Kathleen Perry Long - High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France

I would like to thank Catharine Randall, whose advice and work on early versions of this collection were crucial for advancing the project. I am grateful to the contributors themselves, who demonstrated incredible patience and understanding as the project went through various phases. I thank Ray Mentzer for taking this project on, and to the readers who provided valuable advice. Most of all, however, I would like to thank Paula Presley and her team at Truman State University Press, who performed the herculean labors of making this collection look and sound its best; their work has been truly impressive.

A number of people inspired this collection; the contributors themselves, of course, but also my colleagues. Mitchell Greenberg, whose work appears in this collection, has been an intellectual inspiration. Nelly Furman encouraged me to ask questions about gender and its relation to epistemology long before such pursuits were in vogue; may she long continue to be in the avant garde of intellectual pursuits. Lawrence Kritzmans work on gender and sexuality also had a significant influence on my own. Finally, I would like to thank the students who heard versions of my own work, and discussed this collection with me: Duane Rudolph, Shannon Clute, Nicolas Barras, Justin Portnoy, and Patricia Gravatt.

Kathleen P. Long, Editor

The past decade has seen explosive growth in the number of critical inquiries pertaining to gender, sexuality, and the body. Nonetheless, the representation of masculinity in early modern French culture has received little attention to date.

Much of the work on the relationship between gender and identity formation in early modern Europe has viewed the Continent through predominantly English lenses, as if cultural specificities had no relevance to the understanding of particular cultural manifestations. This perspective effaces the issue of the very particular contexts in which gender identity (designated as sexe in early modern French, and thus conflated to some degree with essential biology) is problematized. The rigid hierarchies of church and state, which overlay a more fluid society and culture, privilege the masculine at the dawn of the early modern period. From Aristotle on, the male is defined as the ideal, the perfected state of humankind, but the vehement insistence on this assumption, echoed by the often violent misogyny of the querelle des femmes, reveals an anxiety about the status of masculinity that becomes particularly evident in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. For a variety of reasons, most obviously the social disorder ensuing from the Wars of Religion, this anxiety seems to become quite acute in France subsequent to the Calvinist reformation, and does not abate even in the seventeenth century, perhaps from fear of a return to the upheavals of the preceding century. Rather, it becomes the grounding for an examination of the nature of political power, as Mitchell Greenbergs article in this collection demonstrates.

Recent criticism links the rise of the modern subject and of a certain notion of individualism to the seventeenth century; this link is exposed clearly in the works of Dalia Judovitz and Greenberg. Stephen Murphys and Catharine Randalls essays in this collection raise at least one aspect of this issue; perhaps other studies will follow.

In the domain of philosophy, recent revisionist views of the body look back beyond Hegelian dialectic and the binary system it might seem to confirm, to Spinoza as the avatar of monism.