The working title of this book was Broken Men, not only because it describes the figurative and sometimes literal breaking of individual men, not only because it shows ideals of masculinity fissuring under the extreme pressure of the political events of the 1640s and 1650s, but also because it suggests that masculinity is in any case always already broken.

What is masculinity? For the purposes of this study, masculinity is an aspect of identity, an aspect both psychically crucial and socially necessary. Whether the masculinities I discuss turn out to have a biological basis or not, they are nevertheless a complex, fractured and seamed system of signs and symbols. Even the term ‘system’ seems too regular, too structured and sensible for the wild and contradictory blizzard of images and texts hurled at the heads of men and women of the mid-seventeenth century. And yet ‘system’ does convey the idea of something that worked, and mid-century ideas of masculinity worked too. They worked on men, and they worked on women; they worked in and on political ideas; they were stories that could be told to understand or to construe events and give them meaning. They were also images and stories that could provide ventilation for rage, fear and anxiety, emotions understandably provoked reasonably often by the experiences of Civil War and political change.