Ruth Mazo Karras. Thou Art the Man

Studying medieval masculinity is difficult. Medievalists exploring the cultural construction of manliness, individuals’ social performance of their gender, or the subjectivity of a man’s gendered identity run up against texts that rarely discuss masculinity explicitly. How do we discover aspects of men’s actions and thoughts taken for granted by medieval cultures when we lack the thick descriptions of modern ethnography and the few male subjectivities we can easily access are atypical? How do scholars avoid imposing our own preconceptions on what masculinity should be about? Many medievalists, including Ruth Mazo Karras in her influential monograph From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late-Medieval Europe (2003), have synthesized texts about many different men to provide a cohesive overview of specific masculinities. Her new book, Thou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages, takes a different approach, drawing on Joan Wallach Scott’s theory of gender ideology working through symbols. Karras explores how the biblical story of David and interpretations of his character were reworked by Jewish and Christian writers and artists and what that tells us about medieval masculinity more generally. While scholars have often analyzed David as a medieval symbol of kingship, and there are an increasing number of gendered readings of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Karras’s focus on the gender of the medieval David aligns her book more with studies of changing interpretations of the Virgin Mary over time.

Christianity · Ethnography · Identity (music) · Ideology · Judaism · Masculinity · Subjectivity · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender