This Handbook aims to challenge 'gender blindness' in the historical study of high politics, power, authority and government, by bringing together a group of scholars at the forefront of current historical research into the relationship between masculinity and political power.  Until very recently in historical terms, formal political authority in Europe was normally and ideally held by adult males, with female power being perceived as a recurrent aberration. Yet paradoxically the study of the interactions between masculinity and political culture is still very much in its infancy. This volume seeks to remedy this lacuna by considering the different consequences of the masculinity of power over two millennia of European history. It examines how masculinity and political culture have interacted from ancient Rome and the early medieval Byzantine empire, to twentieth-century Germany and Italy. It considers a broad variety of case studies from early medieval Iceland and late medieval France, to Naples at the time of the French revolution and Strasbourg after the Franco-Prussian war, with a particular focus on the development of political masculinities in Great Britain between the sixteenth century and the present day.

1. Introduction: Masculinity and Politik; Christopher Fletcher.- 2. Power, Authority and Phallic Representations in Ancient Roman Society; Cyril Dumas.- 3. Between Bishops and Barbarians: The Rulers of the Later Roman Empire; Mathew Kuefler.- 4. The Rise and Fall of the High Chamberlain Eutropius: Eunuch Identity, the Third Sex and Power in fourth-century Byzantium; Georges Sidéris.- 5. Virile Women and Effeminate Men: Gendered Judgements and the Exercise of Power in Ottonian Empire c. 1000 CE; Laurence Leleu.- 6. Creating Kin, Extending Authority: Blood-Brotherhood and Power in Medieval Iceland; Pragya Vohra.- 7. Beyond Celibacy: Bishops, Power and Masculinity in Medieval Germany; Matthew Mesley.- 8. Masculinity and Political Struggle in the Cities of Castile at the End of the Middle Ages; Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer.- 9. 'By This My Beard Which Hangs From My Face': The Masculinity of the French Princes in the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War; Hugo Dufour.- 10. Monarchy and Masculinity in Early Modern England; Susan Doran.- 11. Manhood and the English Revolution; Ann Hughes.- 12. A Man's Sphere? British Politics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries; Matthew McCormack.- 13. 'I Tremble Lest My Powers of Thought Are Not What They Ought to Be': Reputation and the Masculine Anxieties of an Eighteenth-Century Statesman; Henry French.- 14. Antonio Canova's Statue of King Ferdinand IV and the Gendering of Neapolitan Sovereignty; Allison Goudie.- 15. Psychological Androgyny, Romanticism and the Radical Challenge to Masculinity in England, 1790-1840; Victoria Russell.- 16. The Dominant and the Dominated: Power Relations and Intimate Authority in the Personal Diary of the Jurist Eugène Wilhelm (1885-1951); Régis Schlagdenhauffen.- 17. Eminently Queer Victorians and the Bloomsbury Group's Critique of British Leadership; Dominic Janes.- 18. Masculinity, Political Culture and the Rise of Nazism; Christopher Dillon.- 19. Masculinities and Parliamentary Culture in Modern Britain; Ben Griffin.- 20. From Mussolini to Berlusconi: Masculinity and Political Leadership in Postwar Italy; Stephen Gundle.- Index