Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies. ed. by Ann Marie Rasmussen (review)

This volume is a timely, important continuation and development of the scholarly conversation about medieval masculinities. Although this volume grew out of a series of conferences, classes, and scholarly exchanges, it is more than a coterie project; in fact, as the editor Ann Marie Rasmussen acknowledges, the volume is a testament to the kind of wide-ranging humanities scholarship made possible by a program like Duke University’s “Humanities Writ Large,” which provided the support for the scholarly community from which this volume arose. This is because, in expanding how we think about medieval masculinities beyond the simple doings of men, essays in this volume chart several new paths that will be indispensable to medieval gender studies for the next generation. The three key insights of this collection—masculinities are plural, intersectional, and non-normative—demonstrate how scholars might continue to rethink masculinities beyond heterosexuality, outside hegemony, and through instances where status distinguishes between men.

To do so, this volume’s essays laudably acknowledge the work of scholars who have established the study of medieval masculinities over the past three decades. Clare Lees, who is herself partly responsible for instituting this field of inquiry, gives a helpful overview of medieval masculinities, including the important volume she edited, Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (1994). As she notes, scholarship has largely been conducted via a series of edited collections, most of which were edited and populated by historians. This focus, of course, inflects the work in particular ways. In her analysis of the Old English “Precepts,” a didactic conduct poem in which an older man instructs a younger man in the most important aspects of masculinity, Lees details the conventional practices that seek to install one form of masculinity over others.

Similarly, Gillian Overing’s analysis of Old English poetry’s representations of heroic masculinity as a series of environmental affects affirms that men grapple with expectations for dominant masculinity. The “crisis between men” that Overing identifies in chapter two is expressed as a series of affects associated with stormy, tumultuous, or disturbed weather conditions (p. 33). The associations between troubled affects and troubled masculinities, she further contends, reveal how much pressure men feel to live up to certain standard, culturally privileged, formations of masculine identity. In the heroic community, pressures between mind and body sometimes lead to an affective meltdown, so that warriors “do not know what to feel, or how to be” (p. 34).

Men jostle with each other to work out their relational masculine identities, because, as J. Christian Straubhaar-Jones argues in chapter three, multiple models of masculinity were in contest during the Middle Ages, even within the work of the same author. Through his analysis of Henry Suso’s Life of the Servant (14th c.), Straubhaar-Jones shows how Suso uses secular and sacred masculinities to authorize his spiritual persona. The rivalrous relation between secular and sacred masculinities allows for an adaptive gender model that would appeal to lay and religious audiences alike.

In the collection’s fourth chapter, Astrid Lembke traces the challenge of being both learned and a family man in medieval and Early Modern Jewish writings. By means of a motif in which a man seeks aid for his family yet marries a she-devil as a consequence, these tales show the challenges that marriage and study present to a man who would be both wed and learned. These roles represent different, irreconcilable masculinities in the thirteenth-century version of this story, The Tale of A Poor Man; by contrast, in the seventeenth-century rendering of this narrative, the man is able to reconcile with his family.

The idea that masculinities are frequently in competition is not limited to aspects of a singular identity or consciousness. Rather, in chapter five, Darrin Cox provides a fascinating reading of historical change, analyzing how the rise of the courtier prompted...