This project investigates the transformations in masculinity among the French warrior aristocracy from the end of the Hundred Years War to the beginning of the French Wars of Religion. During these years the French knightly elite came under increasing ridicule from critics who eschewed the gruff demeanor of soldiers and taught instead that education and bearing were more appropriate signs of privileged status rather than martial prowess. Indeed, King Francis I (1515-1547), widely known to contemporaries and to historians as a patron of Renaissance thought, art, architecture, and manners, espoused courtliness and implicitly devalued traditional martial values. Yet this repudiation thinly concealed a paradox for it was precisely through martial skills that the king was able to maintain power and authority. Thus, conceptions of masculinity during Francis' reign were conflicted: the behavioral requirements of a knightly aristocrat were now simultaneously, if incongruously, violent and erudite, murderous yet courtly, masculine and feminine. This project explores how elite men from roughly 1450 to 1550 CE adopted, resisted, or integrated these new perceptions of nobility with their warrior heritage. Thus the central objective of this study is to explain what masculinity meant--and would come to mean--to warrior aristocrats who saw their status and power challenged by a rival masculinity in the form of the courtier.
