Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies

By Ann Marie Rasmussen

Bringing together the work of both leading and emerging scholars in the field of medieval gender studies, the essays in Rivalrous Masculinities advance our understanding of medieval masculinity as a pluralized category and as an intersectional category of gender. The essays in this volume are distinguished by a conceptual focus that goes beyo nd heteronormativity and by their attention to constructions of medieval masculinity in the context of femininity, class, religion, and place. Some widen the field of medieval gender studies inquiry to include explorations of medieval friendship as a framework or culture of arousal and deep emotionality that produced multiple, complex ways of living intensely with respect to gender and sexuality, without reducing all forms of intimacy to implicit sexuality. Some examine intersections of identity, explicating change and difference in conventional modes of gender with regards to regional culture, religion, race, or class. In order to ground this intersectional and interdisciplinary approach with the appropriate disciplinary expertise, the essays in this volume represent a broad cross-section of disciplines: art history, religious studies, history, and French, Italian, German, Yiddish, Middle English, and Old English literature. Together, they open up new intellectual vistas for future research in the field of medieval gender studies.

Contributors include: Ann Marie Rasmussen, Clare A. Lees, Gillian R. Overing, J. Christian Straubhaar-Jones, Astrid Lembke, Darrin Cox, F. Regina Psaki, Corinne Wieben, Ruth Mazo Karras, Diane Wolfthal, Karma Lochrie, and Andreas Krass.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268105594

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PREFACE

ANN MARIE RASMUSSEN

The title of this volume originated in a research and teaching project, Rivalrous Masculinities, which I and then graduate students, Christian Straubhaar-Jones and Steffen Kaupp, undertook at Duke University in 2012 and 2013 with funding from the Duke University Humanities Writ Large Initiative, which was supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thematically, Rivalrous Masculinities investigated changing images of masculinity and the male body from the Middle Ages to the present. The project’s primary, though by no means exclusive, objective was undergraduate teaching. We developed and team-taught two seminars in which undergraduates curated exhibitions on the male body using art objects owned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the first an online exhibition, the second a full exhibition titled Masculinities: Mainstream to Margins, which ran at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from January 11 to July 6, 2014. In these exhibitions, the students selected, combined, and wrote about images of the male body from many different times and places to show masculinity as a constructed entity where struggles for power and control are played out. Their exhibitions highlighted the coexistence of different forms of masculinity, often in sharp competition with one another (no less so in the past than today) and described by the adjective rivalrous. The Duke undergraduate seminars were integrated with related seminars at German universities: in 2012, a seminar on medieval masculinities in art, literature, and culture taught by Ingrid Bennewitz (University of Bamberg, Germany); and in 2013, a seminar on masculinity in German literature from 1750 to the present taught by Claudia Benthien (University of Hamburg, Germany) and a seminar on medieval masculinity in literature taught by Andreas Krass (Humboldt University of Berlin). After extensive preparation, the seminars exchanged findings via campus visits and several shared sessions carried out through teleconferencing. Related activities deepened existing research collaborations between German colleagues and me and enriched Kaupp’s and Straubhaar-Jones’s dissertation projects. Among these related activities were two that laid the groundwork for this volume: two special sessions on medieval masculinity, coorganized with Ingrid Bennewitz, which took place in 2013 at the 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, and an interdisciplinary symposium, New Directions in the Study of Medieval Masculinities, coorganized with Kaupp and Straubhaar-Jones, which took place at Duke University on September 20–21, 2013.

A fundamental commitment to creating scholarly dialogue across disciplinary lines underwrote the Duke University Humanities Writ Large Rivalrous Masculinities project, and it also provided the shape and direction of this volume. The chapters arise from and make important contributions to many fields in medieval studies: history (Cox; Wieben); art history (Wolfthal); religious studies, including Jewish studies (Karras; Krass; Lembke; Straubhaar-Jones); and literary studies of Old English, Middle English, and Italian (Lees; Lochrie; Overing; Psaki). There is temporal and geographic breadth. While seven of the volume’s contributions treat evidence from the high and late Middle Ages, Lees and Overing analyze works from the tenth century (as good a dating for Beowulf as any), Karras’s analysis of changes over time in the story of David and Jonathan spans an even greater stretch of time, and Cox takes the reader into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Geographically, the volume has a heavy foot in evidence from the European continent: German-speaking lands including the Low Countries, Italy, and France. Because cultural diversity roughly maps across linguistic diversity in the Middle Ages, or to put it another way, because in the multilingual Middle Ages choice of language meant first and foremost choice of audience, the wide range of evidence from different language communities—Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, Old French, Italian, Old English, Middle English, Middle High German—comprises texts and artifacts intended to address a wide variety of medieval audiences, differentiated by locality and region, religion, profession, and status. Under these circumstances it cannot surprise that the evidence treated by the experts in this volume is also diverse and rich: from proverbs to heroic epics; texts and images related to worlds of faith, including biblical and parabiblical texts, mystical texts, and religious tales; court records and archival documents; treatises; and literary texts. Yet all contributions to this volume explore masculinity studies as part of gender studies, an intellectual task whose antecedents and potential are explored in depth by Clare A. Lees in the first half of her introductory chapter, which goes on to explore the apparent timelessness of the pan-European, medieval genre of wisdom literature in which a father gives advice to a son. Together, the chapters in this volume create a deep and compelling conversation with one another whose breadth and range opens up for the field of medieval studies as a whole important new intellectual perspectives around three foundational claims: masculinity as a pluralized category, masculinity as an intersectional category of gender, and medieval ways of thinking about gender as being incommensurate with modern assumptions about sex and gender based in heteronormativity.

PLURALIZING MASCULINITY

As the volume’s title, Rivalrous Masculinities, makes clear, the contributions argue that masculinity is a pluralized category, no less so than femininity. There is and was, to quote Gina Psaki’s chapter, no default, monolithic, autopilot masculine against . . . an equally default, monolithic, autopilot feminine. Lord, cleric, merchant, monk, soldier, father, knight, servant, scholar, farmer, craftsman: the late medieval world knew not one but multiple forms of masculinity. Masculinity, like femininity, is a social and cultural construction of gender that changes over time, and different forms of masculinity coexist, often in sharp competition with one another. The chapters by Gillian R. Overing, J. Christian Straubhaar-Jones, Astrid Lembke, and Darrin Cox engage this fundamental insight. Overing uncovers in Beowulf a shifting matrix of embodied thought regarding the affective positioning and gendering of the male warrior body, what she terms the undulating isomorphic reciprocity of inner and outer formations of self, the symbiosis of identity and environment. The internal and external affective codes that identify and validate the male warrior body are not made visible using those oppositions embedded as universals in modern thought, such as human versus monster or human versus nature. Instead, Overing shows us a way of thinking and being in the world that moves along axes of continuity, in which the affects of warrior men are like weather and in which the worst storms internal and external that beset them center on relationship, and the loss of relationship, between men.

Astrid Lembke uses two examples of Jewish stories drawing on the narrative pattern, common in medieval and early modern texts, of a human man embarking on an erotic relationship with a nonhuman woman. The two stories debate and resolve differently the dilemmas of masculinity that emerge when men seek a socially and theologically accepted way to maintain family life while devoting one’s life completely to Torah study.

J. Christian Straubhaar-Jones analyzes how the high medieval Germanic courtly ideals of knighthood and proper manhood are taken up and adapted centuries later for religious use, specifically in The Life of the Servant by the fourteenth-century Rhineland Dominican Henry Suso. Through explicit comparisons, The Life of the Servant repeatedly shows the spiritualized virtues of secular masculinity as having overcome their worldly counterparts. The rhetoric of rivalry between secular and religious masculinities is used to lay claim to the secular virtues defining masculinity while also denying them. This rhetoric of rivalry also sets up a pattern of adaptation that is suited for both male and female religious to extrapolate gendered identity for themselves based on secular models of masculinity but that is policed along traditional gender lines: men must control their affect, and women must not exceed their frail feminine physical capacities.

Darrin Cox gives a historian’s perspective of changing models and behavior for elite males in sixteenth-century France, a moment of crisis that made visible transitions and paradigm shifts, old models of paradigmatic dominance giving way to new or old paradigms being transformed to retain a claim on power and authority. Cox gives us such a moment in time, when a new hegemony emerges as the traditional noble image of the knight was challenged by the rise of the courtier as a model of masculinity.

INTERSECTIONAL MASCULINITY

Intersectional masculinity is a contingent and conventional category that comes into being and is made visible through the positions it occupies in relationship to other categories of personhood, especially femininity. This approach to masculinity embeds masculinity studies in gender studies.

Gina Psaki’s chapter on a fourteenth-century Italian debate poem between two male voices on the virtues and vices of women reminds us that misogyny is interesting not for what it says about women and not because it is a male malady (women can be misogynist, too) but because the traffic in talk about women in the high and late medieval world is overwhelmingly conducted by and among men and so voices a range of discourses that lay out a variety of positions for masculinity. Psaki shows that this exercise in defaming and defending women creates models of masculinity and becomes a debate on the characteristics, nature, and privileges of men.

Corinne Wieben’s chapter presents a case study of the notion of rivalrous masculinities as they played out in marriage litigations brought before the episcopal court of the Italian city of Lucca in the 1340s. Studying court battles fought around and with conventional notions of honor (fama) and gender, Wieben shows that the episcopal judges, who were members of the clergy, expressed their masculinity through different behaviors and standards from those of the lay male litigants who appeared before them. Wieben throws an added light on the arguments and tactics of female litigants, who by depicting themselves as victims of greedy and cruel husbands invoked ideals about married men and women while appealing to clerical judges as possible fellow victims of the secular male appetite for power.

Ruth Mazo Karras’s chapter traces changes across time, religion, and language in one of the oldest and most influential stories of male friendship in the Western world, that between David and Jonathan. While male friendship is shown as the strongest human bond, the medieval texts downplay the Old Testament’s focus on the hierarchical relationship of the two friends and instead elaborate what is only a sideline in the source text: the marriage of Jonathan’s sister, Michal, and David. In the high and late medieval world, marriage completes the original contract of alliance.

BEYOND HETERONORMATIVITY

Interpreting gender and sex in the Middle Ages historically means thinking beyond the linked modern concepts of heterosexuality, defined as the belief that sexual desire is a biological or natural force called forth by the body of a desired person who belongs to the opposite sex, and heteronormativity, meaning that this binary model of sex and gender and of masculinity and femininity becomes a norm that underwrites personal, social, legal, and cultural life and from which all other expressions of sexuality and gender are believed to be deviations. The contributions in this section pry apart the notion that biology, that is, having a male or a female body, makes one either a man or a woman. They show that setting aside a rigid binary in which sex is equated with the body and gender with social identity allows us to see a different understanding of sex and gender at work in the Middle Ages, where these categories are better explored as being a diffuse and complex interaction of categories. Thinking beyond heteronormativity returns us to the importance of thinking about sex and gender as plural, relational, positional, and contingent categories. It widens the field of medieval gender studies inquiry to include explorations of medieval friendship as a framework or culture of arousal and deep emotionality that produced multiple complex ways of living intensely with respect to gender and sexuality, without reducing all forms of intimacy to implicit sexuality.

In her chapter, the art historian Diane Wolfthal asks the question, were servants men? Based on her analysis of historical evidence in medieval art, the answer is no, they were not. Adult male servants may have had male bodies, but that did not make them men. They were, rather, subordinates, submissive and dependent on a master, much like women and children.

Karma Lochrie proceeds from the premise that scholarship can no longer consider medieval masculinity exclusively as it was performed and embodied by men. Her chapter offers a thought-provoking, preliminary, and provisional overview of female masculinity in medieval texts. It challenges medieval scholars who study masculinity to pay closer attention to the ways in which female masculinity intervenes in medieval notions of masculinity, signaling sexual alterity, social rebellion, gender pathology, or an alternative to conventional femininity.

Andreas Krass’s chapter on spiritual friendship as embodied in representations of Christ and his beloved companion, the discipline John, closes the volume. Krass argues that gender difference functions here to produce an internal differentiation of masculinity, with Christ (bearded, older) being constructed as masculine and John (younger, clean-shaven, submissive) constructed as feminine. This medieval differentiation of masculinity along gendered lines poses challenges to modern readers, who have often struggled to grasp a bond of intimacy that is gendered but not sexualized and who have constructed it as, variously, friendship, love, sodomy, pederasty, homosexuality, and even (as in The Da Vinci Code) heterosexuality.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As the foregoing paragraphs have made clear, no scholarship comes into being without the support and collaboration of many along its way. I am especially grateful to the colleagues and friends who contributed to the various intellectual experiments that comprised the Rivalrous Masculinities project. I thank the project’s co-PIs and co-teachers, Christian Straubhaar-Jones and Steffen Kaupp: you taught me as much as I taught you. I know that Steffen and Christian share my gratitude to Laura Eastwood, Grants Manager for Humanities Writ Large at Duke University, for her help and encouragement. We were all deeply saddened by the premature death of Srinivas Aravamuden, Dean of the Humanities at Duke University and founder and leader of the Humanities Writ Large project, whose intellectual generosity and far-sightedness emboldened so many of us to think and do humanities work in new ways. Marianne Wardle, who was in those years the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, was an indefatigable wellspring of ideas, support, and inspiration. We also thank the undergraduates who embraced the challenge of explaining through images the idea of masculinity as a social construct: in 2012, Christina Canzoneri, Isalyn Connell, Alexa Levy, David Delaney Mayer, Anna Offerdahl, Krista Spuglio, and Benjamin Wang; and in 2013, Ryan Elizabeth Bennert, Sarah Kristin Filter, Mary Bourke Hagan, Indrani Saha, and Kelly Noel Waldorf. We thank as well our collaborators and co-conspirators in Germany: Claudia Benthien (University of Hamburg), Ingrid Bennewitz (University of Bamberg), Andreas Krass (Humboldt University of Berlin), and Sabrina Hufnagel. Funding for the 2013 symposium, New Directions in the Study of Medieval Masculinities, was generously provided by the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation; at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, by the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures; and at Duke University, by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, the Program in Women’s Studies, Office of the Dean of Arts & Sciences, Department of English, Department of History, Center for Jewish Studies, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Department of Romance Studies, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and the Humanities Writ Large Initiative, Emerging Faculty Network Rivalrous Masculinities. A grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in 2016 allowed me to explore new avenues for medieval gender studies and masculinity studies research with German colleagues. Finally, I thank my editorial assistant, Arnbjørn Stokholm, the fabulous editors at the University of Notre Dame Press, and the anonymous readers of the manuscript, whose incisive suggestions greatly improved it.

CHAPTER ONE

A Word to the Wise

Men, Gender, and Medieval Masculinities

CLARE A. LEES

Ðus frod fæder freobearn lærde,

modsnottor mon, maga cystum eald,

wordum wísfæstum, þæt he wel þunge:

—Precepts, 1–3

——————

[In this way did a prudent father, a sagacious man, a man experienced in the virtues, teach his noble son in wise words so that he might get on well.]

This chapter explores the relationship of masculinity studies to gender studies in medieval studies. This relationship is not self-evident since for some the study of masculinity is asymmetrical to, if not independent of, feminist, gendered, and queer understandings of culture and history. However, the first wave of medieval masculinity studies, dating from the 1990s, was prompted at least in part by feminist re-examinations of women and gender at the tail end of what is often known as feminism’s second wave.¹ Since then, the field of masculinity studies in medieval studies has developed sporadically though actively in some disciplines, most notably history, while in other disciplines, notably literary studies, queer theory has been more influential for thinking about masculinity in relation to sexualities, acts, and identities.

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in the study of women and in gender after queer studies in the fields of culture, history, and literature. Masculinity too is receiving renewed attention after the critique of heteronormativity developed by leading medieval gender and queer theorists such as Caroline Dinshaw, Karma Lochrie, and James Schultz. The first part of this chapter maps out the past twenty years or so of studies in medieval masculinities against these shifting perspectives of feminism, gender studies, and queer studies from my own stance as a scholar of early medieval English literature.

I do not propose a bibliographical overview of medieval masculinities, although such a review would be timely enough. To be sure, this chapter begins with some critical reflections on the field as it intersects with gender, sexualities, and queer studies, but I then turn to a little-known early medieval poem in Old English. Precepts is an instructional poem from the tenth-century Exeter Book manuscript, which takes the form of advice from a father to a son.² It is not much admired by its modern readers, it has to be said, and this critical view is something worth thinking about.³ Is Precepts disliked more for its conventional poetic style than for its performance of paternal wisdom, I wonder? Can form and substance be separated out in this way? I combine a critical overview of modern medieval masculinities with a reading of this early medieval poem in order to demonstrate that there is more to be learned from this apparently most heteronormative poem about the transmission of wisdom between men. The opening lines of the poem, which begin this chapter, indicate that it associates fathers—men—with age, wisdom, and experience, and sons—other men—with the need to acquire prudence by behaving and speaking well. While the father demonstrates rhetorically how a man might come to live wisely for his own benefit and for the benefit of others, the son has nothing to say. Precepts reveals, in other words, something of intergenerational relationships between men in even this most schematic of texts.

Precepts invites us to consider how structures of masculinity, co-constructed in relation to rank or status and family or kin, intersect also with the generic imperatives of instructional, or conduct, literature.⁴ From such intersections is produced the authority of a voice aligned with fatherhood and masculinity. Even so, the association of living well, prudently, with the acquisition of wisdom and experience in this early medieval poem depends on a rhetorical performance of a paternity that is minimal at best, and of a paternal will or legacy that, however powerfully asserted, is inevitably uncertain of its future. No father can guarantee that a son will wish to acquire the wisdom to live prudently. Indeed, the father’s voice is formulaic, repetitive, and schematic, barely granting us any purchase on how we might know when paternity, masculinity, or wisdom is successfully achieved. The legacy of the father and his wishful hold on futurity, on the future actions and identity of his son, in Precepts also turns out to be useful when exploring the history and timeliness of critical masculinity studies now, as it enters a new generation.

This chapter, therefore, poses two questions. First, what can be learned about the recent history of medieval masculinities that might guide future work in the field? And second, how can we use a poem such as Precepts to explore the legacy of masculinity and the transmission of wisdom between men in the early medieval period? These two questions are connected. Precepts encourages the reproduction of fixed forms, of sameness across the generations as silent sons become wise fathers. Masculinity studies within the fields of gender and sexuality would do well to continue to reflect on other, more varied, generative, and flexible masculinities, however.

MEN, AGAIN, IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES

Rivalrous Masculinities offers a timely opportunity to look back to the first phase of work on medieval masculinities in the early 1990s. Attending to this history enables its particular formations, achievements, and limitations to be more fully appreciated. There is much to celebrate. Medieval masculinities over the past two decades or so has established itself as a method of research across a range of periods, disciplines, and outputs, although the article and the edited collection rather than the monograph dominate the publishing landscape. Inevitably, however, these achievements intersect unevenly with the different disciplines and methodologies of medieval studies. This is particularly evident in the contrasting fields of history and literary studies. As well as indicating established strengths, then, this section explores what new avenues of research might be countenanced.

The decade of the 1990s was a crucial one for medieval masculinities, as it was for gender studies and other theoretical approaches now well embedded in the scholarship of medievalists. As P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis recently noted, medieval masculinities was established as a result of the publication of four important studies.⁵ These edited volumes illustrate the collaborative nature of the field and also demonstrate how scholars already more broadly interested in gender were keen to engage with masculinity: Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (1994), edited by Clare A. Lees; Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (1997), edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler; Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West (1999), edited by Jacqueline Murray; and Masculinity in Medieval Europe (1999), edited by D. M. Hadley.⁶ As editor of Medieval Masculinities, I commented in 1994 on the timeliness as well as riskiness of the project (xv). Some of the risks, I argued, came from newer and then less widely appreciated formulations of gender performativity led by Judith Butler; others, from the challenge to feminist historical projects that any emphasis on masculinities, however pluralized, might involve.⁷ In a similar vein, Thelma Fenster observed in her preface to Medieval Masculinities (ix–xiii) that the timeliness of the project was tied up with an increasing awareness of the strengths and limitations of feminist approaches to the study of the past. Understanding women, we argued, might necessitate a consideration of men, too, however politically fraught and theoretically asymmetrical were these gender formations and however indefensible the formulation of the binary masculine and feminine in any case. In the 1990s, gender performativity and, increasingly, the study of sexualities were beginning to uncouple 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.

At this more recent juncture of medieval masculinities at the end of the second decade of the 2000s, how has the work of the 1990s been developed and sustained? Is the study of medieval masculinities once again the timely and perhaps risky business that it was then? What can be made of the fact that fourth wave feminism as well as queer and post-queer understandings of history and sexualities are now as firmly embedded in the critical landscape as masculinities? Or that many critics call into question the impossibility of writing a single or singular history of masculinity, of sexuality, or of gender?⁸

Religious Men and Masculine Identity (2013), edited by Cullum and Lewis, is a good example of the sustained vitality of medieval masculinities.⁹ In their introduction, Cullum and Lewis trace the history of their project to the conference Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, which then formed the basis for a collection of essays with the same title published in 2004.¹⁰ A decade or so later, Religious Men and Masculine Identity continues the work begun in Holiness and Masculinity. In a similar vein Rivalrous Masculinities and the conference that preceded it, organized by Ann Marie Rasmussen, also reflects on, extends, and re-examines the work begun in the 1990s. Yet, while these edited collections indicate a clearly defined and long-lasting audience for the field, it is also worth considering whether that audience is limited to the same, self-nominated group of medievalists. We also need to consider these examples of first and second wave medieval masculinities in relation to contemporary masculinity studies more broadly. The best example is another collection of essays, What Is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World (2011), edited by John H. Arnold and Sean Brady. This anthology includes two essays on the medieval period in its long view of the many histories of masculinity, both by historians.¹¹ Indeed, in some regards, the study of medieval masculinities as a disciplinary practice within gender studies has thrived rather better as the result of the work of historians like Cullum and Lewis and Arnold and Brady than it has done in other fields.

A similar trend is evident in early medieval studies, that area of work with which I am particularly engaged in this chapter. Continuing the pattern of edited collections explicitly focused on medieval masculinities in the 1990s, a flurry of other collections published more recently include essays on the earlier as well as the later medieval periods. I think of Anthony Perron’s essay on Saxo Grammaticus’s heroic chastity in Jennifer Thibodeaux’s Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (2010), for example, or Cassandra Rhodes’s exploration of male virginity in Anglo-Saxon saints’ lives in Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe (2011), edited by Elizabeth L’Estrange and Alison More.¹² There have also been important monographs on men in the earlier Middle Ages, such as David Clark’s Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature (2009), Lynda Coon’s Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medieval West (2011), and Rachel Stone’s Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire (2012).¹³ These essays and books have taken up the challenges of earlier, groundbreaking studies such as Ruth Mazo Karras’s important From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (2003) and the controversial work of Allen J. Frantzen’s When Women Aren’t Enough in Speculum (1993) and Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America (1998).¹⁴

There are a number of distinctive strengths in these more recent studies of masculinities. For one thing, there are clear continuities of methodological remit. Edited collections on men and masculinities continue to include evidence and analysis from multiple temporal and cultural perspectives. The importance of the earlier as well as the later medieval periods and the geopolitical reach and dynamics of the European Middle Ages as a whole is also assumed and engaged. There is, however, more work to be done mapping out the opportunities as well as the potential limitations of such a Eurocentric, and often Mediterranean focus, studies of Carolingian elites and Saxo Grammaticus aside.¹⁵ The sheer temporal range, heterogeneity, and geographic variety of the Middle Ages from the late classical period, on the one hand, to the early modern, on the other, present real challenges.

In early medieval studies, certainly, there is a need for further evidence, particular and specific. There are few detailed analyses of the elite masculinity of even the period’s most familiar figures such as Alfred the Great, Bede, or Cuthbert.¹⁶ Rather more attention is paid to the epic and heroic masculinities of its best-known literary works such as Beowulf, as we shall see, but how might masculinity be a factor in, for example, the works and self-presentation of Ælfric the homilist, Cynewulf the poet, or Wulfstan the archbishop, writer, and legislator? Intersectional studies of ethnicity, race, and gender are similarly rare. There is no overview of British, or more broadly insular, culture taking in Irish, Scottish, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Welsh masculinities, for example. And few studies engage Anglo-Saxon and British masculinities in terms of their international, continental, that is to say, European, influences and exchanges.¹⁷ To be sure, there is no sustained attention to the history of early medieval women in Britain and Ireland either, for which, given the work in the field, a synthetic overview is also well overdue.¹⁸ In sum, there is