seventeenth- century Sweden. It will be argued that allusions to unmanliness not only played a key role in the early modern rhetoric of male prestige but also were strategic means of changing cultural values and ideals and the meanings of masculinity.

Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)Making of Gender

A fresh look at longstanding questions, across a temporal range (classical antiquity to the early modern) and a geographical range (Asia to Europe, Islam to Christendom). The optimistic investigato ...