Scott H. Hendrix - Masculinity in the Reformation Era

Masculinity in the Reformation Era

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S IXTEENTH C ENTURY E SSAYS & S TUDIES S ERIES

G ENERAL E DITOR

Michael Wolfe

St. Johns University

E DITORAL B OARD OF S IXTEENTH C ENTURY E SSAYS & S TUDIES

Elaine Beilin

Framingham State College

Christopher Celenza

Johns Hopkins University

Miriam U. Chrisman

University of Massachusetts, Emerita

Barbara B. Diefendorf

Boston University

Paula Findlen

Stanford University

Scott H. Hendrix

Princeton Theological Seminary

Jane Campbell Hutchison

University of WisconsinMadison

Robert M. Kingdon

University of Wisconsin, Emeritus

Ronald Love

University of West Georgia

Mary B. McKinley

University of Virginia

Raymond A. Mentzer

University of Iowa

Helen Nader

University of Arizona

Charles G. Nauert

University of Missouri, Emeritus

Sheryl E. Reiss

Cornell University

Robert V. Schnucker

Truman State University, Emeritus

Nicholas Terpstra

University of Toronto

Margo Todd

University of Pennsylvania

James Tracy

University of Minnesota

Merry WiesnerHanks

University of WisconsinMilwaukee

Masculinity in the Reformation Era

Edited by

Scott H. Hendrix

Susan C. Karant-Nunn

Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 83

Truman State University Press

Kirksville, Missouri

Copyright 2008 Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri USA

All rights reserved

tsup.truman.edu

Cover art: Virgil Solis, David and Goliath, ca. 1562. Woodcut, from Veit Dietrich, Summaria vber die gantze Biblia (Frankfurt a.M.: David Zepheln, Johan Raschen, & Sigmund Feierabend, 1562). Image courtesy of the Kessler Reformation Collection, Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Cover design: Teresa Wheeler

NOTE: Because of display limitations of e-readers, some special characters (e.g., accents or other diacritical marks, cedillas, characters in Eastern European languages, Greek or Hebrew letters) may not display properly in the e-book version of this work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Masculinity in the Reformation era / edited by Scott H. Hendrix, Susan C. Karant-Nunn.

p. cm. (Sixteenth century essays & studies ; v. 83)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-931112-76-5 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-935503-53-8 (ebook)

1. MasculinityEuropeHistory. 2. MasculinityReligious aspectsChristianityHistory. 3. ReformationEurope. 4. EuropeHistory14921648. 5. Social change. I. Hendrix, Scott H. II. Karant-Nunn, Susan C.

HQ1090.7.E85M37 2008

305.3109409'031dc22

2008008655

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Contents

Dimensions of Manhood

Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn

Part One: Deviating from the Norms

Negotiating Masculinity in Early Modern Northwestern Spain

Allyson M. Poska

A Case Study

Helmut Puff

Ignatius of Loyola and the Reformation of Masculinity

Ulrike Strasser

Scott H. Hendrix

Part Two: Civic and Religious Duties

Concepts of Masculinity in Reformation Geneva

Karen E. Spierling

Raymond A. Mentzer

B. Ann Tlusty

Part Three: The Man Martin Luther

Theory, Practicality, and Humor

Susan C. Karant-Nunn

Male Libido in the Writings of the Reformer

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Acknowledgments

This book is the expanded product of sessions organized by the editors for the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (formerly the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference). Scholars of the Reformation era whose research concentrates on different parts of Europe were asked to reflect on ways in which masculinity was constructed and expressed in the areas they studied. The sessions were held at three successive conferences in 2002, 2003, and 2004, and we thank the Society for allowing us to include these sessions in their programs. We are grateful to all the scholars invited to prepare papers for agreeing to publish their revised essays in this collection.

The editors are among those who contributed papers to those sessions. The essay by Scott Hendrix that appears in this collection, Masculinity and Patriarchy in Reformation Germany, is reprinted from the Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995). We thank the editors of the Journal and its publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, for allowing the article to be reprinted here.

We also invited two other scholars of early modern Europe, Helmut Puff and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, to contribute essays on masculinity to our collection. The essay by Professor Wiesner-Hanks, 'Lustful Luther': Male Libido in the Writings of the Reformer, was originally published in Sexuality and Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, edited by Philip M. Soergel (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 3/2, New York: AMS Press, 2005). We extend our appreciation to AMS Press for allowing her essay to be reprinted in this collection. We also thank Sandra Kimball at the University of Arizona for her ongoing assistance, including the preparation of this manuscript. Her intelligent, watchful labors made it possible for Professor Karant-Nunn to take on activities that she otherwise could not have done.

Scott H. Hendrix

Susan C. Karant-Nunn

Introduction

Dimensions of Manhood

Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn

If the first generation of researchers after 1970 discovered many facets of womens history, including the multitude of ways in which European societies attempted to shape girls into the kinds of women they wanted, the second generation has also noted the ways in which those societies formed boys into men. Initially uneasy about seeming to revert to telling the stories of males, scholars are now exploring the simultaneous efforts to craft both sexes into adults who would conform to normative ideals of femininity and masculinity to which late medieval and early modern rural communities, towns, and noble courts aspired. Apropos of early modern Europe, Claudia Opitz has described how our pioneering colleagues gradually departed from an exclusive search for past womens lives in favor of examining the interactive forces of women and men in their class-based variations. She traces the development of the innovative, useful category of gender, introduced by thinkers like Gerda Lerner, Gisela Bock, and Joan Scott. No later than the early 1990s, the search was on in North America and Great Britain for the formative and constitutive elements of masculinity, and that endeavor has quickly spread to the rest of Europe. It has entailed the study of being-a-man from an entirely new perspective, one that could draw inspiration from the ethnographic scrutiny of other societies.

The fundamental insight that expectations of women equally entail understandings of manhood has become ubiquitous, and the examples multiply apace. Among the earliest in this country was Clare Lees anthology, Medieval Masculinities. Levys insight that they have a nullifying effect on the women portrayed could be applied to Robert Schumanns song-cycle, Frauenliebe und Leben, and most especially to the song, Nun hast Du mir den ersten Schlag getan. With the husbands death, the wife in some sense, and certainly in her own eyes, has ceased to exist.

In English literature, Lynn Enterline and Mark Breitenberg have been early theorists of masculinity. This point is invaluable.

We take inspiration from these scholars and from the many others who have preceded us. As historians who have concentrated largely on the sixteenth-century religious movements that are collectively referred to as the Reformation, we recognize that Reformation specialists were for a while hesitant to take up research on women in relation to the new confessions and that more recently they have been equally cautious about pursuing Protestant definitions of manliness. Over the last twenty-five years, however, historians have not confined themselves to studying prominent religious women like Katharina von Bora, While much about the lives of early modern women remains to be investigated, a respectable beginning has been made.