When sertanejos, or poor men from rural north-eastern Brazil, appear in history, literature or popular culture, they are usually characterised as unrelentingly macho – stubborn, misogynistic and prone to violent outbursts in defence of their manly reputations. This depiction has been repeated so often, Martha S. Santos argues, that until recently, even some of the most rigorous scholars of Brazilian history and culture seem to have accepted it as an eternal and incontrovertible truth. In Cleansing Honor with Blood, Santos picks apart criminal court cases, the verses of popular poets and the texts of late nineteenth-century novels set in the arid interior of north-eastern Brazil to show that this model of sertanejo manhood is socially and historically constructed, rather than the product of some timeless, virile essence. What is more interesting for those familiar with the 15-odd years’ worth of critical masculinities studies preceding the book is the meticulous excavation of land registries and post-mortem estate inventories that Santos undertakes in order to understand why particular sertanejo men, in specific historical moments, ‘reproduced a form of manliness centered on the capacity to exercise violence’ (p. 2).

To lay the ground for her investigation of sertanejo masculinity, Santos constructs a revised history of rural north-eastern Brazil in which, beginning in 1845, small-scale commercial farms began to dot a landscape previously dominated by the large cattle ranches of wealthy farmers, and as more and more local families gained stable access to their own productive lands, many free poor men took control of their own labour and prospered. But this prosperity was always tenuous, based as it was on men's claims to agricultural plots established more by community recognition than by law. In this context, Santos argues, a man who relied on the output of his smallholding to sustain his family was obliged always to appear a successful and respectable provider in public, since damage to his honour could weaken – or even invalidate – his access to landed patrimony or scarce natural resources.

In 1865, several events began acting in consort with political pressures to bring the post-flood prosperity these small farmers enjoyed to a close: Brazil's imperial government began aggressively recruiting free poor men to fight in the Paraguayan war, the cotton boom that had enabled several rural families to become financially independent, if not affluent, suddenly came to a close, and then the Great Drought of 1877–9 struck, causing enormous destitution and displacement among the free poor and depriving many local men of the material possessions that undergirded their claims to manly honour. Under these conditions, Santos argues, ‘the reproduction of interpersonal masculine violence became the only available strategic response – creative yet destructive – for many sertanejos to navigate their unsettling world’ (p. 212).

This is not to say that in the final third of the nineteenth century sertanejo men suddenly discovered that violence could be used as a strategic resource. Many of the large landowners who effectively ruled the north-east before the empire had taken up arms against rival family clans and their armies to battle for power and natural resources. Likewise, in the midst of the relatively good times prior to the Great Drought, even the modest subsistence farmers Santos says were able to gain prestige through property ownership and hard work sometimes resorted to physical aggression when dealing with social inferiors who threatened their honour or insulted their manhood. The difference, Santos argues, is that in the late nineteenth century, economic destitution and physical displacement worked in tandem to deprive men of their livelihoods at the same time that social support networks that had previously sustained poor families during times of scarcity were withering away. This prevented most of the poor young men in the region from fulfilling their traditional roles as family providers and protectors, and compelled many to either enter the army, head to the Amazon in search of legitimate labour or join one of the bandit gangs that terrorised the north-eastern backlands, perpetuating the image of the sertanejo as short-tempered and vicious in his pursuit of honour.

What is more, with all these men on the move, many women assumed control of their own households, thereby inverting the gender roles that had traditionally undergirded life in the rural north-east. These autonomous women ‘laid bare the weakened grip of male control over female kin and the disruption of the social ideal of female dependence on male providers’ (p. 163). Many otherwise powerless men resorted to violence against such women, Santos argues, in order to ‘set constraints on autonomous women's behavior and actions, and to ensure the continuation of a patriarchal order, even in the face of rapid social changes that called into question its relevance and legitimacy’ (p. 155).

Santos relies almost exclusively on R. W. Connell's notion of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to explain how and why sertanejos resorted to violence in dealing with autonomous women and with male rivals during the difficult years of 1865–89. Though this notion serves the archival material Santos collected well, her analysis could have been more nuanced and much richer had she undertaken a deeper exploration of gender and the various theories that help us to understand its construction. Overall, Santos seems to be uncomfortable with critical theory – or so suggests her use of Benjamin's notion of the state of emergency to explain the effects of the Great Drought. Perhaps this is why she relies largely on repetition to generate her own scholarly authority.

Santos elegantly summarises each of her chapters in the book's introduction, reiterates each of these summaries in the ‘conclusion’ of each chapter, and repeats them again in the final chapter of the book. Given that the most significant contribution Cleansing Honor with Blood makes to an understanding of gender in the context of rural nineteenth-century Ceará is to accumulate details about how men and women of the region lived their lives and contested, while constructing, the roles available to them within their society, Santos would have done well to let her meticulous research shine through rather than burying it within the multiple iterations of her analysis.