Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature: Rabelais, Brantôme and the 'Cent nouvelles nouvelles' (review)

David LaGuardia argues in this new book that normative masculinity in the Renaissance was fundamentally intertextual: that is, it relied upon shared practices of reading, writing, telling and re-telling in order to construct both itself and individual subjects. The topic is extensively explored and convincingly contextualised, both historically and theoretically. His focus is the stories that men tell other men (indeed, are compelled to tell), and he draws his examples from a well-defined corpus: narratives of adultery and cuckoldry in the nouvellle tradition, Rabelais's most resistant work, Le Tiers livre, and Brantôme's collection of sexual anecdotes from the late Valois court, Les Dames galantes. It thus covers a considerable chronological spread – from the 1460s to the 1580s – and LaGuardia argues that the century in question witnessed a development in the figures of normative masculinity, as they became more unstable but also more comprehensive, diverse and adaptable. The first chapter sketches the intertexts that will nourish the writing and reading of LaGuardia's case studies – Roman and canon law, pastoral and penitential literature, and collections of exempla – and provides a rich and varied historical overview. From Roman law, a key concept emerges: a kind of obsession with the spaces of interaction and desire – the house, the woman's body, and the requirement of constant surveillance of both property and propriety. This obsession with spaces and surveillance is very successfully picked up as a leitmotif throughout the textual analyses that follow. A second motif is the crucial importance of storytelling to the shoring up of models of masculinity – nouvelles, exempla, anecdotes, but also legal and pastoral texts participate in the circulation of a particular recognisable figure, and in different ways the texts' protagonists reflect this: the cuckold is a paranoid collector of exempla in the Cent nouvelles; Panurge obsessively seeks out and interprets (mostly) male opinion in the Tiers livre; and Brantôme tries to catalogue what he admits is an endless repertoire of anecdotes in his Dames galantes. In LaGuardia's analysis, such telling and re-telling of stories is a material practice that constructs the sexualities it describes and even traffics in. Intertextual Masculinities is a bold and convincing reassessment of these consistently fascinating texts in the light of modern gender and queer theory and classical and medieval models. LaGuardia's background in late medieval studies provides a rich and erudite map that anchors sixteenth-century literary practice in its vernacular past – a particularly rewarding endeavour that reasserts the connections between medieval and early modern that are often ignored or broken. I wanted at times a little more sixteenth-century historical contextualisation – on marriage rites or social practices, for example – that would colour in the outlines given by the stories recounted in the texts themselves. But overall, this is a provocative and challenging book that raises very pertinent and insistent questions about the study of gender, both then and now.