Masculinity is a gender (too), Jamie Gianoutsos explicitly reminds us early in The Rule of Manhood. Elizabeth I wasn't the only early modern monarch to have to contend with and stylize the presentation of her gender as part of her hold on English power. Kings needed to curate their masculinity just so: effeminacy was a mark of a tyrant, but over-aggressive dominance was also construed as tyrannical and risked emasculating male English subjects. As far as I know, Gianoutsos is the first to take seriously this latter fear, and to consider carefully how seventeenth-century English republicanism developed as a response to a discourse of monarchism that posed the king as a threat to manhood.
The first half of Gianoutsos's book focuses on the emasculated and emasculating figure of the king, arguing that seventeenth-century writers were deeply preoccupied with the king's performance of gender and what it meant for their own masculinity, and that writers explored these fears through the prism of classical texts. The rape and would-be rape of Lucretia and Virginia, respectively, portrayed tyranny as inextricably linked to sexual violence. The career of Nero, too, as a sexual deviant, serial wife-loser, and incestuous mama's boy, was fodder for critics of James VI/I and Charles I. Gianoutsos is careful in her language to resist ascribing a fixed meaning to any one trope or story as it traveled through early modern retellings, arguing instead that Roman models of manliness were malleable. Thus, her first of two chapters on Nero begins with the use of the emperor as a foil for James's faults, but closes with a reading of Edmund Bolton as Nero Caesar, as a text that uses Nero's tyranny to exculpate some of James's sins.
Gianoutsos's real contribution to scholarship is her bold argument laid out in the second half of the book: not only did early modern republican thought develop “as a solution to the perceived problem of emasculating tyranny,” but “the fundamental purpose of classical republicanism was to realize manhood, to allow men (of a certain status) to develop fully as rational, free, and virtuous individuals” (223–24). In other words, Gianoutsos reframes gender as integral to the republican project, emphasizing the pursuit of virtus as its end goal. Her thesis prompts a rereading of Milton's divorce tracts, and concludes that a bad marriage was, for Milton, a serious threat to political personhood (chapter 5). In chapter 7, she links hypermasculine portrayals of Oliver Cromwell to an anxiety over female preachers prevalent in pamphlets from the 1640s (310–13).
Scholars have long noted that early modern discourses diagnose tyrants as effeminate; and that much of republican rhetoric responds to the perceived threat of emasculation, often drawing on the figure of the woman or slave to hyperbolize their fears. The elegance of Gianoutsos's study is to reveal how much extant evidence there is that gender was at the center of this political conflict. Across her impressively researched book, we encounter well-known sites marked for their gender commentary, for example, Milton's Eve's “wanton ringlets.” But Gianoutsos also augments these readings with close interpretations that focus on under- or never-studied texts like Bolton's long history (mentioned above), broadening our knowledge of classical appropriations in the seventeenth century.
The larger payoff to this study is the reevaluation of republicanism as a progressive force, and the reframing of questions around nascent conceptions of citizenship in early modern England. Gianoutsos wants scholars to understand that it was not coincidental that as “republicans called for the expansion of political participation . . . and provided the languages needed for the challenge to absolutist and hereditary monarchy, republican thought articulated or assumed great restrictions on citizenship that were tied to gender, age, freed status, and property” (367). The former was only made possible by the latter.
Especially in the chapter on Marchamont Nedham, more could have been done to link republicanism and masculinity to the rhetoric of colonialization and conquest. This study could lead to a return to the ecocritical work begun by Caroline Merchant's The Death of Nature. I also found the two readings of Agrippina's deaths in Bolton's Caesar Nero and Thomas May's Tragedy of Julia Agrippina to be confusing when compared: both argue that different treatment of Agrippina murder was exceptional, yet both come to a near-identical conclusion (compare 155 with 197). These are small quibbles with what is otherwise an important contribution to studies of gender, early modern classical appropriations, and political history.
