Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde.” (review)

Over the last two decades, masculinity studies has developed into a discipline valid in its own right—albeit one that will forever be beholden to feminist studies for its inception—and several key medieval texts have been examined through its lens. Since Criseyde’s centrality provides a continual reminder that the majority of characters in the poem, and all with any power, are men, it is perhaps surprising that this is the first full collection to be devoted to Troilus and Criseyde, whose context is, after all, the unassailably masculine setting of the Trojan War.

Several of the essays in Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” blend masculinity theory with other theoretical frameworks to good effect. Molly A. Martin reads the poem against medieval optical theory to challenge the tendency of visual studies scholars to equate viewer with active/male and viewed with passive/female, offering a convincing denial that Troilus’s gaze ever empowers him. The ethics of power is considered by Holly A. Crocker and Tison Pugh, who argue that Troilus’s “radical passivity” (90) in fact makes him superior to males with agency, all of whom lose power, while Troilus, ultimately, is elevated. Medieval optics recurs as a backdrop to Richard E. Zeikowitz’s explanation of how the cinematic technique of “suturing” might be applied to the private conversation of Pandarus and Troilus in Book 1. Zeikowitz proposes that this visual conjecturing of the characters’ responses to each other’s words can increase understanding without betraying the text, although some of the potential homoerotic undercurrents that he identifies in his demonstration are already evident from a noncinematic reading. Robert S. Sturges applies Giorgio Agamben’s concept of states of exception to posit that Criseyde is in “precisely the position described by Agamben, that of the one who may be killed with impunity” (33). Skillfully using Agamben’s concepts and terms, Sturges explores the lack of clear sovereignty and the breakdown of juridical order in Troy, the “deactivation” of the distinction between public and private, and the transference of “sovereign masculinity,” most particularly in relation to Criseyde’s vulnerability, her “bare life,” her “purely biological” existence (29).

There are some stimulating comparative readings. Michael Calabrese, proposing that both Chaucer and William Langland offer moral critiques of London, provides a fascinating examination of how Troilus’s and Will’s “male bodies” express, through the public enactment of manhood or the failure of its performance, “the nature of Christian civic and personal life” (162). In “Masculinity and Its Hydraulic Semiotics in Troilus and Criseyde,” James J. Paxson draws on biblical allegory in suggesting that Troilus’s abrupt arrival at Criseyde’s bedside and Pandarus’s description of Troilus appearing in his room via a “goter” together evoke David’s entry to Jebus via a similar orifice, thus “valoriz[ing Troilus] as a hypermasculine figural type” (75). Similarly, the arrangement of the sleeping chambers in Pandarus’s house parallels the layout of Solomon’s First Temple. These hypotheses are well constructed, but the metaphorical significance of “hydraulic,” presented first without and then with quotation marks in the first few pages, is initially unclear, and might usefully have been explained earlier than footnote 10. John M. Bowers suggests that Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Legend of Good Women, and Richard Maidstone’s Concordia with its reference to Troilus and Absolon, encode criticism of Richard II’s failure to procreate. This is a detailed, entertaining, and generally plausible proposition, if sometimes lacking in logical structure and occasionally undermined by omissions, notably the failure to consider Calchas’s treachery when contending that there is no bar to Troilus publicly acknowledging Criseyde as concubine. R. Allen Shoaf compares Chaucer’s Troilus with Shakespeare’s in an essay that offers thought-provoking ideas, interpretations, and etymologies. He alone confronts the volume’s opening questions “What is a man? What groups together approximately half of the humans...