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Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-CenturySpain*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt
Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt*
Affiliation:
Cleveland State University
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Abstract

This article examines how the experience and critique of their country’s decline led Spaniards to craft a distinct discourse of masculinity in the seventeenth century. As they self-consciously examined Spain’s crisis and offered political and economic solutions, these same writers also offered a scathing critique of standards of masculinity. Using the figure of the ideal nobleman as a case study, the article examines how moralists, arbitristas, and hagiographers constructed a dynamic code of manhood linked to questions of productivity, male chastity, and military performance. Further, it argues that this discourse was ultimately nostalgic and failed to adapt itself to the circumstances of the seventeenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , Summer 2008 , pp. 463 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2008

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a meeting of the Premodern Spanish Historians Association of the Midwest at Purdue University in 2003 and the History Department Research Roundtable at Cleveland State University in 2002. My thanks to Marta Vicente and Luis Corteguera for inviting me to present this work as a seminar paper at the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas in April 2006. I am grateful to the participants at all three of these events for their helpful suggestions. I also thank Valerie Hegstrom for her help with some of the translations contained in the article. Finally, I offer my thanks to the readers for Renaissance Quarterly, who offered constructive and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this piece.

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