In recent decades, scholars have been re-examining the experiences of men across every historical period and culture, motivated in part by the current so-called “crisis of masculinity.” This has involved moving away from previous universalizing perspectives that considered men as both preeminent and normative human beings. Women were gendered, men were human. Happily, this perspective has now evaporated and current historical research approaches men as gendered and masculinity as an historical phenomenon informed by context and subject to change over time. Like femineity, masculinity is intersectional and malleable. Yet, there is little recognition, much less agreement, about the various manifestations of masculinities and what kind of social changes impacted men's internal sense of self and their external performance of masculinity. To what extent does conventional periodization map onto changes in masculinities? Or, put another way, to what extent does masculinity, as gender and as identity, appear resilient and resistant to historical pressures?

Embracing the premodern period as broadly defined, this collection of essays explores questions about masculinities, incorporating the psychological and social perspectives, leading to re-evaluations of the meanings and permutations of masculinity that eventually signalled the transition into a new historical era. Thus, masculinities have a history that can be set against other histories, particularly notable in the transition from the culture and society of the late fourteenth century, through to the end of the sixteenth century. This was a period of radical change, of rupture and upheaval in almost every area of European, and indeed, global society. Christendom, that concept that had united Europe for a millennium, was no longer a unifying force. The Protestant Reformation transformed the Age of Faith into an age of the Wars of Religion. Printing fundamentally changed communication, facilitating the spread of new ideas in science and religion, and new values of humanism and law, new forms of art and literature. Innovations in military technology fundamentally altered how wars were fought and destabilized the warrior class and the warrior code; the knights of chivalry were relegated to the pages of romance or dreams of a heroic past.