Writing Masculinity in the Later
Middle Ages. By Isabel
Davis. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 62. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 222. $85.
An odd and perhaps unintended legacy of thirty years of feminist criticism
on the Middle Ages has been to remind us, as does Chaucer's Wife of Bath,
of the profound extent to which medieval literary culture was dominated
by men. The still-emerging field of medieval masculinity studies is thus
important not only because it, too, prevents us from too easily universalizing
gender-specific aspects of medieval literary production, but also because
it shows us that ideas of what it meant to be a man in medieval Europe were
unstable, changing, and contested. Writing Masculinity in the Later
Middle Ages, despite the breadth of its title, focuses on the complexities
of lay masculinity in five writers working in and about London between 1360
and 1430, a period known for both social upheaval and the resurgence of
English as a literary medium. Isabel Davis sees each of these figures—William
Langland, Thomas Usk, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Thomas Hoccleve—drawing
on yet deviating from more traditional clerical and aristocratic models
of manhood to explore, through first-person narration, "a kind of urbanitas,
a pragmatic, non-heroic identity" (p. 11) rooted in work and the ethos
of labor, particularly domestic labor.
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