Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England by Katherine Lewis (review)

Following up on her co-edited volume on medieval masculinity, Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (University of Wales Press 2004), Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England focuses particularly on Henry V and Henry VI in its exploration of the themes to which the title of the book refers. The book has a tripartite structure: the Introduction comprises two chapters; Part I, on Henry V, comprises four chapters; and Part II, on Henry VI, comprises six chapters. The book closes with an Epilogue which looks ahead to the reigns of Edward IV, Richard III, Henry VI, and Henry VII.. It is written in an engaging but impeccably scholarly manner and will be of interest to medieval historians and historians and theorists of gender. The medieval understanding of masculinity as a fixed essence, normative and intrinsically superior to femininity (also conceived in a fixed and normative way) is well-known; the influence of Aristotle and Augustine on the official (clerical) view was enormous and no serious development of theories of gender occurred in the middle ages in scholastic and ecclesiastical circles. Lewis finds much more of interest in the interplay of gender theory on the one hand and gender reality on the other or, in her words, in “the relationship which such prescriptive conceptualizations maintain with what we can observe of the enactment of gender identities by the men and women actually living at the time” (6).

What we can observe is more complicated and more interesting than what we find in those scholastic expositors Aristotle and Augustine. For example, didactic texts on the arts of manhood, called “mirrors for princes,” were intended to inculcate the habits and characteristics prescribed for men (17). Lewis finds in the abundant publications of books in this genre some evidence that, outside of the Schools at least, thinkers in the middle ages had “an awareness that gender did not proceed straightforwardly from the configuration of one’s genitals, but it was a property that also needed to be nurtured and trained to be developed correctly” (6). Far from being viewed as a fixed essence, then, gender is seen rather as a thing to be learned and displayed or performed at the right times and in the right ways. The virtues associated with masculinity remained more or less fixed—courage and prowess in military matters, moderation, self-mastery, skillful management, piety, generosity—but these were understood as trappings adorning mature adulthood (after a culturally acceptable wayward adolescence) rather than as definitional components of the what-it-isto-be of masculinity itself.

Medieval kingship, Lewis argues, was exercised competently to the degree that a king was adept at performing ideal masculinity. The office of the king is therefore an exemplification hegemonic masculinity, wherein the masculinity performed by the ruling male is more perfect than but similar in type to the masculinity expected from males at all strata of society (34). Not just subordinate nobles but all heads of households were to perform the same type of masculinity (if not to the same degree) as the monarch. Henry V is paradigmatic here; his conduct at Agincourt was so admirable, Lewis quotes Pseudo-Elmham, that even were he of inferior rank he would “have deserved to be crowned with a laurel of honor above others” (120). Particular kings, then, were judged according to their performances of masculinity: Edward III and Henry V are great kings because they were viewed as manly kings; Richard II and Henry VI are poor kings because they were viewed as unmanly.

Lewis objects to the caricature of Henry VI as actually unmanly or effete. The ineffectiveness of his reign should not be put down to his lack of masculine virtues as such, but instead to his inability to appear manly to his people: “Richard was prevented from realizing a desire to prove himself as a warrior by practical issues and circumstances, and reacted angrily at missing the chance to thus prove himself in the early 1380s” (11). Whereas...