摘要
While the basic model of learning masculinity is fathers, how, exactly, a fatherless boy learned masculity？ How and where did the children growing up without traditional family structure learn to be men？ This study examines a specific group of children – young apprentices in medeival England – in order to reconstruct how fatherless sons learned the concept of masculinity. To further the question – did the separation of their natal fathers during their youth made boys less masculine？ By examining the indentures, court records and various administrative records, this study demonstrates that, apprentices went through more masculine relationships than the children grew up with their fathers’ prescence, because masters wielded he supreme power which made them de facto “surrogate fathers”. This study also manisfests that apprenticeship was the extension of fatherhood, because it led apprentices to experience absolute subordination to their masters, reducing them to the position of “full-dependence” in their social communities.
