In the early modern period, men (and women) thought, wrote and spoke in a cultural context predicated upon the assumption that social order depended upon both hierarchy and patriarchy. As a consequence they read the human male body asan analogue of human experience. And because they regarded hierarchy and patriarchy – social order and male primacy – as interdependent propositions, they did not even, always, distinguish between the two in the way that we would do. As the sixteenth century progressed, reformation ideology brought these assumptions to a level of self-consciousness which led to their articulation and contest, in a debate that permeated European culture, broadly defined. Reformation ideology carried a universal promise: of a new relationship between God and man that would redeem every individual – man and woman, high and low. For contemporaries it posed the simultaneous threat of a profoundly disordered society on the way to the New Jerusalem; one that, for good or ill, would no longer sustain hierarchy or patriarchy and hence any known form of social order. The challenge to any conceivable status quo posed by the political doctrine of anarchy, in its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manifestations, must be the nearest modern secular equivalent.

Clearly, these conceptual parameters shaped the conduct of politics, especially in the sixteenth century, and particularly in countries that – like France, Scotland and England – experienced both Protestant reformation and female rule.