Becoming Male in the Middle Ages ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tions ofcourtliness" (p.182).Tracing attitudes toward extravagance and exclusivity through time, he delineates how the Church and the state prevailed against the courtly community. Arguing that in the later Middle Ages such criticisms of courtliness, especially of its lavish ostentation, broaden beyond the pulpit, Burnley concludes that the resultant perspective "saw courtliness as combining a valuable refinement of behaviour with a morality based on religious teaching, free from the abstractions of theology, but accompanied by a healthy appreciation of the values of economics and politics" (p.205). As courtliness adapted to the requirements first of religion and then of an urban society, courtesie was supplanted by honeste, reverence, and regard in a process he terms the democratization of courtliness. Burnley's prose is clear and his scholarly apparatus and bibliography helpful, if not as complete as those of the earlier articles upon which he draws.The shortcomings of this book are those typical of texts written for the general audience: oversimplification here, too little theorizing there, not enough evidence in between.Nevertheless, his arguments are interesting and accessible to the advanced-student reader, while the rich lexical analysis and breadth of sources he employs spark in the special­ ized reader both memory and desire.In sum, I would apply to Burnley's book his own laudatory description ofChaucer: "His borrowings ofideas are ...drawn from the bran-tub of medieval doctrine, and his handling of love is eclectic" (p.168). MARK ADDISON AMOS Southern Illinois University at Carbondale JEFFREY JEROME COHEN and BONNIE WHEELER, eds.Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. New York and London: Garland, 1997.Pp.xx, 387.$68.0 0. The seventeen essays in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, framed by Jef­ frey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler's "Becoming and Unbecoming" and Michael Uebel's "On Becoming-Male," share a strong, largely uni­ fied thesis.Gesturing toward existentialist modes of "becoming," but less toward a processual undersranding of cultural relations that might be identified as materialist, the collection examines the "ways in which 326 REVIEWS masculinity is written on the body, through the body, and by the mind into culture" (p. xiii). Time and again, Becoming Male examines medieval culture using the premises of postmodern analyses of gender as rela­ tional, multivalent, and oppositional. Unsurprisingly, then, the collec­ tion as a whole draws heavily on the work of such familiar figures as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Eve Sedgwick. To capture, however fleetingly, the processual nature of becoming-male (as Uebel puts it) is to read medieval culture as a map traversed by multiple discourses of the body. Desire, discipline, transgression, transformation, and the flu­ idity of sexualities and genders are key themes in this "alchemical" proj­ ect of becoming male. The magic of alchemy (emphasized by D. Vance Smith in "Body Doubles: Producing the Masculine Corpus," as well as by Cohen and Wheeler) turns matter into the gold of a maleness shot through with "impurity and phantasmatic 'refinement' " (p. xi). Becoming Male in the Middle Ages tends to stress the impurities of the process rather than the desire for gold, although R. James Goldstein ("Normative Heterosexuality in History and Theory: The Case of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount") tracks Lindsay's anxious emphasis on normative masculine heterosexuality throughout his writing on king­ ship and court life, and David Townsend's fascinating "Ironic Intertex­ tuality and the Reader's Resistance to Heroic Masculinity in the Walth­ arius" traces the ways in which a resisting male reader might evade the illusory gold of hypermasculine heroism. For Smith, the male body, "bound up in artifice" (p. 16) and abstracted from its matter, signifies in idealized discourses of production-labor, currency, medicine-each of which undermines the natural ease with which man becomes a ho­ mology for world. Uebel ("On Becoming-Male") pushes such homolo­ gies further in search of the moment(s) when the "private," presocialized body emerges. Uebel's move into the body (into corporeality), however minimally examined and however unexamined his use of the notorious terms "public" and "private," offers a fitting conclusion to the collec­ tion's emphasis on "becoming" with a new project-that of the...