In studies on premodern masculinities that have enriched scholarship in recent years, relatively little attention has been paid to the eroticising of the male body. Masculinities and Representation seeks to fill this lacuna, illustrating how gender construction served to affirm but also diversify premodern masculinity. In so doing, this collection details how, as a social construct, masculinity was not a single concept, but a dynamic and intricate notion.
Focusing on the premodern period, Masculinities and Representation reveals how heteronormative masculinity was affirmed, but also how it was challenged when the male body was eroticised in art, literature, and devotion, or when 'masculine' norms were transgressed by the assumption of 'feminine' behaviours. Ultimately, the book demonstrates how masculinity itself could be transgressive in its focus of affection or in its inherent ambiguities.
Edited by:
Konrad Eisenbichler
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9781487556976
ISBN 10: 1487556977
Pages: 268
Publication Date: 12 December 2024
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction James M. Saslow Part I. Religion, Heavenly Art, Earthly Bodies 1. Bathing and Bonding: Sensual Male Imagery in Italian Paintings of Baptism Steven F.H. Stowell 2. Blasphemous or Beautiful? Leonardo da Vinci’s St John the Baptist, Holy Masculinity, and Its Ambiguities ca. 1500 Anne L. Williams 3. Sharing a Bed with Dominic: Celibacy and Masculinity in the Cult of St. Vincent Ferrer Laura Ackerman Smoller 4. The Body of Christ: Suffering and Desire in Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s De Venere et Cupidine Expellendis Marco Piana Part II. Women and Men: Masculinity, Effeminacy, and Desire 5. A Dio Zerbini a Dio, a Dio Narcisi: Satirizing Effeminacy in Margherita Costa’s Florentine Works (1638–1641) Sara E. Díaz 6. Masculine-Feminine Dichotomy in the Sixteenth Century: Mythological Donna con Donna Images from Fontainebleau and Northern Italy Tara White Part III. Knowledge and Emotions: Forbidden and Required 7. Wounded Histories on the Stages of Old and New Worlds: Vivaldi’s Motezuma and the Cries of Conquest Kate Driscoll 8. Male Courtly Feeling and the Historical Performativity of Shyness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Tiffany Hoffman 9. Latin Epigrams and Early Modern Sexual Knowledge: Or, How Jonson Read His Martial Ian Frederick Moulton Index
Konrad Eisenbichler is a professor emeritus from the University of Toronto.
Reviews for Masculinities and Representation: The Eroticized Male in Early Modern Italy and England
""This erudite volume of cutting-edge essays suggestively extends the range of the burgeoning field of masculine studies and crucially illustrates the way current attacks on the study of gender and sexuality limit and undermine critical discourses not just for historical scholarship but for understanding the range of human possibilities.""--Guido Ruggiero, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Miami ""This splendid collection of essays examines how premodern men coped with the tectonic shifts in traditional masculine culture that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By reshaping old motifs, or creating new ones, men expressed their identities, and their conventional or transgressive sexualities, from warrior to dandy, from homoeroticism to effeminacy, from the repression of desire to its expression. These essays reveal premodern masculinities on the threshold of the modern world.""--Jacqueline Murray, University Professor Emerita of History, University of Guelph
