In his 1512 reflections on why Florence was bound to “lose both her liberty and her state,”1 Francesco Guicciardini bemoaned the infighting among Italians, the might of foreign princes, and the fact that civic life was out of order. This last point was evidenced by several factors, among them “the spirits of effeminate and indolent men, turned to a dainty and – relative to our means – extravagant life.” Guicciardini thus laid the blame for the imminent dissolution of the Florentine republic, at least in part, on “effeminate” men. It was a condemnation of effeminacy that would be echoed by writers throughout the sixteenth century. Like Guicciardini, these writers argued that men had abandoned an ideal past model of masculinity (e.g. Roman or chivalric) for a lesser and “effeminate” modern substitute and that military and political ruination were the result.

My chapter will focus on two texts that constructed the spectre of the modern effeminate man in contrast to the militant man of the past. These texts enact what Peter Hennen has described as the historical function of a discourse of effeminacy, where it is “deployed as a means of stabilizing a given society's concept of masculinity and controlling the conduct of its men based upon the repudiation of the feminine.” I will consider how Anton Francesco Doni and Scipione Ammirato used differing techniques to create unease about masculine gender performance by linking so-called “effeminate” dress and appearance to failed militancy. I consciously identify and name this unease as anxiety. The effeminophobic anxiety that I discuss herein does not describe a psychological experience of readers of texts but, rather, the discursive tool employed by authors in the social control of men. My argument about the function of effeminophobic anxiety is invested in the literary, where the strategies of literature – as Jane Tylus and I wrote over a decade ago – not only represent masculinity, they produce it.

EFFEMINATE, EFFEMINACY, AND NORMATIVE GENDER PROJECTS

The term effeminato circulated with sufficient frequency to appear in the 1612 Vocabolario of the Accademia della Crusca: “Effeminate: of feminine manners, gestures, and spirit, delicate, soft. Latin effoeminatus, muliebris, delicatus, mollis.”