Excerpt of "Rivalrous Masculinities"

RIVALROUS MASCULINITIES New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies

EDITED BY ANN MARIE RASMUSSEN

U NIV E RSIT Y O F NOT R E DA M E PR ES S NOT RE DAME , I ND I A N A

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University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

vii

Preface Ann Marie Rasmussen

xi

one. A Word to the Wise: Men, Gender, and Medieval Masculinities.

Clare A. Lees two. Men in Trouble: Warrior Angst in Beowulf.

Gillian R. Overing

27

three. The Rivalry of the Secular and the Spiritual in the Masculine Personae of Henry Suso’s The Life of the Servant.

J. Christian Straubhaar-Jones

42

four. Predicaments of Piousness: The Trouble with Being a Learned Jewish Family Man in Premodern Europe.

Astrid Lembke

57

five. The Knight versus the Courtier.

Darrin Cox

79

six. Misogyny, Philogyny, Masculinities: Antonio Pucci’s Il Contrasto delle donne.

F. Regina Psaki

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1

102

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vi

Contents

seven. VirtĂš: Marriage, Gender, and Competing Masculinities in Fourteenth-Century Lucca.

Corinne Wieben

131

eight. David and Jonathan: A Late Medieval Bromance.

Ruth Mazo Karras

151

nine. When Did Servants Become Men? Diane Wolfthal

174

ten. Medieval Masculinities without Men. Karma Lochrie

209

eleven. The Beloved Discipline: From the Gospel of John to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.

Andreas Krass

234

List of Contributors

251

Index 255

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P R E FAC E

A nn M arie R asmussen

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 xi

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xii

Preface

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, that 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 Write Large “Rivalrous Masculinities” project, and it also provided the shape and direction of this volume. The chapters arise from and make im­ portant 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

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Preface xiii

a­ rtifacts 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 epic; 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

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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

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Preface xv

of the knight was challenged by the rise of the courtier as a model of ­masculinity.

INTERSECT IONAL 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

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Preface

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 HETERONORMAT IVITY 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 art 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.

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Preface xvii

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. M ­ arianne

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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 R ­ omance Studies, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and the Humanities Writ Large Initiative, Emerging Faculty Network “Rivalrous Mascu­ linities.” 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.

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