Jamie A. Gianoutsos's The Rule of Manhood is a welcome and timely contribution to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural origins of English republicanism. Gianoutsos convincingly argues that the classical education provided by the early modern grammar schools promoted views of masculinity—primarily Roman views of masculinity—that were often antithetical to Stuart absolutism. Common school texts such as Cicero's De Officiis taught that fully realized manhood required the exercise of “autonomy, authority, and moral excellence” in both public and private life (36). They also depicted tyrants as failed men whose licentiousness, instability, and abuse of power emasculated their male subjects by preventing them from exercising their own manhood, supplying seventeenth-century Englishmen with historical lenses through which to understand and critique their own political moment.
By devoting four chapters to examining how specific historical exempla were mobilized in early Stuart England, Gianoutsos demonstrates that this shared educational background created a common political vocabulary. For example, in chapter 1, she maintains that reworkings of Livy's account of the rape of Lucretia and the founding of the Roman Republic celebrated the ideal masculinity of Junius Brutus by contrasting it with the degeneracy of the Tarquins. She concludes with a reading of Thomas Heywood's The Rape of Lucrece (1608) that finds that the depiction of Lucius Tarquin as an emasculated and lawless tyrant governing a corrupt court was tailored to evoke parallels with James I's court and “effeminate” foreign policy (65). In chapter 2 Gianoutsos looks at the how the story of Virginia—a chaste maiden killed by her virtuous father to protect her from being imprisoned and raped by Appius Claudius—was used to foreground concerns about judicial abuse and corruption. This chapter exemplifies the strength of this section as a whole: nuanced readings of a broad range of cultural documents, especially neglected plays such as Webster and Heywood's Appius and Virginia, that illuminate early seventeenth-century political anxieties as well as continuities with the later republicanism of the interregnum. Gianoutsos is an agile reader of these texts and excels at highlighting the crucial differences between various retellings of the same basic story. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the ways that the history of Nero's tyrannical reign was mobilized to criticize the failings of James I and Charles I. For James, Neronian comparisons emphasized the effeminacy of his pacifist foreign policy and the extravagance and sexual debauchery of his court. For Charles, they stressed his uxoriousness and inability to govern his own household. Both chapters reveal how vulnerable the patriarchal and absolutist doctrines of the Stuart monarchy really were to gender-based criticism from those who embraced classical masculinity and how readily James and Charles could be recast as effeminate tyrants.
In the second part, Gianoutsos contends that English republican thought emerged as a response “to the perceived problem of emasculating tyranny experienced under the Stuart regime” (223) and that its “fundamental purpose . . . was to realise manhood—to allow men (of a certain status) to develop fully as rational, free, and virtuous individuals” (224). Moving to the interregnum, Gianoutsos shifts from case studies of historical exempla to chapters devoted to major Commonwealth figures: John Milton, Marchamont Nedham, and Oliver Cromwell. In chapter 5, she argues that Milton epitomizes her overall claims, and although some will quibble over precise dates and terminology, few scholars familiar with Milton's political writings would dispute that his “classical republicanism” stresses “the restoration and realisation of manhood for its citizens” (232). But Gianoutsos reads too much of Milton's work through a stark republican gender binary that is characteristic of his political prose from 1649 to 1660 but that obscures the gender fluidity and nuance evident elsewhere in his thinking. For instance, Gianoutsos observes that young Milton (“the Lady of Christ's College”) dissents from the prevailing view of masculine identity based on violence and sexual adventure and that he seeks to redefine virility in terms of virtue and intellectual prowess. But Gianoutsos overlooks the degree to which he subsumes traditionally feminine virtues such as chastity into his definition of perfect manhood, as he does in An Apology. Likewise, Gianoutsos overemphasizes the difference between Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. Milton famously declares that Eve was formed “[f]or softness . . . and sweet attractive Grace” (Paradise Lost, bk. 4, line 298); Gianoutsos oversimplifies these characteristics by reducing them to “physical frailty and untamed sexual passion” (233), and emphasizes “the portrayal of Adam as virile, free, and upright” (234) but neglects that Eve shares most of these traits (“Two of far nobler shape erect and tall, / Godlike erect” [Paradise Lost, bk. 4, lines 298–89]). None of these localized missteps threaten the core of the overall argument. Indeed, the complexity of Milton's views elsewhere in his writings underscores the distinctly masculine posture of his republican prose. Gianoutsos focuses chapter 6 on Nedham's republican writings in the 1650s. Establishing that he shares Milton's desire to create “a free-state in which males could become fully realized as men” (275), Gianoutsos demonstrates that Nedham differs by placing martial prowess and imperial expansion at the center of his republicanism. Gianoutsos concludes with a final chapter on representations of Cromwell that validates both sides of her thesis: his supporters portrayed him as meeting (or exceeding) the classical ideal of masculinity and thus as the perfect counterpoint to Stuart effeminacy, whereas his critics depicted him as grotesquely hypermasculine and used historical example to cast him as a classical usurper and tyrant.
Revisionist historians have long maintained that we cannot talk about English republicanism before the execution of Charles I. The Rule of Manhood is exciting because it is a judicious, forceful, and eloquent case for why we can and should. It reveals undeniable continuities between the classically informed views of masculinity evident before the English Revolution and those that define English republicanism, and in doing so, it reiterates why gender is a crucial framework for understanding the political culture of seventeenth-century England. The schoolboys who learned what it meant to be a man by studying the tyrannical regimes and republican revolutions of Roman history were prepared to confront political crises that may not have been inevitable but that were certainly conceivable.
