The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. Introduction: Masculinity and Politik

   • Christopher Fletcher

   Pages 1-16

3. Power, Authority and Phallic Representations in Ancient Roman Society

   • Cyril Dumas

   Pages 17-35

4. Between Bishops and Barbarians: The Rulers of the Later Roman Empire

   • Mathew Kuefler

   Pages 37-62

5. The Rise and Fall of the High Chamberlain Eutropius: Eunuch Identity, the Third Sex and Power in Fourth-Century Byzantium

   • Georges Sidéris

   Pages 63-84

6. Virile Women and Effeminate Men: Gendered Judgements and the Exercise of Power in the Ottonian Empire c. 1000 ce

   • Laurence Leleu

   Pages 85-104

7. Creating Kin, Extending Authority: Blood-Brotherhood and Power in Medieval Iceland

   • Pragya Vohra

   Pages 105-131

8. Beyond Celibacy: Medieval Bishops, Power and Masculinity in the Middle Ages

   • Matthew M. Mesley

   Pages 133-160

9. Masculinity and Political Struggle in the Cities of the Crown of Castile at the End of the Middle Ages

   • Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer

   Pages 161-178

10. ‘By this My Beard Which Hangs From My Face’: The Masculinity of the French Princes in the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War

    • Hugo Dufour

    Pages 179-199

11. Monarchy and Masculinity in Early Modern England

    • Susan Doran

    Pages 201-223

12. Manhood and the English Revolution

    • Ann Hughes

    Pages 225-246

13. A Man’s Sphere? British Politics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

    • Matthew McCormack

    Pages 247-264Open Access

14. ‘I Tremble Lest My Powers of Thought are not What They Ought to be’: Reputation and the Masculine Anxieties of an Eighteenth-Century Statesman

    • Henry French

    Pages 265-283

15. Antonio Canova’s Statue of King Ferdinand IV and the Gendering of Neapolitan Sovereignty

    • Allison Goudie

    Pages 285-310

16. Psychological Androgyny, Romanticism and the Radical Challenge to Hegemonic Masculinity in England, 1790–1840

    • Victoria Russell

    Pages 311-333

17. The Dominant and the Dominated. Power Relations and Intimate Authorities in the Personal Diary of the Jurist Eugène Wilhelm (1885–1951)

    • Régis Schlagdenhauffen

    Pages 335-357

18. Eminently Queer Victorians and the Bloomsbury Group’s Critique of British Leadership

    • Dominic Janes

    Pages 359-378

19. Masculinity, Political Culture, and the Rise of Nazism

    • Christopher Dillon

    Pages 379-402

20. Masculinities and Parliamentary Culture in Modern Britain

    • Ben Griffin

    Pages 403-433

This handbook aims to challenge ‘gender blindness’ in the historical study of high politics, power, authority and government, by bringing together a group of scholars at the forefront of current historical research into the relationship between masculinity and political power.  Until very recently in historical terms, formal political authority in Europe was normally and ideally held by adult males, with female power being perceived as a recurrent aberration. Yet paradoxically the study of the interactions between masculinity and political culture is still very much in its infancy. This volume seeks to remedy this lacuna by considering the different consequences of the masculinity of power over two millennia of European history. It examines how masculinity and political culture have interacted from ancient Rome and the early medieval Byzantine empire, to twentieth-century Germany and Italy. It considers a broad variety of case studies from early medieval Iceland and late medieval France, to Naples at the time of the French Revolution and Strasbourg after the Franco-Prussian War, with a particular focus on the development of political masculinities in Great Britain between the sixteenth century and the present day.

• gender
• government
• political authority
• Byzantium
• French Revolution

• CNRS/University of Lille, Lille, France

  Christopher Fletcher

• Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK

  Sean Brady

• Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

  Rachel E. Moss

• European University Institute, Florence, Italy

  Lucy Riall

Christopher Fletcher is a chargé de recherche (Assistant Research Professor) in the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) affiliated to the University of Lille, France. His previous publications include Richard II: Manhood, Youth and Politics, 1377-99 (2008) and Government and Political Life in England and France, c. 1300-c.1500 (2015).

Sean Brady is Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. His research interest focuses on gender, sexuality, politics and religion in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. His publications include What is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World (Palgrave, 2011), co-edited with John H. Arnold. 



Rachel E. Moss is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, UK. Her current research project is on late medieval homosociality, and she is the author of Fatherhood and its Representations in Middle English Texts (2013). 



Lucy Riall is Professor of the Comparative History of Europe at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Her publications include Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (2007), Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town (2013) and (edited with Valeria Babini and Chiara Beccalossi), Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789-1914 (Palgrave, 2015).

Policies and ethics