Sebastian Coxon's study of beardic discourse—a pogonography—explores the literary and cultural semiotics of beards across texts and time in medieval German. In six chapters, which include an introduction as well as chapters centered on Pfaffe Konrad's Rolandslied, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm, the genre Sangspruchdichtung, Heinrich Witenwiler's Ring, and various portrayals of Christ, several thematic concentrations arise: majesty and rulership; masculinity and humanity; wisdom, teaching, and learning; and laughter and comedy. A brief summarizing conclusion and an appendix of references to Charlemagne's beard in other texts round out the volume (the focus of each chapter listed previously does not exhaust the texts consulted). Beards and Texts also features 17 full-color figures from manuscripts, primarily of miniatures and other illustrations, but also of decorated textual passages.Chapter one, the introduction, presents the beard as a (nearly) universal symbol of masculinity, at least in a European or northern Eurasian context. From the mid-twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, Coxon traces two paths, one of the literary discourses on beards and the other of the impact on literature of discourses of beards and beardedness in culture. From the beginning, the book calls for close reading and admits a “not overly theoretical” (p. 1) stance in order to probe the reciprocal relationship between literature and culture. While the theoretical density of the text indeed reflects this statement, the thematic breadth of commentary in the readings is vast: courtly society, generic characteristics and differences, discursivity, text-internal literary concerns, manuscripts versus broader literary streams and traditions, multimediality, gender and sex, and the body are listed as potential lenses of reading. The actual stakes, theoretically speaking, are also outlined in the introduction: in post-Butlerian terms, Coxon is engaged in a project amongst other developing masculinities researchers of exploring masculine biology as a basis on which to discuss differences between men, not only seeking to ignore it on a quest to deconstruct discourses. Among the major discursive strands that shape interpretations over time are the writings of the church fathers, Old High German homiletics, chronicles, and high medieval monastic writings, all of which exhibit relatively stable topoi that are equally able to be used in defense of or against beards, current fashions, and courtly and ecclesiastical shaving practices and ideals. The introduction also offers a list of examples of literary and other textual beards and beardedness, which reveal not different motifs but rather different expressions of a small set of rhetorically restricted description types.In the second chapter, beards are considered as a “natural symbol of masculinity and authority” (p. 30) fundamentally associated with kingship across time and space in the European Middle Ages. Coxon links the emergence of vernacular, secular literature, and the early attestation of beard discourses alongside an interest in manuscript illuminations of bearded rulers, for example in the Middle High German adaptation of the Chanson de Roland, which includes thirteen textual references to beards and thirty-nine illustrations of which more than half feature beards. The literature of crusade focuses on male protagonists and an unwavering ideological stance in which symbolism is fixed and orients the reader toward the identification of good and evil, strength and weakness, and other dichotomies. Heathens are, to a point, also defined by their hair; men of court with braided beards are disparaged as too worldly; and Charlemagne's beard is found to be without peer among men. A comparison with French and Franco-Italian versions in the chanson tradition reveals that the German text is in fact less preoccupied with beards—even if many references are heroic epithets expected in the written manifestation of oral tradition—than its western and southern models and peers. The author traces the influence of Charlemagne's beard in the Rolandslied through Der Stricker's early thirteenth-century text Karl to subsequent versions with a discussion of shifting manuscript illustrations, of which those in the earlier Rolandslied manuscript are purported to represent a nascent tradition at odds with the developed and artistically superior tradition represented in the Anglo-Norman versions. Further on kings and beards, the chapter discusses the Roman de Renart, Reinhart Fuchs, Heinrich und Kunigunde, various Latin and vernacular chronicles, and King Arthur in the German branch of the Arthurian cycle, not only in terms of rhetorical descriptio, but also as embedded gestures, the phraseological and kinnegrammatic representation of bearded discourse. Examples include swearing on one's beard and tearing at beards, alongside beards as generally symbolizing royal and secular authority.The third chapter addresses beards as distinguishing age (e.g., white- and gray-beards), as well as between men of similar ages (qualities such as length, fullness, color, etc.), not only among the nobility. While also conceived as an adaptation of another chanson de geste and therefore read in the same tradition of the Rolandslied, Wolfram's Willehalm reflects the various developments that separate the earlier vernacular literature from the highpoint of Middle High German literary production in the thirteenth century. Beyond the rhetorical rules of descriptio, the text displays a complex metaphorical use of beards and beardedness with more than twenty references. Beards represent progression, age, and maturation, but the symbolism is also inverted or portrayed in an older interpretive framework—beards of battle, so to speak, in the mold of the chanson de geste. Humanizing (i.e., not always disparaged) and difference-leveling beards among heathens and Christians show a different treatment of this divide than in the Rolandslied. A comparison of French source materials reveals Wolfram's expansions of beard descriptions and symbolism, concerns which are also discussed as central to portions of his Parzival. An excursus in the chapter discusses texts throughout the Blütezeit in terms of “tearful beards” (p. 77): expressions of grief, but also the regret, rumination, and accumulated guilt or sin in old age. The chapter contains additional discussion of beardedness and beardlessness in conjunction with age, Christian vs. heathen beards, and a brief tour through some of the illuminations in the Willehalm manuscripts, in which beardedness serves to focus the attention of readers on developments from the courtly default of fashionably shaved young men.In the fourth chapter, the “poetic approach” (p. 99) is contrasted with traditions in the overtly didactic lyric and literature, in which the textual embodiment of social norms and distinctions between men predominates over description. This literature seeks to distinguish, among other things, the “wise and foolish, men and boys” (p. 100), distinctions that to this reviewer do not appear significantly different from the qualities of beard discourse and depictions presented in the preceding chapters. From Herger and Spervogel around 1200 to Frauenlob in the early fourteenth century, topics such as wisdom and its lack and the moral character of young men are discussed at length. Der Welsche Gast, which provides a medical discourse on beards and an attendant history of visual depictions that ultimately depart from the text and appear the result of confusion on the part of later readers, provides a slightly more literal foil for Der Renner, which includes bearded figures whose voices appear in monologues, symbolizing deficiencies and the sinful nature of humanity. An excursus on biblical didacticism and its reflection in episodes in chronicles precedes a return to the religious discourse on beards in der Renner. Another section on moral-didactic meaning and criticism based on the whims of fashion, e.g., critiques of wearing overly long beards, follows. Although no female body parts or hairstyles are analogous to beards in didactic literature, Coxon notes that women's attitudes and commentary on beards are extant in literature and demonstrate in one way how multiple audiences participate in reading texts, regardless of the nature of the gendering of figures in them.Chapter five examines the comedic-didactic mode in Der Ring, particularly the beard as a device for lampooning peasant men. Coxon notes that in the famously color-coded Ring—red for ‘serious’ episodes and green for the farcical, comedic, base, and foolish—beards occur in both parts.A long reading and exposition of the various beard-related episodes in the text follow, with particular attention paid to the development of peasant-focused commentary on hair from Neidhart to the growth of bawdy narratives in later centuries (Schwankdichtung), particularly regarding ‘pubic beard’ references to hirsute female genitals, which, alongside bearded women, represents one of a very small set of mixed-gender/sex representations. Additional sections on physical comedy regarding the beards of (erstwhile, failed, or actual) heroes, the negatively assessed qualities of red hair and beards, and the ‘othering’ dimensions of beard-related discourse complete the chapter.In the final chapter, we see evidence for beardedness, fixed characteristics, variable characteristics, and symbolic and theological interpretations of Christ's beard—an admittedly selective but nevertheless large group of sources—including various depictions of the abuse of Christ's beard as a gesture of the defiling of (divine) beauty. Examples are shown mostly from explicitly religious texts such as Passion plays, but also in literary texts such as the Narrenschiff, in which a fool dares to pull the beard of Christ as the Risen God and is admonished not to think himself spared because he has escaped punishment for a time.In the conclusion, Coxon claims that beards serve at the most basic level “to denote masculinity and in doing so to foreground certain male figures and figure types, accentuating the roles such figures play—their relationships both with other men and with women—within broader thematic contexts” (p. 189). Summarizing the genre-specific developments and various presentational narrative modes in which beards signify, the author reminds readers that interpretations against normative masculinity, in fact, require norms. In its breadth of textual sources, which by no means exhaust the possible corpus, and in the number of genres, literary periods, and narrative uses discussed, Beards and Texts succeeds in outlining the salient dimensions of beards within the wider framework of the medieval, German-speaking norms of masculinity. Such specificity is required despite the existence of general European cultural markers not least because the other language traditions consulted, Latin and Old French, diverge enough in their depictions and interpretations of beards and beardedness to suggest that more work is needed, including, as Coxon notes, in premodern German literature.