Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe: Construction, Transformation, and Subversion 600–1530 (review)

In this recent addition to the large body of scholarship on sex and gender in the Middle Ages, editors Elizabeth L’Estrange and Alison More have collected essays from several disciplines dealing with expressions of gender across the entirety of the medieval period. These broad chronological boundaries create the potential for a scattered volume, but the book is effectively unified by several narrower topics addressed by more than one essay, including material culture, hagiography, the tension between a “warrior” model and a “contemplative” model of masculinity, and the ways in which women subverted gendered norms in order to expand the behavioral options available to them. Furthermore, all essays assume, implicitly or explicitly, the performative nature of gender as articulated by Judith Butler. Nonetheless, the ten essays in this book deal with wide-ranging subjects, from male virginity in Anglo-Saxon saints’ lives to the epistolary writings of humanist Laura Cereta. It is difficult to extract a unified argument from the volume’s many essays; still, this collection is a significant addition to the corpus of work on gender in the medieval period.

The editors have contributed the volume’s first, titular chapter, in which they lay out their approach to gender as a “category of analysis” and preview the chapters to follow. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on hagiography. Chapter 2, by Cassandra Rhodes, explores portrayals of male virginity in Anglo-Saxon saints’ lives. She is especially interested in the paradox hagiographers face in attempting to resolve a masculine ideal linked to warrior culture with the ideal of virginity for male saints. Following Butler as well as Sarah Salih and Jo Ann Macnamara, Rhodes notes that “the virginal identity of some of these saints is inherently attached to their physicality” and argues for virginity as a “third gender” that is neither masculine nor feminine but somehow between or beyond the two. However, she also stresses the varied nature of portrayals of virgin men in Anglo-Saxon saints’ lives, concluding that the construction of male virginity was just as fluid and unstable as the construction of female virginity in the same context.

In chapter 3, Alison More examines the portrayals of saints in thirteenth-century Liège, noting that gender construction and transformation is portrayed as a conversion-like process. The importance of the physical body in this “call to conversation” leads More to conclude that the body plays an important role in hagiographies—not just for women saints (on whom much has been written) but for men as well. She notes that the tensions between the “warrior” and the “virgin” models of masculinity are resolved to some extent with the portrayal of male saints as “saintly knights” described in terms of “spiritual battle imagery.” In this way More addresses a similar paradigm to the one Rhodes considers in the previous chapter. “Virtus,” that defining feature of masculinity, is aligned with sexual prowess; how, then, are male religious “men”? In the case of Liégois saints, manly “virtue” is expressed through triumphing over sexuality, as in the story of the dead abbot being washed for burial whose genitals have miraculously disappeared. Interestingly, More comes to a model of gender expression similar to Rhodes’s “third-gender” model of holy virginity.

Chapter 4 moves away from hagiography and toward the political. In this essay, Francesca Canade Sautman examines the successive thirteenth-century rules of Joan and Margaret, countesses of Flanders. In the case of these women, lineage supersedes the supposed “weakness” of females, allowing them to rule in the absence of a male heir. The countesses’ reputations as poor rulers, established in the literature of their own time, persists today; Sautman seeks to recast the duchesses’ rules, saying that their “vulnerabilities” did not have to do with sex or gender but rather “larger societal factors” over which they had no control.

The gendered identity of a particular saint is addressed in chapter 5, the...