Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages ed. by Clare A. Lees (review)

REVIEWS CLARE A. LEES, ed. Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages. Medieval Culture Series, vol. 7. Minneapolis and London: Univer­ sity of Minnesota Press, 1994. Pp. xxv, 193. $44.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. The study of masculinity--or masculinities, in keeping with the notion that manliness is constructed in a variety of ways across time and according to place--0ften elicits the quip, "Isn't that redundant?" History, after all, is his story. This collection of essays, the first of its kind in medieval studies, takes this question very seriously. Thelma Fenster argues in her preface that while the study of women in history and literature has often been shaped by gender, "the relationship between a man's gender and his acts remains to be examined. Women have been treated as material and local, whereas men have remained untouchable and unreachable" (p. x). As the ten essays illustrate, concentrating on masculinity, particularly on the question of how it is represented and reproduced, can shape our reading in fruitful and sometimes unexpected ways. More important, Medieval Masculinities dem­ onstrates forcefully that no single, monologic male identity in medieval Western Europe can be posited; taken together, the essays effectively cali­ brate differences in representation from one genre or discourse or time or place to another. Before I touch on individual essays, a word on contemporary men's studies is in order. There is a core group of texts, written mainly by sociolo­ gists and psychologists in the U.S., Great Britain, and Australia, that con­ stitutes the "first wave" of research in men's studies. All of the leading scholars concerned with the study of masculinity take as their premise the cultural constructedness of male identity; many take a psychoanalytic ap­ proach. However, their relationship to feminism is often problematic: some scholars cite feminist scholarship in an extremely selective way; others ig­ nore it altogether. The overall effect has been to downplay or deemphasize the activist agenda of feminism and feminist scholarship. Moreover, by stressing object-relations theory (best exemplified by Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering) at the expense of other psychoanalytic models, some scholars of masculinity have perpetuated a "blame the mom" attitude. The essays in Medieval Masculinities avoid these and other epis­ temological problems that sometimes characterize the academic study of masculinity; they do so by historicizing masculinity, grounding its effects and symptoms in specific events, trends, and texts. (Indeed, treatments of masculinity by literary scholars are usually superior to this nascent disci­ pline's foundational texts.) 241 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER In the first essay, "The Herren/rage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050-1150," Jo Ann McNamara focuses on the early twelfth cen­ tury in Western Europe, a time of "broad social changes, complicated by the ideological struggle between celibate and married men for leadership of the Christian world, [which} precipitated a masculine identity crisis" (p. 3). She dubs this crisis the Herren/rage. General and assertive in its claims rather than demonstrative, this essay creates a context for the essays that follow. Clare R. Kinney emphasizes the importance of "continuous and ulti­ mately equivocal renegotiation" of "chivalric manhood" (p. 47) in "The (Dis)Embodied Hero and the Signs of Manhood in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." The green girdle suggests how manliness is not necessarily stable and fixed; the adoption of the girdle by the court at the end of the poem illustrates how a dominant class can control its own representation. In "Men and Beou·ulf," Clare Lees takes up the history of Beou·zdfscholar­ ship as it has shaped our understanding of Anglo-Saxon manliness in the poem; she performs admirable readings of key texts by J. R. R. Tolkien, James W. Earl, and Gillian Overing. Lees then goes on to develop a reading of her own, in which she argues that Beowulf"is as much about the limits of aggression in this male aristocratic heroic world as it is about its suc­ cesses" (p. 144). The poem is by no means an unequivocal celebration of violence; rather, while it "naturalizes gender and thereby promotes mas­ culinism" (p. 146), it also reveals the tensions-and costs...