The 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.Footnote 1 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 access to and claims on them as the benefits of patriarchy became subtly redistributed.

As currently represented, the men of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and their counterparts in the late seventeenth century look like different species rather than different generations. Two pioneering monographs, belonging to the same series, might be compared to illustrate this point. On the one hand, Elizabeth Foyster's Manhood in Early Modern England depicts the ways in which house-holding men secured their manhood through relationships with women (particularly their wives) in a precarious balance of power that caused them acute anxiety. Manhood was won through the assertion of heterosexual male identity, ideally within the confines of marriage, which in turn rested on men's efforts to tame female sexuality, itself paradoxically constructed as naturally unruly and largely beyond control. The patriarchal male, therefore, was rendered perpetually anxious by the specter of his own cuckolding. On the other hand, Philip Carter's Men and the Emergence of Polite Society traces the changing terms of refined manliness from discourses of civility in the later seventeenth century to ideals of politeness and then sensibility in the century beyond. In contrast to Foyster's work, the focus of Carter's study is on manliness as a social, rather than a sexual, identity.Footnote 2 As a consequence, the sites of elite sociability in the urban public sphere provide the setting for his analysis of the ideal types of the polite gentleman and the man of feeling and their counterparts, the blackguard and the fop. Both Foyster and Carter are sensitive to longer-term continuities and seek to link their findings to preceding and succeeding periods. However, the men featured in their accounts appear radically different, and it is important to ask why this is so.

These two books are not unrepresentative of recent trends in the history of early modern masculinity and of gender relations more generally. Work focusing on the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has tended to emphasize the household as a primary site for the construction and achievement of manhood. Such work builds on histories of early modern women and has been influenced by the tendency of early modern gender historians to base their analysis on the domestic advice literature that began to proliferate during this period.Footnote 3 The centrality of the household to the gender analysis of the early modern period should, however, not be interpreted as an exclusive focus on the private dimensions of gender relations. Instead, it is a reflection of the household's public importance as the primary unit of society, as a highly resonant analogy for the state, and, in many instances, as the site of production as well as reproduction.Footnote 4

In the context of the household, early modern manhood is represented by historians as closely linked to maintaining domestic order over subordinates (male as well as female) and particularly in terms of retaining control over wives. According to Foyster, “it was by obtaining and maintaining exclusive heterosexual marital relationships that men believed they would come closest to reaching the patriarchal goal.”Footnote 5 Preserving honor in these terms appears to have been immensely troubling for sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century men. Despite the existence of a double standard, which represented women as the more culpable sex in matters of sexual indiscretion, husbands were nonetheless faced with the imperative of controlling their wives’ lusts, with violence if necessary.Footnote 6 Images of disorderly women and anxious men abound and are explained as the product of an unstable patriarchal system predicated on concepts of insatiable female sexuality.Footnote 7 When this line of argument is taken to extremes, men as well as women are viewed as victims of patriarchy, as men suffered the “burden” of the impossible demands of maintaining dominance over a sex they perceived to be beyond their control.Footnote 8 While the vogue for identifying a seventeenth-century “crisis” in gender relations in general and masculinity in particular appears to have passed, there is nonetheless a degree of consensus among historians that this was a period witnessing acute tension over gender roles.Footnote 9 It was, according to Anthony Fletcher, characterized by “particularly fraught sexual politics.”Footnote 10

Such conclusions contrast dramatically with work on the later seventeenth century, which privileges the emergent public sphere as the key arena for the articulation of manhood, largely in relation to other men. The later seventeenth century—from the Glorious Revolution in 1688, if not from the Restoration in 1660—is generally approached as part of the (very) “long” eighteenth century, for which claims of major change are made. Crudely summarized, the long eighteenth century is heralded as the passageway to a reconfigured private domestic order, and to modern gender identities, rooted in notions of binary sexual difference (as opposed to a gender hierarchy which placed men above women on a continuum), which were increasingly internalized and which ultimately connected with a modern sense of self.Footnote 11 The household becomes largely eclipsed, and the anxious patriarch and the ridiculed cuckold are replaced with the polite gentleman and the fop, and, within the context of the public sphere at least, masculinity becomes proved between men, rather than between men and women.

This apparent periodization, I would argue, has come about by accident rather than by design and owes a great deal to chronologies that have long predated women's history, gender history, and the history of masculinity. It is most obviously a product of the historiographical carnage that has laid waste to the seventeenth century, which is in turn attributable to deeply entrenched methodological differences. There is a trend among early modern social historians of concentrating on the period between 1560 and 1640, not least because of its significance as a time of severe social and economic dislocation leading to what has been dubbed a “crisis of order.”Footnote 12 The gender conflict deemed characteristic of this period—and the anxious patriarchs associated with it—is, therefore, approached as part of the acute social conflict that was a product of the pressure of population growth on resources and the consequent realignment of community interests and relations as the middling sort became increasingly polarized from their social inferiors. The engine of change here, therefore, is economic and demographic, with, in some accounts, the most acute gender conflict attributed to nascent capitalist relations.Footnote 13 Much of this work has relied heavily on legal records to recover the texture of such social conflict, which has added to the preoccupation with the household and the parish as the key loci of tension. This also explains the choice of 1640 as a cut-off point for analysis, since legal processes (and their records) were severely disrupted by the civil wars and the church courts—which provided one of the richest archives for early modern social historians—were abolished until after the Restoration.

By contrast, histories of gender and masculinity in the long eighteenth century (to which much of the latter half of the seventeenth century is harnessed) pursue a much more cultural-historical agenda. Looking forward from the later seventeenth century (rather than back), historians have been preoccupied with the print culture pertaining to an emergent, and implicitly masculine, public sphere and its representation of genteel and middling gender identities.Footnote 14 The engine of change behind the progression from concepts of civility to politeness and sensibility is cultural and intellectual, attributed to a new emphasis on manners (manifested in, e.g., declining levels of male violence), which in turn is related more or less directly to the “civilizing process” first theorized by Norbert Elias.Footnote 15 Similarly, the profound shift toward incommensurable sexual identities for men and women (away from a “one-sex” model of a hierarchical continuum of being between male and female) is attributed to new medical thinking about the processes of conception and reproduction.Footnote 16 If social conflict is depicted in such representations, it is less between the “middling” and “poorer” sorts than between the gentry and aristocracy. With rare exceptions, the social-historical analysis of men and women's material lives and their lived experiences of gender relations has given way to the cultural-historical analysis of representations.Footnote 17

Notable by its absence from all this is the period of civil war and interregnum between 1642 and 1660. Social histories of early modern England devote negligible attention to the events of the civil wars and the wars of the three kingdoms, and this is a trend that has been largely continued by histories of masculinity (my own included) despite being an area ripe for research.Footnote 18 Likewise, political and cultural histories are only just beginning to explore how concepts of manhood were deployed in and changed by civil war and the political upheaval of the middle decades of the seventeenth century.Footnote 19 The lead here has primarily been taken by literary scholars rather than historians, and, as a result, such work has focused particularly on the representation of gender stereotypes in political debate rather than men's wartime experiences. Although there has been considerable work on the impact of the civil wars and interregnum on the lives and status of women, very few questions have been asked about men's gendered experience of war, despite evidence that military activity may have involved one tenth of the adult male population.Footnote 20 More recent work on the social history of the civil war and on the codes of conduct expected in battle is suggestive, but Diane Purkiss is the only scholar to date who has sought to investigate men's experience of war in mid-seventeenth-century Britain in explicitly gendered terms.Footnote 21 This is in stark contrast to the proliferation of work on masculinity and war in the twentieth century.Footnote 22 The experience of warfare on such a massive scale in mid-seventeenth-century Britain may also be an important strand in a longer-term shift drawing more and more men into military activity with the development of the fiscal military state. It is still extremely unclear how the experience of war in mid-seventeenth-century Britain shaped concepts of masculinity in subsequent decades and what its longer term impact might have been. Further dialogue between social, literary, and political historians is needed, therefore, both to produce a fuller gender history of the mid-seventeenth century and in order to think again about how the events of this period might have been more closely connected to preceding and subsequent decades, rather than functioning as an often unacknowledged watershed between the early seventeenth and the long eighteenth centuries.

The reason why men in the sixteenth and later seventeenth centuries appear so different in the historiography may be less indicative of a dramatic shift in male identities than attributable to the fact that we are not comparing like with like. It is unsurprising that the men described by Foyster and Carter appear so different, given that they belonged to different classes, different localities, and different contexts and that the evidence representing them is incommensurable. The appearance of difference is compounded by huge gaps in our knowledge relating to the impact of civil war and the abolition of monarchy to concepts and experiences of manhood. Another lacuna is the early sixteenth century and, in particular, the impact of the Reformation (and the Protestant rejection of clerical celibacy) on the range of male identities.Footnote 23 While we may have a few important pieces of the puzzle, we are a long way from the whole picture. In addition, while both profess to be engaged in the common goal of historicizing patriarchy, histories of masculinity have been written with very different agendas from histories of women, not least because until relatively recently the latter have been conceived in terms of either the improvement or decline of women's status in relation to men.Footnote 24 As a result, we are left with a series of mismatching histories which are almost impossible to link up, leaving us with, at best, a highly blurred and patchy picture of change.

In turn, this raises the bigger question—perhaps the most fundamental question for all gender historians—of the degree to which gender history might comprise chronologies different to and independent of those already familiar to us as historians. The inadequacy of traditional chronologies to histories of women has long since been pointed out; women's history does not work as a mere supplement to existing studies of the past.Footnote 25 It is important, therefore, to bear in mind that there are two potential dimensions of gender history to which histories of masculinity might contribute. The first analyzes the ways in which events of traditional importance such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the English civil wars and the wars of the three kingdoms were gendered. The second seeks to construct entirely new chronologies on the basis of gender change itself. The latter is a far taller order. It is clearly insufficient to superimpose preexisting sociological or historical models of change, from which the history of masculinity becomes merely derivative. However, it is extremely difficult to ascertain the ways in which gender in general, and the history of masculinity in particular, was constitutive rather than simply reflective of change. Given the inadequacy of established chronologies that do not fully account for either the transition from the late medieval to the early modern periods or the divide between the mutilated seventeenth and the long eighteenth centuries, it is possible that gender history and the history of masculinity might eventually challenge and help to reshape the periodization of early modern British history.

At this point it is worth considering in more depth the conceptual foundations upon which a history of early modern masculinity might be built. Even the term “masculinity” is problematic, since it is currently deployed very loosely to refer to several different things ranging from a set of cultural attributes associated with normative notions of maleness to the subjective experience of male identity. As John Tosh has argued, histories of masculinity need to get beyond representations of “manliness” to an analysis of masculinity as a form of social status integral to relations of power, as well as a “psychic identity.”Footnote 26 This is an especially pressing issue for early modernists, since the term itself was not coined until 1748 and, as Michael Roper argues below, not self-consciously conceived as a form of subjective identity (particularly in psychoanalytical terms) until the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 27 As a consequence, historians have tended to avoid approaching early modern masculinity as a psychic identity, although the emphasis in some work on anxious masculinity is suggestive of one way in which it might have been experienced as an emotional state.Footnote 28

What is clear, however, from the historiographical review above is that a fully comprehensive history of early modern masculinity needs to take into account both the cultural construction of maleness/manhood/manliness and the social (and, where possible, psychic) experiences of men as a diverse group of people in relation to those categories. It is easy to conflate the two (not least because of the challenges of distinguishing experience from representation). For example, although male superiority might have been secure as a cultural norm, not all men benefited as a result or benefited equally. One of the reasons why there is currently such a mismatch between the histories of masculinity before 1640 and after 1660 is that the former pay more attention to manhood as a form of social status (particularly in relation to womanhood), while the latter approach it primarily as a cultural construction. What is needed is analysis of both.

Furthermore, it is imperative that we approach masculinity (as a cultural category, as a form of social status, and as experienced by a variety of men) in multirelational terms. This means not only considering the ways in which maleness was defined in relation to femaleness, and comparing men and women's gendered experiences, but also exploring the ways in which concepts and experiences of masculinity were premised on differences among men, and of femininity on differences among women.Footnote 29 Gender relations were both inter- and intrasexual, involving a highly complex set of power dynamics linked to distinctions of age, marital status, social status, and sexuality, as well as of sex. Although its value to gender historians has been disputed, the concept of patriarchy is useful here, since it affords a framework for the analysis of such relations of power—particularly when it is acknowledged that patriarchy involved intergenerational as well as gender relations.Footnote 30 The analysis of patriarchy is especially relevant for histories of the early modern period, given the centrality of its literal meaning—“rule by fathers”—to the social and political order.Footnote 31 In addition, therefore, a third strand in a “multirelational” history of masculinity must address how gender identities and experiences were related to concepts of patriarchy and constitutive of patriarchal relations both between men and women and within each sex.

Patriarchy undoubtedly privileged maleness over femaleness and most men above most women. However, given the complex interaction of gender with other determinants of status (age, class, marital status, sexuality, ethnicity), patriarchal dividends were by no means evenly available to all men. Nor were they entirely unavailable to some women. Patriarchy involved complex axes of domination and subordination that could transcend or cut across distinctions of sex. Therefore, while patriarchal imperatives privileged most men above most women, they also privileged several men above many others. This, in turn, produced complex sources of conflict, which, like most forms of conflict, might usefully be explored as a dynamic of change. Much has been written about women's agency and resistance in the face of patriarchal norms and expectations.Footnote 32 It is perhaps ironic that, by contrast, the men excluded from, or even merely rendered anxious by, patriarchal privilege have tended to be approached as victims of the system. Just as historians are beginning to accept that in certain circumstances certain women might have benefited from patriarchal norms (albeit to a different degree and in very different ways from men), so it is important to recognize that men as well as women actively resisted patriarchal norms and also pursued alternative codes of manhood.

By tracing the multirelational complexity of all this, it becomes possible to think more broadly about what R. W. Connell has called the “social organization of masculinity” in the early modern context. Connell distinguishes between four types of masculinity. The dominant form is hegemonic, and, as a result, the other three categories of masculinity—complicit, subordinate, and marginalized—are largely determined in a dialectic with hegemonic masculinity.Footnote 33 The advantage of such a model is that it takes into account the ways in which masculinity involves relations of power between different kinds of men. The disadvantage, however, is that the alternatives to hegemonic masculinity—and in particular the subordinate and marginalized categories—are accorded little autonomy either as alternatives or as active forms of resistance, since they are exclusively defined in relation to the hegemonic norm.

Patriarchal masculinity in the early modern context encompassed an extremely powerful set of norms, yet it was also actively resisted and often ignored by a variety of men, including those occupying patriarchal positions, as well as those excluded from them. A modified model of the social organization of masculinity might, therefore, be more appropriate, involving four slightly different categories of manhood. The dominant form was patriarchal manhood, closely linked to the house-holding status associated with marriage and middle age and more obliquely linked to the social status of middling groups and elites. In contrast to patriarchal manhood (although part of the same framework), was subordinate manhood, experienced, for example, by unmarried male servants placed within other men's households for at least part of the life course, and in some cases for most of it, who conformed to the codes of deference expected of them. In addition, we can identify what might be called antipatriarchal manhood: deliberate countercodes of resistance adopted in flagrant rejection of patriarchal imperatives. The most obvious example of such codes is provided by the calculated excess and violence of youthful misrule. Such behavior enjoyed a complex relationship with patriarchal norms, since its dependence upon fraternal bonds involved the exclusion of women and therefore had a patriarchal dimension, but this also existed in direct tension with (and as a rejection of) the importance of the marital bond which was often placed at the heart of the patriarchal ideal.Footnote 34 Finally, it is possible to glimpse alternative codes of manhood, independent from but not necessarily articulated in direct tension with patriarchal norms, such as the survival strategies adopted by migrants and vagrants, the collectivism of those living in shared households, or the fraternalism of alehouse conviviality.

It is important to stress that these were very loose categories rather than rigid types, with a considerable degree of fluidity and overlap. Patriarchal norms, as well as antipatriarchal and alternative expressions of manhood, all involved many subtle variations and contradictions. It is also possible that one man might conform to more than one category not only over the course of a lifetime but also over the course of a single day. Men occupying patriarchal as well as subordinate positions might either intentionally or unintentionally assert antipatriarchal and alternative codes of manhood, albeit with different consequences. Yet there were also some distinct patterns to all this, particularly on the basis of age, marital status, ethnicity, and class, which interacted with various male identities to produce significant fault lines between men. Exploring resistant and alternative strands of masculinity also allows the possibility of viewing them in their own terms rather than solely in relation to the dominant patriarchal mode—which, in turn, might be recast slightly less forcefully as normative rather than hegemonic. Although the men subordinated by patriarchal relations were often denied access to normative manhood and the benefits associated with it in stark relations of power (most often on the basis of age or social status), they nonetheless found independent ways of articulating a positive sense of male identity. Although many such alternatives are difficult to discern in the historical record—usually becoming apparent only through the distorting lens of judicial and disciplinary responses—at the very least it is important to avoid colluding with normative assumptions about what it meant to be a man in early modern England by recognizing that they were selectively applied and adopted and that they most likely held limited significance for the majority of men at any one time.

By exploring the differences between men, and the various ways in which manhood was conceived and articulated, it becomes possible to open up the degree of contradiction and contest inherent in its construction and practice. This was not simply a competition between men for patriarchal dividends but also a contest between different codes of manhood itself. Men who failed as patriarchs or who failed to achieve patriarchal status did not necessarily fail as men, but often drew upon competing codes to prove their manhood. As a result, it is important not to equate manhood with patriarchy but rather to recognize the plurality of masculinities, many of which existed in tension with each other and with patriarchal concepts which were themselves varied and muddled rather than a monolithic measure of manhood. And it is these areas of contest that might hold the key to understanding the dynamics of change.

How, then, was all this played out in early modern Britain? Clearly, it is beyond the scope of a single article to provide a comprehensive history of masculinity along the lines just advocated; it is possible, however, to suggest a brief overview in the space remaining. Perhaps most striking is the degree of continuity to the components of male identity over the course of two centuries. The story of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in terms of the history of masculinity, is one marked more by continuity than change. Yet while the many and varied components of masculinity remained largely unchanged, what is also striking is the increasing plurality and fluidity of their configuration, informing a diverse range of male identities that existed in tension with each other and with normative expectations.

Normative—or patriarchal—concepts of manhood in the early modern period were variously informed by courtesy literature and medical theory and by biblical, chivalric, and civic traditions. In different combinations and in different measures, many attributes were celebrated or encouraged as being constitutive of (and the justification for) male superiority over women, as well as the superiority of certain men over others. These attributes ranged from strength, valor, courage, magnanimity, and liberality to virtue, reason, prudence, moderation, self-mastery, civility, honesty, independence, thrift, sobriety, and self-sufficiency, and they variously informed male identities ranging from genteel self-fashioning to the respectability associated with the honest poor. Pitted against such attributes in moral commentary, if less so in practice, were a set of antipatriarchal characteristics ranging from luxury, libertinism, prodigality, drunkenness, disorderliness, comradliness, and licentiousness to idleness, dishonesty, cowardice, “rudeness,” and vulgarity. Moralists and social commentators labored extensively to keep these attributes separate, by celebrating the former as manly and condemning the latter as either effeminate or beastly.Footnote 35

Yet what is most interesting are the ways in which these two sets of attributes were both integral to concepts of manhood—whether patriarchal, antipatriarchal, or alternative. Despite moralists’ attempts to label prodigality, drunkenness, or disorderliness, for example, as unmanly, effeminate, and beastly, many men clearly chose precisely these forms of behavior to express their manhood. As already suggested, one of its most flamboyant and visible forms was the culture of excess principally associated with young men who routinely flouted expectations of both deference and thrift by smashing windows, ridiculing their elders and betters, and consuming vast quantities of alcohol and tobacco. This can be described as antipatriarchal behavior, not because it was the most threatening to men wielding patriarchal authority (indeed, much of it was licensed misrule) but because it was a deliberate inversion of the norms commonly claimed for patriarchal manhood. This, in turn, highlights one of the contradictions at the heart of patriarchal configurations of manhood. Men—and often men occupying patriarchal positions as well as those largely excluded from patriarchal dividends (on the basis of, e.g., age or marital status)—had considerably more latitude than women when it came to breaking behavioral codes, and in many instances antipatriarchal or resistant behavior by men was not deemed inherently threatening to the social order. Young men's misrule was often written off as “sport” and its potential for conflict thus diffused and minimized.

While such flexibility provided the basis for shared male identities, it also underpinned many of the divisions among men and the related conflict among concepts of manhood, which varied considerably in conjunction with other variables of status and identity. The principal gateways to patriarchal manhood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were marriage and its association with house-holding status; adulthood, or the “middle age,” which in early modern terms was a limited phase roughly restricted to the years between thirty-five and fifty; and, increasingly over the course of the period, social status. As a result, despite a loose degree of overlap in male identities, the boundaries between the married and unmarried, the adult male and the young and old, the householders and the servants or lodgers, and different social groups, were frequently staked out in terms of the dichotomous patriarchal and antipatriarchal attributes that I have tried to sketch here. Moreover, this was a process that was carried out from both sides of the fence, as men excluded from patriarchal status configured their manhood in alternative, if not explicitly antipatriarchal terms, drawing on differing combinations of attributes from across the spectrum.

Conflicting concepts of manhood, often cast in dichotomous terms—such as manly/effeminate; thrifty/prodigal; courageous/cowardly; plain-dealing/cozening; self-governed/licentious—were also invoked in a wide range of disputes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, they were applied to the confessional divide between Protestants and Catholics; to distinctions between the industrious and idle poor; to the divergent identities of roundhead and cavalier during the civil wars; and to differences of race and ethnicity in England's first wave of colonization and imperial expansion.Footnote 36 Distinctions between normative and deviant forms of manhood informed a powerful language of masculinity that served to articulate divisions in the most hostile terms and that also influenced the distribution of patriarchal dividends in favor of the married, the middle aged, the householders, the English, the white, and increasingly the middling sorts and elites.

With the exception of the introduction of the attribute of politeness toward the end of the seventeenth century, this language changed very little between 1500 and 1700.Footnote 37 What did change, however, was the ways in which it was applied and appropriated. It is my hypothesis that this language became more diverse, while also serving a more rigid set of boundaries along class lines. Owing to the pressure of rapid population growth on limited resources, from the mid- to late seventeenth century increasing numbers of men and women of the “poorer sorts” were denied the privilege of marrying because they did not have the means to establish independent households. It has been estimated that up to a fifth of those born between 1604 and 1628 never married; combined with the late age of marriage and high mortality rates, this meant that the majority of men at any one time in the later seventeenth century were unmarried.Footnote 38 Similarly significant were the growing numbers of men becoming increasingly dependent upon wage labor, not only for a larger portion of their livings, but also for longer periods (if not all) of the life span. According to patriarchal principles, such men were accorded little more status than young men and women in service; the boundaries between life-cycle service and permanent wage labor, while shifting, remained blurred.Footnote 39 The negative associations attached to wage labor informed and, therefore, circumscribed mid-seventeenth-century attempts to extend the franchise and helped to drive a deeper wedge between the “honest” middling men and their laboring counterparts as citizenship became reconfigured in more exclusively male terms over the course of the early modern period in ways that disadvantaged many men of the poorer sorts as well as women.Footnote 40 Some of the antipatriarchal attributes traditionally associated with youth became more readily applied to lower-ranking men of any age and their assertions of alternative or resistant codes of manhood were deemed more threatening to the social order than the temporary misdemeanors of young men. Inevitably this exacerbated tension among different categories of manhood that, in conjunction with social conflict, contributed in important ways to incipient class identities. As a result, the ways in which normative codes of manhood could accommodate deviant forms of behavior were beginning to reform. Furthermore, any sense of shared identity between men on the basis of age or marital status became looser as divisions of class began to override distinctions of age more forcefully. The exception to this was old age, which was becoming sharper as a chronologically defined (rather than functionally defined) category at the same time that the distinction between youth and adulthood began to diminish in relation to differences of social status.Footnote 41

This, in turn, partly helps to contextualize both the anxious patriarch and the refined gentlemen that currently feature in the historiography of early modern masculinity, since the first represents the ways in which men from across the social spectrum drew upon normative codes of manhood to endorse the marital and house-holding status of adult males and the second represents the ways in which men from one social group appropriated and shaped normative codes of manhood to endorse social exclusiveness. What is now needed is a great deal more work on the multirelational context of both groups, particularly attentive to the levels of conflict each involved—both within each sex as well as between them. It may then be possible to work toward not only a fuller history of masculinity in its own right but also a new and more fruitful periodization of the early modern period. This is likely to lead to a fuller appreciation of a long seventeenth century with as much cultural- and social-historical coherence and significance as has been claimed for the long eighteenth century, based on the recognition that the profound cultural shifts attributed to the eighteenth century both built extensively on earlier precedents and were offset and mitigated by as many social and psychic continuities.Footnote 42

The men of the later seventeenth century were not an entirely different species from their sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century counterparts; they drew on many of the same discourses which were subtly adapted over time and according to different social contexts to perform a wide range of cultural work and to inform a panoply of male experiences—some of which are beyond the reach of historians. A greater appreciation of the specificity of these changes, as well as the continuities that persisted alongside them, may begin to challenge received chronologies derived from histories serving very different agendas and outmoded theories of causation. The rejection of master narratives must be accompanied by the exploration of new explanations of both continuity and change. The disjuncture between gender history and much of the traditional periodization of early modernity suggests that it has an important role to play in this endeavor.