How has the meaning of manhood changed over time? A History of Virility proposes a series of answers to this question by describing a trajectory that begins with ancient conceptions of male domination and privilege and examining how it persisted, with significant alterations, for centuries. While the mainstream of virility was challenged during the Enlightenment, its preeminence was restored by social forms of male bonding in the nineteenth century. Pacifist, feminist, and gay rights movements chipped away at models and codes of virility during the next hundred years, leading to the twentieth century's disclosing of a "virility on edge," or virility as an unstable entity dispossessed of any automatic claim to power.

These original essays, written by an international group of scholars including Arlette Farge, Jean-Paul Bertaud, Christelle Taraud, and Fabrice Virgili, add an intriguing sociohistorical dimension to our understanding of the evolution of virility. Unsettling received notions of political and cultural critique, these authors consider painting, sculpture, literature, film, and philosophy to expand our knowledge of fascism, nationalism, liberalism, classicism, and colonialism.

Alain Corbin is a French historian and specialist of nineteenth-century France. His publications include Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850; The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination; Village Bells; and The Life of an Unknown.

Jean-Jacques Courtine is professor of European studies at the University of Auckland, and professor emeritus at the Sorbonne nouvelle (Paris III) and the University of California, Santa Barbara. With Alain Corbin and Georges Vigarello, he edited Histoire du corps (History of the Body). His publications include Histoire du visage (History of the Face) and Déchiffrer le corps. Penser avec Foucault (Deciphering the Body. Thinking with Foucault).

Georges Vigarello is one of Europe's best-known historians of the body. He has published prolifically on topics ranging from Concepts of Cleanliness and the cultural history of sports to The History of Rape and The History of the Body. He is research director at the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS), and the author, most recently, of The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity.

Keith Cohen has published a number of translations from the French, most notably "The Laugh of the Medusa" by Hélène Cixous, reprinted widely throughout the English-speaking world, as well as Cixous's Third Body.