Jamie A. Gianoutsos. The Rule of Manhood: Tyranny, Gender, and Classical Republicanism in England, 1603–1660.

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes famously lamented that a diet of “Greek and Latine authors” had given his contemporaries a taste for “tumults” and rebellion. Jamie Gianoutsos’s fascinating new book, The Rule of Manhood: Tyranny, Gender, and Classical Republicanism in England, 1603–1660, echoes Hobbes’ assessment and resituates classical republican discourse at the heart of English prerevolutionary and revolutionary political culture. She adds a twist, however. To fully understand republican thought, we must acknowledge how inextricably its core ideas—about tyranny and liberty, political virtue and resistance—were connected to ideals of manhood. Gianoutsos argues that educated Englishmen were deeply familiar with classical republican concepts of good and bad governance. Ancient histories and prescriptive texts valorized men whose virtus—masculine virtues of self-control, temperance, rationality, and military prowess—fitted them for public life, and denounced tyrants as “failed men” ruled by their passions, whose effeminacy corrupted the state. Gianoutsos argues further that these classical discourses of masculine virtue and unmanly tyranny had contemporary resonance, structuring critical perceptions and images of political misrule under the early Stuart kings. Overtly republican—and deeply masculinist—ideas thus played a key role in political discourse before the revolutionary events of the 1640s; and, as English republicanism flowered in the 1640s and 1650s, ideals of masculinity remained central to its meaning.