In his 1512 reflections on why Florence was bound to “lose both her liberty and her state,”1 Francesco Guicciardini bemoaned the infighting among Italians, the might of foreign princes, and the fact that civic life was out of order. This last point was evidenced by several factors, among them “the spirits of effeminate and indolent men, turned to a dainty and – relative to our means – extravagant life.” Guicciardini thus laid the blame for the imminent dissolution of the Florentine republic, at least in part, on “effeminate” men. It was a condemnation of effeminacy that would be echoed by writers throughout the sixteenth century. Like Guicciardini, these writers argued that men had abandoned an ideal past model of masculinity (e.g. Roman or chivalric) for a lesser and “effeminate” modern substitute and that military and political ruination were the result.

My chapter will focus on two texts that constructed the spectre of the modern effeminate man in contrast to the militant man of the past. These texts enact what Peter Hennen has described as the historical function of a discourse of effeminacy, where it is “deployed as a means of stabilizing a given society's concept of masculinity and controlling the conduct of its men based upon the repudiation of the feminine.” I will consider how Anton Francesco Doni and Scipione Ammirato used differing techniques to create unease about masculine gender performance by linking so-called “effeminate” dress and appearance to failed militancy. I consciously identify and name this unease as anxiety. The effeminophobic anxiety that I discuss herein does not describe a psychological experience of readers of texts but, rather, the discursive tool employed by authors in the social control of men. My argument about the function of effeminophobic anxiety is invested in the literary, where the strategies of literature – as Jane Tylus and I wrote over a decade ago – not only represent masculinity, they produce it.

EFFEMINATE, EFFEMINACY, AND NORMATIVE GENDER PROJECTS

The term effeminato circulated with sufficient frequency to appear in the 1612 Vocabolario of the Accademia della Crusca: “Effeminate: of feminine manners, gestures, and spirit, delicate, soft. Latin effoeminatus, muliebris, delicatus, mollis.”

Bands occupy a problematic space within the field of musicology. One might expect, given the centrality of bands as a dominant form of popular music in America from the 1830s to the Great Depression, that bands would be well represented in prominent journals and conferences alongside jazz, rock, country, and hip hop. These popular genres have received seemingly constant attention over the years, ranging from books and dedicated periodicals to entire general education courses at most colleges and universities. On the other hand, bands—central to American popular music for at least as long as all the other genres combined—have been consistently overlooked. Various reasons for this disparity exist; by considering several of them in this introduction, we hope to begin the process of remedying the situation.

The dedication of the collection to Frank Cipolla offers an excellent opportunity to reflect on the field of band research as it exists at present and how it will evolve in the future. Cipolla wore many hats over the course of his long and productive career—orchestral trumpet player, band director, conductor, scholar, bandsman, and educator. Each of these roles gave him a unique perspective on the many “inflection points” in band history. In 1961 he became director of bands at SUNY-Buffalo, where he remained for three decades. During the early years of his appointment, when the university played Division I football, marching band and pep band—the bands most popular and visible to the general public—occupied much of his time. The university marching band disappeared in 1971 when the school discontinued its football team. Left with more time to explore the artistic side of bands, Cipolla concentrated his efforts on his wind ensemble and concert band. Along the way he published essays and was an advocate for greater knowledge of band history among both educators and scholars. He wrote on the major figures of band history, edited essay collections containing foundational research, maintained a bibliography of scholarly writings, and worked to integrate historic band music into the repertoires of modern high-school and college bands.

The Brewster XF2A-1 naval fighter made its first flight in December 1937 because the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics had reconsidered the idea that monoplane aircraft were unsuitable for aircraft carriers because of their high landing speed. The Brewster F2A-1 was to become the very first U.S. monoplane fighter for use on aircraft carriers. Unfortunately it was already more or less obsolete and retired from first line duty at the U.S. Navy when the Pacific war broke out. It had a very unlucky career when it was used by the U.S. Marines in combat against the Japanese Mitsubishi A6M ‘Zero’ fighter. For this reason some aviation historians consider the Brewster fighter as a failure, but in fact this was undeserved. In the hands of well-trained Finnish air force pilots this stubby little fighter was a great success. Also in the war between the Netherlands East Indies with Japan, the B-339 as it was called by the Dutch was the best fighter they had. It definitely was inferior to the Japanese Zero fighter, but it could absorb a lot of enemy fire before it was downed!

Brewster Aeronautical Corporation:

Brewster & Co was a U.S. based company manufacturing originally carriages. Later they changed their production to automobile bodies. In 1932 James Work purchased the aircraft division of Brewster & Co. He changed the name into Brewster Aeronautical Corporation. The company was based in multi-story urban factory buildings in Long Island City, New York, across the East River from Manhattan. Being an aeronautical engineer, Work started building business with contract work for other aircraft manufacturers such as making wing panels for the PBY Catalina, but already in 1934 Brewster’s design team, headed by Dayton T. Brown, started with the design and construction of their first aircraft. It was a single engine two-seat scout bomber, that received the naval aircraft designation SBA-1. The prototype XSBA-1, Bureau Number 9726, made its first flight on 15 April 1936. Although a small order for 30 machines was placed, these were eventually built by the Naval Aircraft Factory as the SBN-1.

The next type Brown’s team designed was a single seat monoplane fighter. It was clearly based on the SBA-1 having the same type of engine. It was built as an answer to a U.S. Navy requirement for a new shipboard fighter. First flight of the new fighter, designated as the XF2A-1, took place in December 1937.

Seemingly incidental, men's facial hair signaled a variety of significant differences and masculinities during the Renaissance. In medical, legal, and social terms, the ability to grow a beard was considered a distinctive, exclusive marker of the adult male reproductive body. But that normative structure did not always mean that men did not shave. There were shifts in the practice over time: on the whole, men shaved in the fifteenth century but began to grow beards by the second decade of the sixteenth century, and that habit was maintained until facial hair was replaced by false, sometimes ludicrously abundant, wigs in the late seventeenth century. In some examples of fifteenth-century portraits, stubble or morning shadow was subtly represented in portraits in order to assert the sitter's full masculine virility and identity. By the sixteenth century, for a variety of reasons, groomed beards became fashionable and remained so for some time thereafter. This chapter offers an overview of the meaning of certain differences between facial hair and examines reasons for the adoption of beards, thereby bringing to the fore a consideration of how such personal yet socially recognizable habits resonated with power differences between men.

The visual shift in self-presentation from shaved to fully bearded faces was partly due to the mere vagaries of fashion, which usually cycle back and forth. However, a fashionable trend is more about popularity than change; that is, description of a vogue is not the same as an analytical explanation of its initial cause and subsequent acceptance. Studies that focus on the different styles of beards – as is also done with contemporary beards today – similarly reduce the mode to no more than personal taste and neglect social meanings. I argue, instead, that differences in facial hair were not about styles for their own sake and did not merely indicate the wearer's choice or character, which are modern, superficial criteria about fashion. Today and in yesteryears, facial hair and its meaning depend on such factors as genetics and physiology, health, age, wealth, origin, the pressure of ethnic and national norms, religion, and, at times, occupation, status, or desirability and sexuality.

The simple spur is an often described but rarely analyzed item of armorial dress. It was a minor riding accessory: a handful of pieces of metal and leather strapped to the foot used to apply pressure and guide the animal's movements. An iron tool in its earliest forms, the medieval spur – now cast in copper alloy, gilded and tinned – became intrinsically connected with knightly status and chivalric masculinity. Ambiguity followed, as negotiations of masculinity changed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the semiotic resonance of spurs declined. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries they became a highly symbolic article of dress as they moved into the contemporary fashion system, bringing with them an embodiment of the masculine ideal now distilled into portable form. This change in the way spurs were perceived and used was an expression of the rising anxieties about gender and the body that rippled through this period.

This research project began with a question, one about significance and symbolism, and about performances of masculine display in an early modern colonial setting. The Acadians, French colonists who arrived in modern-day Nova Scotia in the 1630s, have historically been represented as isolated peasantry and farmers. Archaeological investigations of Acadian homesteads and villages in the mid-to-late twentieth century, on the other hand, unearthed counterexamples to this archetype of poverty. The Melanson settlement, across the Annapolis River from the English Fort Anne, was first excavated in the summer of 1984. Among the finds was a partial copper-alloy spur buckle cast with floral designs, curling leaves, and a pair of fleur-de-lys (Fig. 5.1). Far fancier in design than the other known Acadian spur – a rowel spur of plain metal, likely iron, found at the Roma site on Prince Edward Island – this decorated buckle seemed incongruous. Why would one of the Melanson men have worn a fancy pair of spurs on a small farming settlement in the early eighteenth century? They had horses, certainly, but the predominant forms of riding gear in the region were cruder iron and pewter.

Birth of a champion

Willy Messerschmitt was the managing director of the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke A.G.. The company, which was based at Augsburg, built various aircraft types mostly of single-engine design. In the economic crisis of the thirties, also Messerschmitt’s company ran into financial difficulties which in 1931 resulted in bankruptcy. Messerschmitt still owned Messerschmitt Flugzeugbau as a dormant company holding all his technical patents. New working capital was borrowed and on 27 April the Regional Court of Augsburg issued a verdict that gave Messerschmitt the opportunity to re-open his factory gates with 85 employees. He received an order from Romania to build a small series of light passenger aircraft but the German Ministry of Aviation RLM (Reichsluftfahrtministerium) refused permission to build them.

The RLM was of opinion that the new development and production capacity had to be strictly used for Germany.

In compensation Willy Messerschmitt received a contract for the development and construction of a single engine aircraft to compete in a fighter contest between the various aircraft manufacturers. This opportunity would have far-reaching consequences! Although Messerschmitt had no practical experiences in designing fighters, he had a sound basis with the all-metal Messerschmitt Bf 108 4-seat light plane. This was of modern light-alloy monocoque construction with a fully retractable main undercarriage.

In January 1557 in Rome, a notary of the governor's court deposed a young woman lying in bed sorely injured. After having lost her virginity amidst group sex to a soldier at her village of Santa Fiora (so she claims), Camilla had come to Rome and moved in with a Signora Margarita, and then made her living trading sex for income. Camilla said that, shortly before, she had fallen in with a Frenchman. Naming him she then tells what happened next.

Camilla then adds that, with treatment, she is recovering.

This is clearly an ugly, tawdry story of unfeeling sex and callous harm. Rome's criminal records teem with such tales of cruelty, where men inflict harm on those weaker, be they women or other men who have less strength or social backing, or who just suffer momentary disadvantage. It would be easy, using records such as these, to depict masculinity as a toxic distillation, much unkind sex, and far more violence. But we should not.

ALL THINGS ARE connected, but not all things are connected equally – this is one of the central tenets of the ecologies in which all things exist, (inter)relate, and communicate. Recognition of this coextant, if unequal, connection between entities is becoming more commonplace when engaging with things and spaces and places – both of the present and of the past. This increased awareness of interrelational connections is certainly true for those working with material culture and objects, but is also seen in a wider socio-cultural context and more broadly in academic discourse. Pioneering work by the likes of Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Andrew Patrizio, Jane Bennett, and Timothy Morton (among others) has sought to highlight the interrelational and fluid network of things that form, inhabit, and shape the environments in which they and we exist and move, seeking to decentralise the human-centric narratives and structures which have traditionally shaped understanding of the world, and of the species and objects that inhabit it. As noted by Andrew Patrizio, ‘natural history is entangled with the images and processes of the visual (social history of art is a natural history of art)’. Such work has radically shifted the possible discussions surrounding things and objects; it reaches for a more complex and nuanced approach to living, knowing, and being in and of this network, instead of a top-down model of production, patron, viewer, or a human/object binary. These approaches acknowledge and promote the importance of a collaborative and fluid spectrum of natural and unnatural, human and non-human that make up a material and embodied being-in-the-world, of which these medieval objects, their makers and viewers are part. Alongside this awareness of an eco-critically inflected approach to these objects and these materials, it is also important to acknowledge their lush materialities, as discussed by Anne F. Harris and Karen Eileen Overbey in their ‘manifesto’ on ‘Lush Ethics’, where they write: ‘This is a material moment, and we want a material future […] a future of abundant encounters with the material and natural worlds, a future of touching objects that touch us back’.