Elite masculinity and early modern performances of walking

This essay explores the surprising importance of walking to the production of early modern masculine identity, demonstrating that pedestrianism was a culturally significant performance that was widely recognized as an indicator of social status and patriarchal privilege. Walking is both an individual and social activity, and I propose a new model for considering how the collective perambulation of men organized and (re)produced masculine superiority—“pedestrian homosociality.” “Pedestrian” not only ascribes a fundamental role to walking in this process, it shows how everyday behavior worked in tandem with larger systems and institutions to shore up the power embodied by the white, non-disabled, affluent male. Expectations around elite male walking can be discerned across a remarkably broad range of early modern texts—from dialogues, to conduct literature, to husbandry manuals—but especially drama, whose manifestations of manliness relied upon the ideological imperatives that connected walking to patriarchy. At the same time, the theater offered a unique venue to disrupt the dominant discourses of pedestrianism, an opportunity which early modern dramatists seized upon, as I show through readings of Heywood’s How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (perf. 1601) and Massinger’s The Maid of Honour (perf. c.1630). [E.R.]