This handbook aims to challenge 'gender blindness' in the historical study of high politics, power, authority and government, by bringing together a group of scholars at the forefront of current historical research into the relationship between masculinity and political power. Until very recently in historical terms, formal political authority in Europe was normally and ideally held by adult males, with female power being perceived as a recurrent aberration. Yet paradoxically the study of the interactions between masculinity and political culture is still very much in its infancy. This volume seeks to remedy this lacuna by considering the different consequences of the masculinity of power over two millennia of European history. It examines how masculinity and political culture have interacted from ancient Rome and the early medieval Byzantine empire, to twentieth-century Germany and Italy. It considers a broad variety of case studies from early medieval Iceland and late medieval France, to Naples at the time of the French Revolution and Strasbourg after the Franco-Prussian War, with a particular focus on the development of political masculinities in Great Britain between the sixteenth century and the present day.

The figure and role of the late-medieval father is reappraised through a close reading of a range of documents from the period, including both letters and romances. Late medieval English society placed great weight on the practices of primogeniture, patrilineal descent, and patriarchal government, and the significance of the father had cultural resonance beyond the rule of law. Yet despite aburgeoning interest in both the family and gender, "the father" has to date received little attention from medievalists. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the "fictions" of fatherhood, the ideological constructs that underpinned late medieval conceptions of fathers and patriarchy. Its focus on gentry and mercantile readers and writers also offers new insights into the literary culture of late medieval England by considering how texts were produced and received within gentry and bourgeois communities, and demonstrates the ability of texts to not only reflect but also shape hegemonic norms and cultural anxieties. Through close examination of late medieval letters and romances, it shows how the father was the dominant figure not only of medieval domestic life, but also of the medieval imagination. Dr RACHEL E. MOSS is a Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton.