This ambitious and engaging book offers a salutary reminder of how English culture, at least as absorbed by boys with grammar-school educations, was steeped in classical history. It argues for the potentially subversive character of the dramatic stories about the origins, character, and demise of the Roman republic, in the writings of authors such as Cicero, Seneca, and Livy. Gianoutsos maintains that modern scholars have missed a crucial element of these stories that is hiding in plain sight: They involve contests about the meaning of true manhood, as men succeed or fail as law givers, warriors, and fathers. Such a gendered reading suggests that such contests were a particularly potent means of representing contrasts between corruption and virtue and tyranny and good government.A commendably broad chronological range crosses the too-frequent 1640 border. Part I, “Emasculated Kingship,” offers perceptive close readings of contemporary uses of Roman history showing James I and Charles as failed men and, consequently, tyrants. Part II, “The Masculine Republic,” discusses how republicans worked to restore “true manhood to citizens long stripped of their virtus through emasculated and emasculating tyrants,” as well as exploring rival representations of Oliver Cromwell.Gianoutsos deploys a variety of texts to explore the use of Roman history in cheap print, poetry, and popular drama, as well as in school texts and learned works. The multivalent uses of the Emperor Nero discussed in Part I are particularly illuminating. As the persecuting power intimated in Romans 13 of Paul’s New Testament Epistle to the Romans, he was used to justify absolutism. More commonly, however, Nero demonstrated the corruption of the polity through dissolute masculinity, as in Chapman’s witty conceit regarding Nero’s burying a single, amber strand of his mistress Poppea’s hair. Gianoutsos effectively links this passage to Prynne’s better-known polemics about the evils of long hair and May’s account of Nero’s monstrous and murderous relationship with his mother Julia Agrippina.1Gianoutsos shows a tendency, especially in Part II, to exaggerate the originality of her approach. Gianoutsos’ own thorough footnotes bely her claims that gender “has remained largely unstudied in accounts of the republican tradition” or neglected in “influential studies of Milton’s republican thought” (228, 231). The book, however, amply demonstrates the value of a gendered analysis focusing on manhood to a proper understanding of seventeenth-century political history and the character of classical republicanism. Some of its general arguments (such as the ways in which a gendered analysis supports positive rather than negative notions of liberty) would have benefited from extended treatment in one place, not in scattered footnotes or connected loosely to several of the detailed readings.The analysis in Part II, which covers the bulk of republican writing, loses focus. The treatment of Cromwell as a republican hero, father of the people, or corrupt tyrant (another Nero) seems a little rushed, and its “for-or-against structure” misses some of the conflicted nature of John Milton’s or Marchamont Nedham’s views of the Protector.2 Cromwell was as often compared to Moses and Gideon as to Nero or Brutus, and, given the recent stress by Nelson, Coffey and Winship on the religious origins of republicanism, Gianoutsos’ approach to analyzing how biblical exemplars of manhood were mobilized in seventeenth-century political debates might be useful in further work.3Gianoutsos focuses appropriately on the highest of politics, mostly on the failings of rulers, perfectly aware of the rich body of work on manhood as an unstable and contested concept. At the beginning and end of her book, she stresses the importance of distinctions between homo and vir; full manhood implied maturity, independence, and householder status—roles unavailable to many men as Shephard has shown, though more challenges to such exclusions than she suggests may have existed.4During the revolutionary upheavals of the 1640s, contemporaries who agreed that “the fundamental purpose of English republicanism was the realisation of manhood for its citizens” may not have agreed on how citizenship itself was defined (4). Equally, Gianoutsos is surely correct that political historians tend to ignore men in favor of women, but since gender is a relational concept, Gianoutsos should have left room for a discussion of how women featured in republican thinking, even referring to such literary scholars as Wiseman and Gillespie.5 Nonetheless, this book has immense value, both for its close readings and for the many ways in which it prompts broader reflections.
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Mar 15, 2022
Paul Stevens 
Open Access
