Religious Men and Masculine Identity in the Middle Ages

Description

The complex relationship between masculinity and religion, as experienced in both the secular and ecclesiastical worlds, forms the focus for this volume, whose range encompasses the rabbis of the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud, and moves via Carolingian and Norman France, Siena, Antioch, and high and late medieval England to the eve of the Reformation. Chapters investigate the creation and reconstitution of different expressions of masculine identity, from the clerical enthusiasts for marriage to the lay practitioners of chastity, from crusading bishops to holy kings. They also consider the extent to which lay and clerical understandings of masculinity existed in an unstable dialectical relationship, at times sharing similar features, at others pointedly different, co-opting and rejecting features of the other; the articles show this interplay to be more far more complicated than a simple linear narrative of either increasing divergence, or of clerical colonization of lay masculinity. They also challenge conventional historiographies of the adoption of clerical celibacy, of the decline of monasticism and the gendered nature of piety. Patricia Cullum is Head of History at the University of Huddersfield; Katherine J. Lewis is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield. Contributors: James G. Clark, P.H. Cullum, Kirsten A. Fenton, Joanna Huntington, Katherine J. Lewis, Matthew Mesley, Catherine Sanok, Michael L. Satlow, Rachel Stone, Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, Marita von Weissenberg Frontcover Contents List of Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction From salve to weapon: Torah study, masculinity and the Babylonian Talmud Gender and hierarchy: Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (845-882) as a religious man The defence of clerical marriage: Religious identity and masculinity in the writings of Anglo-Norman clerics Writing masculinity and religious identity in Henry of Huntingdon ‘The quality of his virtus proved him a perfect man’: Hereward ‘the Wake’ and the representation of lay masculinity Episcopal authority and gender in the narratives of the First Crusade ‘What man are you?’ Piety and masculinity in the vitae of a Sienese craftsman and a Provençal nobleman ‘Imitate, too, this king in virtue, who could have done ill, and did it not’: lay sanctity and the rewriting of Henry VI's manliness John of Bridlington, mitred prior and model of the mixed life Why men became monks in late medieval England Feasting not fasting: men’s devotion to the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages Index Backcover