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Making And Breaking Kings: Generational Kingship And The Masculinities Of The Last Plantagenet Kings Of England,1308–1399, Richard Merrell

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this project, I apply ideas on hegemonic and chivalric masculinity to four generations of Plantagenet kings of England during the fourteenth century—Edward II, Edward III, Edward the Black Prince, Richard II. My aim is to decenter men from their default position at the normative gender. I specifically recontextualize kingship form the canonical frameworks of patriarchal power and privilege and reconfigure it in terms of new research on masculinity studies to understand how masculine identities interact with ideas on the generational component of kingship. This project has implications for other fields of study such as chivalry and medieval masculinity. I …