Mischief in Masculinity: Gender in John Lydgate's Troy Book

Abstract

or medieval authors, the Trojan War narrative offered a safe space within which the role of gender—and more specifically masculinity—might be explored. Christopher Baswell has suggested that the Roman d’Eneas (ca. 1160) “created a space in which its aristocratic readership could examine manhood and heroism for its own time and imagine the old dangers and new pressures under which its concept of manhood labored.” 1 The complex representation of the masculine war hero in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385) has been much debated by recent scholars. 2 Although Chaucer’s Troilus might be the most obvious and intricate consideration of medieval masculinity, the heroes of John Lydgate’s Troy Book (1412-20) further complicate our understanding of that masculinity and its role in the perpetuation of patriarchal authority. 3 In Troy Book, Lydgate portrays stable gender performances as foundational to the structural stability of the Trojan world, emphasizing a rigid binary of gender performances. He then challenges that foundation by demonstrating the illusory nature of such performances by highlighting the frequent incursions of feminine characteristics on the gender performances of his many classic heroes. What results is the deconstruction of a hetero-normative gender binary in favor of a more fluid system of gendered performances. Born, in many ways, out of Carolyn Walker Bynum’s analyses of gender in medieval Christian texts, recent scholars have canvassed the many ways gender was constructed, idealized, imagined, and performed in the Middle Ages. 4 What may have begun on the margins has now become central to our understanding of medieval literature in the western world and beyond. This study would not have been possible without the work of scholars like those represented in Thelma S. Fenster and F