High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France: 59 (Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies) - Softcover

"High Anxiety is an invaluable and seminal contribution to French literary and cultural history supplemental reading lists and academic reference collections."

--Midwest Book Review

"These authors attempt to tease out the developments of masculinity and the male norm in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France that would eventually result in the transformation of such institutions such as marriage, monarchy, the market, and the church, in the period leading up to and after the Revolution. The authors...examine a wide range of sources from pamphlets, fairy tales, jokes, poetry, and medical works to the works of such authors as Montaigne and Labé."

--Comitatus

This collection explores the evolution of notions about masculinity during the intense crisis of Renaissance and early modern France. Authors of the period reflect the anxieties about masculinity that became more pronounced against the backdrop of major events and innovations of the period: the religious conflict in France, the repeated questioning of religious and royal authority, the revival of Greek skepticism, the discovery of the New World, and the rise of clinical medicine. These events in turn fueled growing doubt concerning the fixed and hierarchical nature of gender distinction, a distinction upon which many felt French culture was dependent for its very survival.