| Summary: | This article begins a critical revision of a historiography that has overestimated themes of honor and race in understanding constructions of elite white masculinity in the antebellum South. Gentility, too, played a decisive role in framing appropriate manly behavior. By investigating the specific interaction between the Southern discourses of gentility, medievalism, and masculinity, this article indicates a direction for significant future study of Southern elites. It first addresses these themes in a broader, conceptual sense, before turning to the embodiment and apotheosis of gentility, medievalism, and gender roles in the South: the leisure resorts of the Virginia Springs.
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