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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies ed. by Ann Marie Rasmussen Emily Houlik-Ritchey ann marie rasmussen, ed., Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2019. Pp. 258. isbn: 978-0-268-10557-0. $60. Rivalrous Masculinities offers a stimulating collection of essays that advances the field's intellectual perspectives on medieval masculinities, sharpening our sense of the multiplicity of medieval masculinities as cultural constructions; their contingency upon social, geographic, and temporal forces; their intersectionality with other social modes of being in the medieval world; and above all, the necessity of our ongoing interrogation of gender, sexuality, and their presentation across disciplines in the medieval world. Rasmussen organizes this volume around 'three foundational claims':1) 'masculinity as a pluralized category'; 2) 'masculinity as an intersectional category of gender'; and 3) 'medieval ways of thinking about gender as being incommensurate with modern assumptions about sex and gender based in heteronormativity' (p. xiii). The Preface lays out ambitious claims, and while not all of the essays fully accomplish each of them, the triumph of the collection stems from each contribution's consistent analysis of multiple, competing iterations of medieval masculinities within a variety of temporal, geographic, generic, and linguistic contexts. Clare A. Lees opens the collection, usefully laying out a brief critical history of medieval masculinity studies in relation to medieval gender studies. Both Lees' essay, 'A Word to the Wise: Men, Gender, and Medieval Masculinities,' and Karma Lochrie's essay, 'Medieval Masculinities without Men,' emphasize a foundational insight: that gender, queer, and transgender studies have 'uncouple[d] masculinities, femininities, queer identities, and sexualities from what had come to look like a stable association between gender and the social, on the one hand, and (hetero) sexuality and embodiment, on the other' (Lees, p. 4). This uncoupling, as Lochrie [End Page 128] stresses, 'open[s] up the possibility—even the urgency—of our own consideration of the ways in which genders dissociated from sex might be produced' (pp. 209–10). Rivalrous Masculinities is at its strongest when its contributors thus dismantle and expose the assumption that masculinities are the natural province of biological males. The strongest essays within the collection proceed from these foundational insights, whether or not they lay them out as explicitly as Lees and Lochrie do. In this vein, the collection contains several intellectual gems that may be of particular interest to readers of Arthuriana. In the first section of the collection, 'Pluralizing Masculinity,' Lees argues that the Old English advice poem 'Precepts' offers 'a masculinity without subjectivity, whereby the constant repetition, or iteration, of the address to the "son"… lays bare the rhetorical structure of masculinity itself' (p. 18). In the stimulating essay 'Men in Trouble: Warrior Angst in Beowulf,' Gillian R. Overing analyzes the affective valences of 'specific formations of masculinity in Old English poetry,' arguing that Beowulf elucidates 'the concerns of the warrior elite to replicate itself, to create and control sameness, to ensure succession and maintain power' in the face of a troubling intersection of the heroic ethos with a clerical culture—a rivalrous intersection that creates 'an impossible quandary for the warrior male' (pp. 28, 37). In 'Predicaments of Piousness: The Trouble with Being a Learned Jewish Family Man in Premodern Europe,' Astrid Lembke analyzes two iterations of a popular Ashkenazic narrative pattern where a human man marries a demon woman, tracing models of masculinity that 'are thinkable in a community that does not offer a model of learned, clerical masculinity… based on abstaining from secular marriage' (pp. 58, 57). Because learned Jewish men had social and religious duties both to family and God, their models of masculinity sought to accommodate the tensions of these competing demands. In the second section of the collection, 'Intersectional Masculinity,' F. Regina Psaki insightfully analyzes an iteration of the medieval debate on the nature of women. In 'Misogyny, Philogyny, Masculinities: Antonio Pucci's Il Contrasto delle donne,' Psaki argues that Pucci 'evades or subverts' epistemological categories and rhetorical moves traditional to medieval misogyny and philogyny texts (p. 105). In so doing, Pucci's contribution to the medieval debate on the nature of women becomes 'a debate on...