Forum Introduction: Reconsidering Patriarchy in Early Modern Europe and the Middle East

The word ‘patriarchy’ appeared frequently on protest signs and blog posts in 2017, but over the last several decades it had largely disappeared from feminist scholarship, dismissed as essentialist, overly dichotomous and depressing. This includes fields that were especially influential in scholarly thinking about patriarchy in the first place, such as the study of early modern Europe, where patriarchy seemed particularly easy to find in both the sense of privileges accorded to all males and those accorded to male heads of household. This disappearance has happened despite, or perhaps because of, an explosion of scholarship on women, gender, sexuality and related topics in the early modern world, which has challenged and complicated analytical concepts that were once quite fixed. Such dismissal might be premature. The four papers in this Forum revisit patriarchy, contextualising it within current scholarship and reconsidering when and where it was a defining system for women and men, and when and where it was not. The authors also make some suggestions for how reconsidering ‘patriarchy’ in early modern Europe might serve as a model for broader reevaluations. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.