Masculinity in the Reformation Era ed. by Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn (review)

As its title suggests, this useful volume focuses on the construction of masculinity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformation Europe. In addition to an introduction, the book includes three sections: the first composed of contributions that “treat departures from that abstract standard that early modern models proscribed,” the second of chapters that “relate masculinity to concrete civic settings” (p. xii), and the third of content that addresses Martin Luther. Two chapters in the volume—those by Scott Hendrix and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks—were first published elsewhere.

The introduction by Hendrix and Susan Karant-Nunn provides a solid overview of preceding scholarship. For those seeking further context for thinking about early-modern masculinity, the opening pages of Helmut Puff’s chapter are also worth considering.

Part 1 of the book is titled “Deviating from the Norms.” Its first chapter, by Allison M. Poska, asks why large numbers of early-modern peasant men left Galicia. She argues that they were motivated by limited economic opportunity and local custom affording married men little authority. Together, Poska asserts, these made it impossible for Galician peasant men to meet the expectations of elite Spanish masculinity without seeking their fortune elsewhere. Helmut Puff then elegantly studies the life of Werner Steiner—wealthy married cleric, humanist reformer, friend to great men, military aficionado, seeker of physical intimacy with lower class men—as “a life lived at the intersection of different masculinities” (p. 23). Puff argues that cases such as Steiner’s demonstrate what masculinity studies and sexuality studies can learn from each other about possible lives in early-modern Europe and about the gendering of sex acts. Next, Ulrike Strasser ingeniously considers how the success of the Jesuits depended on the order’s “emotional appeal as … a homosocial fellowship of men who embodied a reimagined clerical masculinity” (p. 46, emphasis in original) that seems not to have been an anxious response to the Protestant emphasis on the procreative family.

Part 2 of the book, “Civic and Religious Duties,” contains three chapters. The first, by Karen E. Spierling, offers a sophisticated exploration of “negotiated masculinity” in Reformation Geneva. Focusing on the expectations placed on fathers, she demonstrates that religious expectations ranging from piety to time spent in church could come into conflict with traditional forms of virility and the imperative to care for the needs of the family. She also underscores that the increasing emphasis on the father as the head of the patriarchal household was in tension with secular and religious regulation of family matters such as sexual impropriety and the disciplining of children. The next chapter, “Masculinity and the Reformed Tradition in France” by Raymond A. Mentzer, looks at evolving male roles in baptism, the Eucharist, and marriage as defined by the French Reformed Church. The section concludes with an essay by B. Ann Tlusty that examines the expulsion of firebrand preacher Georg Müller from Augsburg and the ensuing civil unrest. Rather than emphasizing Protestant concerns about spiritual autonomy and economic exploitation as other scholars have done, Tlusty argues that rumors about the possibility of massacres like those that had occurred elsewhere in Europe led male Protestants to fulfill traditional roles by taking steps to protect their possessions and families.

The third and final section of the book opens with an essay by Karant-Nunn that “discuss[es] Luther’s own ideals concerning proper masculine behavior and his private attempts to embody those ideals” (p. 168). Most revealing here is Karant-Nunn’s sustained discussion of Luther’s use of humor in managing the domestic scene.

As the introduction notes, together these chapters demonstrate the need for ongoing research into the ways in which the lived reality of early-modern men differed from the largely homogenous proscriptive expectations placed on them. As a whole, this volume is an important contribution to...