Most histories of women written in the past thirty years owe an undeniable debt to feminist theory and the women's movement. Most histories of men, those exploring masculinity and manhood, have taken their intellectual cues from gay and lesbian studies. The two fields have many affinities, and scholars working in them have benefited greatly from each other's work. Only very recently, however, have historians such as Elizabeth Foyster, Anthony Fletcher, Anna Bryson, Garthine Walker, and others attempted to meld the two perspectives together, examining the ways in which masculine identity and power affected men's lives as well as women's lives. Alexandra Shepard's important study of the Meanings of Manhood powerfully demonstrates the insights that such an approach can provide.

Drawing on an impressive array of published and archival sources and making excellent use of the fertile records of the Vice Chancellor's Court in Cambridge, Shepard shows what can be gained by analyzing patriarchy not just from a modern perspective, as the systematic domination of women, but as early modern subjects viewed it, as rule by fathers. Combining the two approaches provides a rich and subtle vision of power relations within as well as between the sexes, showing how different men and women dealt with patriarchal ideology in their daily lives. Men (and women) had complex choices to make, not simply about whether to accept or reject assigned roles, but about the extent to which they might embrace, enforce, ignore, manipulate, or reject each element within expansive repertoires of patriarchal ideals. Manhood, in other words, had many meanings, some of them contradictory, and it was neither synonymous with, nor wholly determined by, the dictates and dividends of patriarchal power and authority.

The book has two parts. Part 1 takes a careful look at various forms of theoretical and prescriptive literature, showing the range of ideals of manhood and how dependent they were on a variety of factors, some inherent, such as age and marital and social status, and others more contingent, dependent on individuals’ abilities to control themselves and resist the fruits and temptations of any number of deadly sins. Medical historians and intellectual historians interested in the dignity of man have trodden this ground before, but Shepard's focus on gender and manhood reveals complexities that many social and feminist historians have overlooked. Her perceptive identification in these genres of competing, and sometimes incompatible, hierarchies of manhood persuasively demonstrates both the mutability of masculine identity and the extent to which it was shaped by social class as well as by mastery over women. According to prescriptive literature, only socially elite middle-aged married men could aspire to achieve the prized ideal of perfect manhood, and only these men could reap the full benefits of patriarchal authority.

Part 2 examines the acting out of the dramas of manhood in actual social situations, in chapters entitled “Youthful Excess and Fraternal Bonding,” “The Violence of Manhood,” “Respectability, Sex, and Status,” “Credit, Provision and Worth,” and “The Ancienter Sort.” Space prevents even a cursory review of Shepard's findings, and of the subtlety and originality of her investigations of countercodes of manhood (those inspired not by sober ideals, but by drunkenness, debauchery, sexual conquest, or mocking gestures) and the affinities between male and female conceptions of honor and reputation. However, two key themes deserve mention. One is her analysis of the paradox of violence, in a society where institutions and individuals often used violent means to enforce patriarchal ideals, yet unauthorized or excessive acts of violence undermined or threatened those ideals. While authors of conduct literature characterized much violence as unmanly—the victory of passion over reason—boisterous young gentlemen, laborers, and apprentices all regarded actual or threatened violence as a key constituent of their masculine identities. The other is the growing importance between 1560 and 1640 of social class in the construction of ideals of manhood and in the distribution of the benefits of patriarchal authority, largely as a result of demographic and social change, such as the increasing reliance on wage labor. Shepard's conclusions here provide a vital backstory to eighteenth-century narratives of civility.

There is little to fault in this thoughtful and confidently argued monograph, although by its nature it raises as many questions as it answers. For example, one wonders the extent to which questions of manhood and masculine identity might have affected men's willingness (or unwillingness) to bring certain types of lawsuits or to characterize and justify episodes in the ways that they did. As Shepard admits, future scholars will have to map more fully the intricate terrain that she has identified, but her book not only shows the way, it provides many of the tools for the job. It should be essential reading for anyone interested in social, cultural, gender, and family history in the early modern period and beyond.