The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England by Derek G. Neal (review)

REVIEWS 281 fiery element, the five zones of the earth, that the sea is higher than the land, the sphericity of the earth, the transformation of the elements into one another, and the art of astrology (145). Valla also felt that such inquiries encouraged dangerous speculation into the secrets of God’s creative acts. Along similar religious lines, Valla rejected the Aristotelian psychology, which indicated the soul’s dependence upon the internal faculties of the brain. Valla judged that this rendered the soul too “passive” and that such an explanation fell beneath the soul’s “noble and autonomous nature.” Nauta cautioned against superficial comparisons of Valla’s regard for daily observation with seventeenth-century science. Unlike later naturalists, Valla was more intent upon curbing speculation about God’s artistry than sounding a call to any systematic investigation of nature on its own terms (148). While Valla relished reducing scholastic jargon, his program also envisioned an expansion of scholastic methods of inquiry and argumentation. For instance, Valla wanted to replace philosophic speculation with the “true theologizing” of philological and historical analysis. He also wanted to reduce the scholastic dependence upon the formal logic of syllogisms by increasing the role of classical rhetoric. Valla saw no conflict in combining the discrete goals of the logician’s task of discovering truth with the rhetorician’s duty of “producing conviction in [his] hearers” (211). As this final point on rhetoric suggests, Valla was only superficially engaged with the scholastic Aristotelianism of the later Middle Ages. In the end, Nauta reveals that Valla likely only consulted the foundational philosophic writings of Aristotle and Boethius of scholasticism, showing no evidence of engaging the long commentary tradition of those works that developed in the universities over the course of the Middle Ages. Thus the Repastinatio cannot be considered a sympathetic critique or representation of scholasticism in any illuminating way. Rather, Valla sought to replace a scholastic view with a non-philosophical alternative based on the oratorical program of Cicero and Quintilian, the grammatical traditions of Priscian, and a somewhat vague notion of a common linguistic usage (273). For this reason, parallels sought between Valla and medieval nominalism are misdirected. Although both William of Ockham and Valla wanted to reduce scholastic terminology, Ockham did so for philosophical reasons, while Valla’s efforts were primarily grammatical in nature (124). The same is true regarding apparent similarities between Valla’s work and the modern ordinary language movement of the 1950s (discussed in an appendixlike section of the conclusion). That said, Nauta suggests that the importance of Valla’s work lies in the spirit of his critique, namely its “gut feeling” that an entirely different approach was necessary to think about the world, both metaphysically and theologically. ANDREW FOGLEMAN, History, University of Southern California Derek G. Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2008) 303 pp. Derek G. Neal’s excellent The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England offers a reconsideration of traditional representations of masculinity in fourteenththrough sixteenth-century England. Neal moves away from scholarly analyses of masculinity as stereotypically manifested in displays of aggressiveness and REVIEWS 282 patriarchy. Instead, he identifies a relational social identity, in which medieval men valued inward and outward consonance, honesty, and household management . Situating himself within the work of historians Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard, Neal suggests that their approach to medieval masculinity insufficiently represents the complexity of gender norms. By synthesizing both historical and literary texts, offering close readings and psychoanalytical theory, Neal asserts a paradigm of medieval masculinity frequently at odds with itself. He portrays normative masculinity as transparent, self-controlled and moderate, and as such in line with regulatory forces that enabled social relationships. Neal also identifies a more subversive masculinity, one concerned with gratifying bodily desires and rebellion that acted as a transitional phase to true male adulthood but that retained cultural capital within literary romances. Both representations exist simultaneously, demanding contradictory social performances and, consequently, driving the need for literary fantasy in the romance. Chapter 1, “False Thieves and True Men,” discusses the language of defamation and manhood. Neal discovers that accusations of thievery did not necessarily correlate to actual theft, but...