Philip Grace. Affectionate Authorities

For the past decade, scholars of all periods and places have begun to attend to the question of men and masculinity in their gendered specificity. During the course of this project, historians have availed themselves of the theories and methodologies that have emerged from the more mature historical study of women, carefully assessing men’s social roles and the opportunities and constraints provided in patriarchal societies. Affectionate Authorities: Fathers and Fatherly Roles in Late Medieval Basel balances early studies of motherhood in medieval society. Rather than attempting to survey the whole of the medieval world, Philip Grace presents a monograph that focuses narrowly and deeply on Basel around 1500. Grace consults a wide body of sources, including court records, especially those pertaining to marriage and inheritance cases, literature, pedagogical treatises, and letters. These supply him with the vignettes and examples that enliven the pages, and many people and families move across the chapters, lending them unity and coherence. Taken together, the sources provide an ideological foundation for fatherly activity and its expectations, as well as evidence for how these ideas played out in lived reality, both within the community of Basel and in individual families. Thus, the book strikes a nice balance between theory and practice, set against a single well-examined social context. This is the backdrop against which Grace examines his fundamental research question about the resonance of the metaphor of fatherhood and why medieval Europeans deployed it in so many different contexts. To address this, he interrogates the multiple qualities that accrued to fathers and imbued the metaphors of fatherhood found in Basel and elsewhere in late medieval society.

Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Ideology · Masculinity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity