The emergence of gender as an analytical category fundamentally restructured early modern historiography in ways that extended far beyond simply adding women to existing narratives. When Joan Wallach Scott published her landmark 1986 essay arguing that gender should be understood as a primary way of signifying relationships of power, she initiated a methodological transformation that would reshape how historians approached every aspect of early modern society—from state formation to religious practice, from colonial encounters to scientific inquiry.

This shift from women's history to gender analysis represented more than terminological refinement. Women's history, for all its recovery of forgotten female agency and experience, had often operated within existing historiographical frameworks, asking where women fit within established periodizations and categories. Gender history posed a more radical question: how did the organization of sexual difference itself constitute the very structures historians sought to explain? The category demanded that scholars interrogate how masculinity and femininity operated as relational constructs embedded in language, institutions, and power.

The implications for early modern studies proved particularly profound. A period defined by religious reformation, state consolidation, colonial expansion, and intellectual transformation now appeared shot through with gendered logics that earlier generations had either ignored or naturalized. What had seemed neutral categories—the monarch's body, confessional discipline, scientific objectivity, civilizational hierarchy—revealed themselves as deeply gendered constructions. The historiographical consequences continue to unfold, challenging scholars to rethink not just who populates early modern history, but how we conceptualize historical change itself.

Joan Scott's argument that gender functions as a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between sexes, and as a primary way of signifying power, arrived in early modern studies at a propitious moment. The field had already absorbed significant insights from women's history—scholars like Natalie Zemon Davis, Lyndal Roper, and Merry Wiesner had demonstrated that women's experiences and female agency mattered to understanding early modern transformations. Yet Scott's intervention demanded something more systematic.

The theoretical framework Scott proposed drew upon post-structuralist insights, particularly from Derrida and Foucault, to argue that gender operated through culturally available symbols, normative concepts, and subjective identities that historians needed to decode. For early modern scholars, this opened entirely new interpretive terrain. Monarchy, that quintessential early modern institution, became legible as a gendered system wherein paternal authority over subjects mirrored (and was legitimized by) male authority over households. The state's very conceptualization as body politic depended upon gendered assumptions about embodiment and governance.

Religious history underwent similar transformation. The Reformation's emphasis on household discipline, clerical marriage, and proper gender roles revealed that confessional change was simultaneously gender reformation. Catholic responses, including the enhanced veneration of the Virgin Mary and debates over female mystical authority, likewise emerged as sites where religious and gender orders intersected and mutually constituted one another. Gender analysis made visible what had seemed natural or incidental.

Colonial historiography proved equally fertile ground. The category of gender illuminated how European expansion involved not merely economic extraction or territorial conquest, but the imposition of particular gender systems upon colonized peoples. Indigenous gender arrangements—which frequently diverged from European binary frameworks—became battlegrounds of cultural transformation. Missionaries, administrators, and settlers actively restructured gender relations as instruments of colonial power.

The application of gender analysis to intellectual history similarly reshaped understanding of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment. Scholars demonstrated how the emergent culture of empirical science constructed itself through gendered metaphors—nature as female body to be penetrated, reason as masculine faculty opposed to feminine passion. What earlier historians had described as the triumph of rationality appeared as a thoroughly gendered epistemological project, its claims to objectivity revealed as historically specific masculinist constructions rather than neutral advances.

Takeaway

Gender analysis reveals that categories historians once treated as natural or incidental were active constructions—and that understanding how sexual difference organized power transforms interpretation of every major early modern development.

One of gender history's most productive developments involved the analytical recovery of masculinity as a historical category requiring investigation rather than naturalization. If earlier generations had written about men without examining manhood, gender historians reversed this invisibility. Masculinity, like femininity, emerged as culturally constructed, historically variable, and subject to analysis. For early modern studies, this discovery transformed understanding of politics, social order, and violence.

The work of scholars like Alexandra Shepard on English masculinities, and Christopher Fletcher and Sean Brady on European contexts more broadly, demonstrated that early modern manhood was neither monolithic nor secure. Multiple masculinities competed within hierarchical arrangements, wherein elite men claimed superior manhood over subordinate males as well as over women. The achievement of normative masculinity required constant performance and remained perpetually vulnerable to challenge. This instability had profound implications for understanding early modern social dynamics.

Political history benefited enormously from attention to masculinity. Kingship involved elaborate performances of martial prowess, paternal authority, and bodily integrity that constituted claims to legitimate rule. The crisis surrounding a ruler's perceived masculine inadequacy—as with questions about James I's relationships with male favorites—destabilized political systems precisely because gendered legitimacy mattered. Republicanism and constitutionalism likewise drew upon masculine ideologies of civic virtue, independence, and rational self-governance that excluded women and effeminate men from political subjecthood.

The early modern culture of honor, that pervasive system regulating elite behavior, became newly intelligible through gender analysis. Dueling, that characteristic aristocratic practice, emerged as a performance of masculine honor wherein reputation required violent defense. The elaborate codes governing challenges and combat constituted theaters of masculinity. Similarly, violence within households—against wives, children, servants—operated within gendered frameworks that legitimized male correction of dependents while policing excessive brutality that threatened patriarchal order.

Attention to masculinity also reshaped understanding of religious change. The Protestant critique of clerical celibacy and promotion of married ministry represented a reformation of masculinity as much as theology. The Catholic priest's renunciation of sexuality and family, which Protestants derided as unnatural and effeminate, gave way to the married pastor whose patriarchal household exemplified proper Christian manhood. These competing visions of masculine religious identity drove confessional conflict in ways earlier historiography had missed.

Takeaway

Making masculinity visible as a historical construction—rather than treating it as the unmarked default—reveals how gendered performances of manhood shaped political legitimacy, social hierarchy, and the regulation of violence throughout early modern society.

By the 1990s, a significant current within gender history pushed beyond the emphasis on discourse and representation that characterized Scott's original intervention. Scholars increasingly insisted that bodies themselves—their materiality, their sensations, their physiological processes—required historical attention that linguistic analysis alone could not provide. This bodies turn proved particularly productive for early modern studies, where transformations in medical understanding, sexual regulation, and bodily discipline offered rich historical terrain.

The work of Thomas Laqueur on the history of sex became foundational, if controversial. His argument that early modern Europeans operated within a one-sex model—understanding female anatomy as an inverted, inferior version of male—challenged assumptions about the transhistorical stability of biological sex itself. While subsequent scholars have complicated Laqueur's schema, his intervention forced recognition that bodies are always interpreted through cultural frameworks. What counted as male or female, the boundaries distinguishing sexes, proved historically variable rather than naturally given.

Sexuality emerged as a distinct analytical domain within this bodily turn. Historians traced how early modern authorities regulated sexual behavior through ecclesiastical courts, secular legislation, and community surveillance in ways that constituted subjects as sexual beings. The category of sodomy—that elastic designation encompassing various non-reproductive sexual acts—revealed how sexual regulation intersected with religious, political, and social ordering. Same-sex practices, while formally condemned, occupied complex positions within early modern cultures that modern categories of homosexuality inadequately capture.

Reproductive bodies attracted sustained scholarly attention. Pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and infant care appeared as historical experiences shaped by shifting medical theories, religious meanings, and social arrangements. The lying-in chamber, dominated by female midwives and attendants, constituted a distinctly feminine social space that male physicians only gradually penetrated—a transformation with significant implications for gendered medical authority. Miscarriage, stillbirth, and maternal mortality also entered historical analysis as experiences requiring interpretation within early modern frameworks of meaning.

This attention to embodied experience pushed gender history toward integration with histories of emotion, sensation, and material culture. Scholars examined how clothing, cosmetics, and bodily modification produced gendered appearances that were neither merely superficial nor simply discursive. The early modern body emerged as simultaneously biological reality, cultural construction, and lived experience—categories whose boundaries proved far more permeable than earlier historiographical assumptions suggested.

Takeaway

Bodies are not merely biological substrates upon which culture writes meanings—they are simultaneously material, experiential, and historically interpreted, requiring analytical approaches that refuse simple oppositions between nature and culture.

The transformation wrought by gender analysis in early modern historiography extends far beyond the correction of earlier neglect of women's experience. Gender as a category fundamentally reorganized how historians approach their evidence, formulate questions, and construct explanations. The gendered dimensions of state formation, religious change, imperial expansion, and intellectual transformation now appear not as supplementary additions to existing narratives, but as constitutive elements requiring central analytical attention.

Contemporary early modern historiography continues to develop these insights. Intersectional approaches examine how gender operated alongside and through categories of race, class, and religion in producing differentiated historical subjects. Transnational and global perspectives trace how gender systems traveled, collided, and transformed through colonial encounters and cultural exchanges. The boundaries of gender history itself remain productively contested.

What persists is the fundamental insight that gender is not merely something history happened to, but something through which history happened. The methodological revolution initiated in the 1980s remains incomplete, its implications still being worked through across every subdomain of early modern studies.