This essay focuses on what may seem an ideologically narrow genre: the conduct book, offering a broad and complex interpretation of the texts and their place in medieval culture. Ashley ranges across European examples, especially French works that were later translated into English, beginning with the celebrated early example of the book written by Dhuoda, a Carolingian noblewoman for her son. Louis IXߣs Enseignemenz (Teachings), by contrast, provided advice for both his son and daughter. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the readership of conduct books expanded to include the middle classes. The conduct works of Christine de Pizan illustrate the growing popularity of the genre, reflecting an assumption that the lower classes will learn from the examples set by aristocratic women. Ashley demonstrates the appeal to a wider readership of the late-fourteenth-century book of Geoffrey de la Tour Landry, written for his three daughters and focused on marriage rather than life at court, while, in the same period, Le Menagier de Paris provides an example of a work addressed to a bourgeois audience that anticipates the development of ߢhousehold anthologiesߣ.

This introduction begins with a reading of Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and with its evocation of Opportunity as a sexual temptress, which brings temporal concepts and gendered identities into conversation with each other in complex and revealing ways. The introduction goes on to set out the critical and conceptual foundations of the book as a whole, explaining how scholarly work which has focused on time, gender and performance has helped me to develop an understanding of the opposition of action and inaction, which I argue is central to the early modern temporal consciousness, to theatrical experience and to the early modern construction of gendered identity. In the second part of the introduction, I examine some of the ways in which early modern thinking about time and about gender developed in relation to classical ideas, religious and medical discourse and conduct literature, which workedboth to define and destabilise a conflicted binary opposition between waiting and not waiting. I then return to The Revenger’s Tragedy to illustrate how the play engaged with this supposed binary opposition, suggesting that its negotiation and complication were central to early modern performances of both gender and time on the early modern stage.

The eighteenth-century Irish gentleman was, according to Samuel Madden, an ‘amphibious animal … envied as an Englishman in Ireland, and maligned as Irish in England’. This sense of ambiguity had repercussions on the gendering of Irish men, as manly norms were increasingly defined by British imperialism. This chapter analyses the representation of Irish masculinity, using William Chaigneau’s The History of Jack Connor as a case study which negotiates gender, nation, and political relations. If Jonathan Swift laments the toxic effects of army morals and English effeminacy on Ireland’s political class, Chaigneau invokes patriarchy and paternity to explore and to ramify the affective bonds between the two nations. Analysing Chaigneau’s representation of a cosmopolitan Irish soldier, this chapter examines how the novel creates a modern martial masculinity which legitimises the authority and potency of Irish Protestants, creating an imaginative dynastic filiation between Britain and Ireland.