Masculinities and Femininities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (review)

Volume 23 in the Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance series has its origins in the 2007 ACMRS conference Masculinities and Femininities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this collection of the proceedings, Frederick Kiefer refreshingly dispenses with the typical collection introduction; rather than providing perfunctory summaries of the essays to follow, Kiefer reflects on his pedagogical decision to replace The Changeling with The Roaring Girl in his undergraduate survey of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His students’ engagement with the play’s cross-dressing, marriage-defying Moll Cutpurse/Mary Frith protagonist brings him to the unsurprising conclusion that “no issue fascinates this generation of students more than that of sexual identity” (p. ix). He connects this observation to the essays at hand by noting that the authors and texts under discussion illustrate similarly that “gender identities are inherently unstable” (p. x).

Kiefer’s introductory focus on undergraduate pedagogy here is indeed refreshing and welcome, but it may be as well that he realized that the essays have little in common besides their origins as papers at the same conference. Proceeding somewhat chronologically by the dates of the texts under discussion, none of the essays refers to any of the others except in the broadest of thematic terms. Very few, if any, readers will see the nine essays as a coherent group to be explored as a whole; instead, scholars and students will seek out the individual essays for their specific content. The following remarks do not follow precisely the order of essays as presented in the volume, but address first those essays largely concerned with masculinities, then those focused on femininities.

The collection begins with Tracy Adams’s discussion of a possible model for “clerical masculinity” that drew on Augustine’s Confessions for men who had experienced and appreciated but then renounced earthly intimacy (both sexual and emotional). Adams reads Abelard, the anonymous “Metamorphosis Golye Episcopi,” Peter of Blois, and Jean de Meun as examples of such masculinity, ultimately arguing that such a construction of masculinity was less misogynistic than a more oppositional “demonization of women” (p. 3).

Victor Scherb’s fine essay, “Shoulder Companions and Shoulders in Beowulf,” combines detailed lexical analysis (of eaxlgestealla ‘shoulder-companion’) with discussion of how shoulders and shoulder-companions figure in Beowulf to present “masculine intimacy” as part of (necessarily) masculine heroism. Scherb’s conclusions about Wiglaf at Beowulf’s death, where he is literally frean eaxlum neah (at his lord’s shoulder), emphasize “the importance and the fragility of masculine relationships” in this poem (p. 44).

Masculine heroism of a different sort is Lynn Shutters’s focus in “Lion Hearts, Saracen Heads, Dog Tails: The Body of the Conqueror in Richard Coer de Lyon.” In the late Middle English romance, Richard literally eats the heart of a lion, infusing his heroic masculinity with oddly animal-like qualities that spill over into the much-discussed cannibalism episodes later in the romance. Shutters’s careful and well-presented analysis provides a deft and intriguing final reading of Richard’s consumption of the Saracens, uniting gender and postcolonial critiques in an exciting and productive manner.

In “‘Trewe Men’: Pastoral Masculinity in Lollard Polemic,” Elizabeth Schirmer does an excellent job describing the Lollards’ “sustained retroping of marriage and sexual sin, elevating marriage above virginity and using adultery and sodomy to figure violations of the Word” (p. 118), but her argument connecting that “retroping” specifically to masculinity is ultimately unconvincing. She sees the Lollards reaching for a “pastoral masculinity” of marriage rather than a “clerical masculinity” of celibacy, but fails in her attempt to connect this thinking specifically to men and masculinity or masculine performance. Even as she acknowledges that the phrase “trewe men” is most often (if not always) gender neutral in its preaching and theological contexts, it is her only evidence that these arguments for marriage over celibacy refer specifically to men rather than to...