Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages (review)

The frontispiece of Isabel Davis’s excellent book shows an early fifteenth-century misericord, which itself depicts a carver producing a misericord. This astonishingly self-reflexive object is the artfully chosen material example of a phenomenon that Davis locates in late fourteenth-and early fifteenth-century writing. The volume explores “intersections between medieval masculine subjectivity and the ethics of labor and living, within a group of texts that are geographically proximate and that span the two generations between c. 1360 and c. 1430” (2). This complex but arresting book brings together work on five major writers of this period—Langland, Usk, Gower, Chaucer, and Hoccleve—and is focused on three central ideas: life-writing, the representation of labor, and masculinity. These three things, as Davis compellingly shows, were closely related. Her analysis of “how” and “why” marshals a great deal of material—theoretical, historical, literary-critical—into some important new perspectives on all of these writers, and perhaps on late medieval culture on a broader, and deeper, level.

Davis traces the “fixation” (9) on labor in these texts (and one thinks particularly of Langland’s Piers Plowman here) to the demographic and social changes of the fourteenth century, particularly acute in London, where the language of labor statutes collided with the newness, the fluidity, of social and labor identities in an especially palpable way. Indeed, it is this tension between “official” or traditional figures of labor and masculinity and the “unstable cusp identity” (9) of many of these writers (semiclerical; bureaucratic) that, Davis argues, goes some way to producing the vast and intricate complexity, and the self-reflexiveness and anxiety, of something like Piers Plowman. In this burst of vernacular writing in the years 1360–1430, we might see “a representation of a new masculine modality: a kind of urbanitas, a pragmatic non-heroic identity that is an unsteady accommodation between the ‘common good’ and the interior, appetitive self” (11). This is ultimately the wider argument of the book, which works to bind together some very detailed discussions of individual texts.

This idea—the “unheroic,” practical, even bourgeois image of masculinity in many late medieval texts—is evocative of parts of J. A. Burrow’s wonderful book Ricardian Poetry (1971), but Davis’s formulation of it is both more historically specific and more theoretically sophisticated. For Davis’s study is less interested in the possibilities of canon formation and literary periodization, which were important parts of Burrow’s book. Instead, Davis centers her analysis on London culture and London writing in a distinctive and compelling way. But Davis’s point is not that all these texts worry away at the issue of masculine selfhood and social roles in the same way. Importantly, the broad thesis about the shifting nature of masculine self-representation and its relation to late medieval economic and social history is never allowed to overpower the complex textual analysis of the individual works.

Chapter 1 focuses on Langland’s Piers Plowman. This is an excellent analysis of the poem, which relates some familiar contexts for the poem (fourteenth-century labor legislation) with aspects of it that are less frequently emphasized. In a sequence of astute and artful close readings of Langland’s verse, Davis’s analysis describes how the poem’s preoccupation with the language of labor is connected to issues of sexuality and marriage. This is an excellent point, for Langland’s poem is often seen (and certainly regularly taught) as a poem whose focus is largely sociopolitical and/or anticlerical. Davis’s reading of the poem helps to show how economic and political discourses were closely integrated with discourses about domesticity, sexuality, and selfhood. Most strikingly, perhaps, Davis shows how Langland can be seen to be “negotiating a more privileged place for marriage and fatherhood within his theological poetics” (14), and that Langland’s representation of marriage “always looks for loopholes in the Catholic case for the primacy of virginity” (24).

This complex, erudite discussion leads...