Gender in Medieval Culture by Michelle M. Sauer (review)

Michelle M. Sauer, professor in the Department of English at the University of North Dakota, wrote Gender in Medieval Culture as an introduction to gender in the Middle Ages, specifically, to discourses, beliefs, and customs associated with gender, gender roles, sex, and sexuality. Despite the title of the book, Sauer advises readers that her ambition is to focus on postconquest England (from the mid-eleventh to the fifteenth century). However, this geographic frame varies from chapter to chapter, and despite the similarities of intellectual discourses on gender throughout western Europe, this geographic inconsistency might mislead students unaware of the existence of various practices, legal frames, and customs that affected the gendered experiences of individuals outside England and gave more freedom to women.

In the introduction, Sauer discusses the recent developments of gender studies and the historiography of gender in the Middle Ages, and she introduces the essentialist (“naturally” and biblically justified) understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender in premodern thought. Throughout the book, the author develops the idea of “performative essentialism,” that “biology, social roles, and personal actions not only can determine gender, but also can change it” and hence can “move an individual along the gendered continuum” (12).

In the first chapter, “The Social World: Law, Medicine, and Science,” Sauer explains with clarity the intricate medical theories of the time and explores various themes related to sexuality, particularly rape, reproduction, contraception, and sexually transmitted (or not) disease. She relates these topics to legal and economic discourses, such as the English legal concept of coverture, which restricted women’s rights by placing them under the authority of their husbands. The author explains how medical science supported the gender hierarchy by asserting the “natural” inferiority of female biology, associated with vulnerability and instability, and the superiority and perfection of male biology, seen as the model for all bodies. In the second chapter, “The Expected Ideal: Marriage and Virginity,” Sauer examines the Roman Church’s views on the sexual and marital status of lay people and clerics. Discourses on virginity, widow(er)hood, marriage, and the chaste marriage in canon law, Patristic literature, and various ecclesiastical writings are analyzed to show how they reinforced patriarchy and associated femininity with sexuality and sin. Virginity and widowhood were not merely physical states; to gain spiritual value they had to be accompanied by a spiritual (masculine) state. Sauer subsequently offers a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the church’s regulation of marriage. The third chapter, “The Unexpected Actuality: ‘Deviance’ and Transgression,” looks at transgressive forms of gender performances and sexual activities (for example, prostitution, homosexuality, castration, cross-dressing). Many familiar medieval figures are introduced in a series of case studies: Abelard and Héloïse, Joan of Arc, and the transvestite John Rykener, a prostitute of fourteenth-century London, to cite only a few. Sauer demonstrates the existence of gender fluidity despite the essentialist and binary medieval view of biological sex, sexuality, and gender roles.

Chapter 4, “The Gendered Christ: Sexuality and Religion,” explores religious femininity and masculinity and further explicates the association of masculinity with spirituality and control of femininity with the body and flesh. Women who could obtain the highest spiritual status had transcended their body and gender and performed actions associated with masculine virtues. One notable section of chapter 4 is devoted to the gender of God and the Holy Spirit and to the fluidity of gender roles incarnated by the figure of Christ. The fifth and last chapter, “The Political Sphere: Power, Labor and Economics,” focuses on social history and the political and economic roles of women with discussions of female access to work and estate, queenship, and the place of women in craft guilds in Europe, including case studies of English female brewers and medical practitioners. The book ends with a subsection on the relations between masculinity and economic dominance in the craft world. The book does not have a formal concluding chapter, but it contains a glossary, an index, and a list of further readings...