Abstract
The history of masculinity has recently encountered a general problem which has often arisen in the study of past societies. A number of commentators have drawn attention to the difficulty of reconciling modern categories of analysis with the cultural concepts of their object of study.1 Two divergent tendencies have been identified in the study of masculinity. Some writers, it has been suggested, have favoured a sociologically informed approach, taking their agenda from modern social theory, whilst others have followed a primarily cultural historical method, focusing their efforts on the explication of contemporary structures of ideas.2 A certain dissatisfaction with the ‘linguistic turn’ in historical studies has arguably contributed to focusing criticism on the second of these two perspectives, in that a primary cultural approach might be accused of reducing lived social realities to just so much discourse.3 Weighing up these two tendencies, commentators on recent developments in both history and ethnography have expressed similar dissatisfactions, invoking the need for a primarily sociological perspective to enable broad comparisons over time,4 or noting the limitations of ‘symbolic’ studies which are ‘often remarkable, but partial’.5
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Notes
Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard, ‘What have historians done with masculinity? Reflections on five centuries of British History, circa 1500 to 1950’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 274–80.
Harvey and Shepard, ‘What have historians done?’, 276. For similar remarks concerning ‘materialist’ or ‘symbolic’ approaches to masculine domination in ethnography, see Pierre Bourdieu, La domination masculine (Paris, 2002), p. 13.
Joan Hoff, ‘Gender as a postmodern category of paralysis’, Women’s History Review 3 (1994), 149–68. For a more moderate view, see Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘The lady vanishes: dilemmas of a feminist historian after the “linguistic turn”’, Church History 67 (1998), 1–31.
John Tosh, ‘Masculinities in industrializing society: Britain, 1800–1914’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 330–42, on 330–31, 342.
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931).
For comment on the origins of this distaste, given Butterfield’s own grand historical projects, see Stefan Collini, ‘Whigissimo’, London Review of Books 27 (2005), 14.
For a combative summary of early developments, see K.B. McFarlane, ‘An early paper on crown and parliament in the later middle ages’, in his The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), pp. 279–97. An example of noble interests: R.A. Griffiths, ‘Local rivalries and national politics: the Percies, the Nevilles and the Duke of Exeter, 1452–55’, Speculum 43 (1968), 589–632. An example of gentry society: Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992).
The early attacks of H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles on the significance of the Commons in parliament are brought together in Sayles, The King’s Parliament of England (London, 1975). For a more moderate view, see J.W. McKenna, ‘The myth of parliamentary sovereignty in late medieval England’, English Historical Review 94 (1979), 481–506 and the remarks of McFarlane, ‘Early paper’, pp. 287–94.
See Christine Carpenter, ‘Political and constitutional history: before and after McFarlane’, in R.H. Britnell and A.J. Pollard (eds), The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society (Stroud and New York, 1995); Edward Powell, ‘After “After McFarlane”: The poverty of patronage and the case for constitutional history’, ibid.
G.L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005); Jean-Philippe Genet, La genèse de l’Etat moderne: Culture et sociétépolitique en Angleterre (Paris, 2003); W.M. Ormrod, Political Life in Medieval England, 1300–1450 (London, 1995); Simon Walker, Political Culture in Later Medieval England, ed. M. Braddick (Manchester, 2006); and, from the European perspective, John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge, 2009).
Joan Scott, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, American Historical Review 91 (1986), 1053–75; Alan J. Frantzen, ‘When women aren’t enough’, Speculum 68 (1993), 445–71; Clare A. Lees, ‘Introduction’ to Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis and London, 1994).
Quentin Skinner, ‘Sir Geoffrey Elton and The Practice of History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 7 (1997), 301–16.
This is not least because much early work on medieval masculinity has emerged in the form of closely focused case studies, producing many overlapping insights but no clear consensus as to the core object of study. The variety of approaches can be sampled from the contributions to Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities; D.M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London, 1999); J.J. Cohen and B. Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York, 1997); Jacqueline Murray (ed.), Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West (New York, 1999); P.H. Cullum and Katherine Lewis (eds), Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (Cardiff, 2004). For an attempt at a broad categorisation of current approaches to medieval masculinity, see Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–1399 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 4–5.
See, for example, the sanguine remarks of Peter G. Beidler, ‘Introduction’ to Beidler (ed.) Masculinities in Chaucer (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 1–5.
R.M. Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2003), p. 1. Cf. R.W. Connell, Gender and Power (Oxford, 1987); Connell, Masculinities (Oxford, 1995).
David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven and London, 1990).
Christopher Fletcher, ‘Manhood and politics in the reign of Richard II’, Past and Present, 189 (2005), 3–39, on 13–14.
See Jacqueline Murray, ‘Masculinizing religious life: sexual prowess, the battle of chastity and monastic identity’, in Cullum and Lewis (eds), Holiness and Masculinity. An excellent summary of the tradition of spiritual combat up to the twelfth century is provided by Katherine Allen Smith, ‘Saints in shining armour: martial asceticism and masculine models of sanctity, ca. 1050–1250’, Speculum, 83 (2008), 572–602, on 576–82.
P.H. Cullum, ‘Clergy, masculinity and transgression’, in Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe; Cullum, ‘Learning to be a man, learning to be a priest in late medieval England’, in Sarah Rees Jones (ed.), Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad (Turnhout, 2003).
John H. Arnold, ‘The labour of continence: masculinity and virginity in the twelfth and thirteenth century’ in Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (eds), Medieval Virginities (Cardiff, 2003); Jacqueline Murray, ‘“The law of sin that is in my members”: the problem of male embodiment’, in Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih (eds), Gender and Holiness: Men and Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (London, 2002).
Megan McLaughlin, ‘The woman warrior: gender, warfare and society in medieval Europe’, Women’s Studies 17 (1990), 194; A. Dunlop, ‘Masculinity, crusading and devotion: Francesco Casali’s Fresco in the Trecento Perugian Contado’, Speculum 76 (2001), 315–36, on 328.
R.M. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), p. 89. Further discussed by Jacqueline Murray, ‘On the origins and role of “wise women” in causes for annulment on the grounds of male impotence’, Journal of Medieval History, 16 (1990), 235–49, on 240–41.
It seems that the women were, in fact, known to the court as prostitutes, although this is not mentioned in the trial record itself. See P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Women in Fifteenth-Century Town Life’, in John A.F. Thompson (ed.), Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester, 1988), p. 119, n. 128; R.M. Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (New York and Oxford, 1996), p. 97.
Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Oxford, 1988), pp. 51, 59–60, 68, 117; Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 52–3, 171–72, 181, 184–85.
Der Mittelenglische Versroman über Richard Löwenherz, ed. K. Brunner, Wiener Beitrage zur Englischen Philologie 42 (Vienna and Leipzig, 1913), 11. 1908–12: (‘And at the land-gate King Richard held the assault so hard, and acted so manly, that he lost not one of his men.’)
Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, ed. M. Mills (Heidelberg, 1988), ll. 166–68. (‘Better manly to be slain than long to live in sorrow and pain under a foreigner’s yoke.’)
William of Palerne, ed. G.J.V. Bunt (Gröningen, 1985), ll. 3900–01. (‘And it is more noble to die manly than to flee cowardly, whatever may happen.’)
Sir Eglamour of Artois, ed. F.E. Richardson, Early English Texts Society 256 (London, 1965), ll. 1315–17 (Lincoln Cathedral Library 91 of c.1430–1440, the ‘Thornton’ MS). Variant from BL Cotton Caligula A.II (c.1446–1460).
Carlin A. Barton, Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley and London, 2001), esp. pp. 36–42; Myles McDonnell, Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic (Cambridge, 2006).
The Poems of William of Shoreham, ed. M. Konrath, Early English Texts Society, old series 86 (London, 1902), no. 7.
Ibid., ll. 349–54: (‘And there is no bliss nor celebration to compare with the joy of conquest that comes through God; nor can I conceive of more joy than when a man proves his manhood through mastery.’)
The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373–1389), ed. M.A. Devlin, Camden Soc. 3rd ser. 85 (London, 1934), sermon 37, p. 106: Sed quomodo per fidem sumus recreati pariter et nutriti? Certe tripliciter. Tria regna videlicet diaboli, carnis, et mundi viriliter superando. Cf. Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans. S. Wenzel (London, 1989), pp. 40–3. Compare also the examples from the eleventh and twelfth centuries cited by Smith, ‘Saints in shining armour’, pp. 591–92.
‘The two ways’ in The Works of Sir John Clanvowe, ed. V.J. Scattergood (Cambridge, 1975).
See especially K.B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972), pp. 201–05.
Ibid., ll. 477–503.
For such values in twentieth-century Mediterranean societies, see J. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame: The values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago, 1974); David Gilmore (ed.), Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (Washington DC, 1987); P. Bourdieu, ‘Le sens de l’honneur’, in Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé par Trois études d’ethnologie kabyle (Paris, 2000), pp. 19–60; A. Blok, Honour and violence (Malden, MA, 2001).
An approach launched by M. Kimmel, ‘The contemporary “crisis of masculinity” in historical perspective’, in Harry Brod (ed.), The Making of Masculinities (Boston, 1987) and followed notably by McNamara, ‘Herrenfrage’; Anthony Fletcher, ‘Men’s dilemma: the future of patriarchy in England, 1560–1660’, TRHS, 6th ser., 4 (1994), pp. 61–81.
Karras, Boys to Men, pp. 161–62; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), pp. 1–17.
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Fletcher, C. (2011). The Whig Interpretation of Masculinity? Honour and Sexuality in Late Medieval Manhood. In: Arnold, J.H., Brady, S. (eds) What is Masculinity?. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307254_4
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