Rivalrous Masculinities

This volume is a timely, important continuation and development of the scholarly conversation about medieval masculinities. Although this volume grew out of a series of conferences, classes, and scholarly exchanges, it is more than a coterie project; in fact, as the editor Ann Marie Rasmussen acknowledges, the volume is a testament to the kind of wide-ranging humanities scholarship made possible by a program like Duke University's “Humanities Writ Large,” which provided the support for the scholarly community from which this volume arose. This is because, in expanding how we think about medieval masculinities beyond the simple doings of men, essays in this volume chart several new paths that will be indispensable to medieval gender studies for the next generation. The three key insights of this collection—masculinities are plural, intersectional, and non-normative—demonstrate how scholars might continue to rethink masculinities beyond heterosexuality, outside hegemony, and through instances where status distinguishes between men.To do so, this volume's essays laudably acknowledge the work of scholars who have established the study of medieval masculinities over the past three decades. Clare Lees, who is herself partly responsible for instituting this field of inquiry, gives a helpful overview of medieval masculinities, including the important volume she edited, Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (1994). As she notes, scholarship has largely been conducted via a series of edited collections, most of which were edited and populated by historians. This focus, of course, inflects the work in particular ways. In her analysis of the Old English “Precepts,” a didactic conduct poem in which an older man instructs a younger man in the most important aspects of masculinity, Lees details the conventional practices that seek to install one form of masculinity over others.Similarly, Gillian Overing's analysis of Old English poetry's representations of heroic masculinity as a series of environmental affects affirms that men grapple with expectations for dominant masculinity. The “crisis between men” that Overing identifies in chapter two is expressed as a series of affects associated with stormy, tumultuous, or disturbed weather conditions (p. 33). The associations between troubled affects and troubled masculinities, she further contends, reveal how much pressure men feel to live up to certain standard, culturally privileged, formations of masculine identity. In the heroic community, pressures between mind and body sometimes lead to an affective meltdown, so that warriors “do not know what to feel, or how to be” (p. 34).Men jostle with each other to work out their relational masculine identities, because, as J. Christian Straubhaar-Jones argues in chapter three, multiple models of masculinity were in contest during the Middle Ages, even within the work of the same author. Through his analysis of Henry Suso's Life of the Servant (14th c.), Straubhaar-Jones shows how Suso uses secular and sacred masculinities to authorize his spiritual persona. The rivalrous relation between secular and sacred masculinities allows for an adaptive gender model that would appeal to lay and religious audiences alike.In the collection's fourth chapter, Astrid Lembke traces the challenge of being both learned and a family man in medieval and Early Modern Jewish writings. By means of a motif in which a man seeks aid for his family yet marries a she-devil as a consequence, these tales show the challenges that marriage and study present to a man who would be both wed and learned. These roles represent different, irreconcilable masculinities in the thirteenth-century version of this story, The Tale of A Poor Man; by contrast, in the seventeenth-century rendering of this narrative, the man is able to reconcile with his family.The idea that masculinities are frequently in competition is not limited to aspects of a singular identity or consciousness. Rather, in chapter five, Darrin Cox provides a fascinating reading of historical change, analyzing how the rise of the courtier prompted changes to knighthood in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France. Those shifts, along with changing royal politics, led to a resurgence of the knight. The subservient masculinity of the courtier was rejected, but the education the courtier introduced into court life ultimately became a part of knighthood as well.In chapter six, F. Regina Psaki traces the plurality of masculinities constructed by Antonio Pucci's Il Contrasto delle donne (ca. 1371). As Psaki persuasively argues, debates about women produced different versions of masculinity. The accuser, she details, inhabits a masculinity characterized by skepticism that ultimately asserts men's powerlessness in the face of domineering and duplicitous women. By contrast, the Defender's masculinity is more credulous, perhaps, but also more self-aware of his own privilege. His ability to see women's point of view lends him a reasonable, controlled gender position that solidifies his authority. These contesting positions, while they show masculinity's multiplicity, also engage Dante and Boccaccio's renderings of famous women in ways that allow Pucci to affirm the contingency of human good.Chapter seven, by Corinne Wieben, provides an important account of how masculinities were differentiated in the courts of fourteenth-century Lucca. Because episcopal judges were part of the clergy, their masculinity was different than that of husbands accused of spousal abuse. Women used gender roles—their own victimization and their husbands’ aggression—to gain an advantage in court proceedings. Men, too, might accuse women of gender insubordination. But by depicting themselves as vulnerable, passive, and in need of protection, women's petitions to courts brought aspects of clerical masculinity into clearer outline. Because these men were associated with self-control and protection, women might forge an alliance against a traditional masculinity associated with violence and domination.In chapter eight, Ruth Mazo Karras studies how medieval Jewish and Christian sources represented the Biblical story of David and Jonathan. As a narrative of male friendship, this story was also used to distinguish between homosocial and heterosexual desire. In Christian sources, Karras details, the marriage between David and Jonathan's sister Micah becomes an important way of establishing a nonerotic bond. David and Jonathan may love each other in ways that supersede marital love, but their intense emotional connection remained distinct from a physical union. Jewish sources, including the late fifteenth-century Yiddish text the Shmuel-bukh, use motifs from chivalric literature to suggest a heroic bond between men; as Karras importantly argues, this “does not mean that a man plays the role that a woman might otherwise play, either sexually or socially” (p. 166).Diane Wolfthal offers a fascinating analysis of servants and masculinity across medieval European art in chapter nine. As she details, servants in visual representations are usually smaller than masters; they are also decentered, obscured, or depicted in submissive postures. Rather than being considered part of a masculine hierarchy, servants were counted in the same way as their female counterparts—as accessories to their masters’ and mistresses’ power. There are exceptions to this conception, Wolfthal further demonstrates. Depictions of servitude as holy changed how servants were represented; similarly, collections of craftsmen made for mercantile communities include servants in representations that afford their positions skill and dignity.Chapter ten, by Karma Lochrie, provides indispensable analysis of “Medieval Masculinities Without Men.” By analyzing how female masculinities work in different ways—in “feminine panic mode,” in spiritualized, miraculous revelation, and using romance logics of disguise—Lochrie demonstrates how female masculinities decenter and refigure masculinity, particularly in John Mandeville (p. 212). Her suggestion that the Amazons represent an idealized masculinity warrants further attention, especially as she uses this claim to open way for the most important analysis of trans-masculinities in medieval literature that I've yet seen. By distinguishing “trans-masculinity” as involving transition, Lochrie shows how Christine de Pizan's Le Livre de la mutacion de Fortune and Gower's Iphis and Ianthe challenge us to rethink “masculinity apart from men” (pp. 221–28; 229).In chapter eleven, which considers “the beloved disciple” motif, Andreas Krass examines how the relationship between Jesus and John was imagined from the Bible to the Da Vinci Code. By considering a host of medieval writings on male friendship, Krass uses this relationship to challenge modern notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality. While some writings consider this relationship to be a spiritual union, others depict an eroticized physical bond. And while many of us might chafe to think of Dan Brown as capturing our own insistence that such contact be heterosexual, the ways that medieval representations suggest fluidity reveals our own gender panic.The range and reach of this volume make it an invigorating, important continuation of the critical conversation on medieval masculinities. The emphasis on disempowered masculinities is especially welcome in an era when we see the negative consequences that follow from hegemonic constructions of men's power. Given the harms #MeToo has exposed, I did wish for more of a critical focus on patriarchy. Long ago Clare Lees urged scholars to think more about how patriarchy consolidated its cultural dominance (“Men in Beowulf,” 1994), and with more and more feminist thinkers refocusing activist and theoretical work on the unequal distribution of dispossession, medievalists have much to contribute to this interventionist reevaluation of masculinities. This volume makes a start by offering an intersectional, pluralist, nonnormative account of medieval masculinities

Conversation · Hegemony · Medieval studies · Political science · Politics · Queer · Scholarship · Sociology · Classics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History

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