Download PDF | Holiness And Masculinity In The Middle Ages University Of Wales Press ( 2004)
244 Pages
Series Eprrors’ PREFACE
Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages aims to explore the interface between medieval religion and culture, with as broad an understanding of those terms as possible. It puts to the forefront studies which engage with works that significantly contributed to the shaping of medieval culture. However, it also gives attention to studies dealing with works that reflect and highlight aspects of medieval culture that have been neglected in the past by scholars of the medieval disciplines. For example, devotional works and the practice they infer illuminate our understanding of the medieval subject and its culture in remarkable ways, while studies of the material space designed and inhabited by medieval subjects yield new evidence on the period and the people who shaped it and lived in it.
In the larger field of religion and culture, we also want to explore further the roles played by women as authors, readers and owners of books, thereby defining them more precisely as actors in the cultural field. The series as a whole investigates the European Middle Ages, from c.500 to c.1500. Our aim is to explore medieval religion and culture with the tools belonging to such disciplines as, among others, art history, philosophy, theology, history, musicology, the history of medicine, and literature. In particular, we would like to promote interdisciplinary studies, as we believe strongly that our modern understanding of the term applies fascinatingly well to a cultural period marked by a less tight confinement and categorization of its disciplines than the modern period.
However, our only criterion is academic excellence, with the belief that the use of a large diversity of critical tools and theoretical approaches enables a _ deeper understanding of medieval culture. We want the series to reflect this diversity, as we believe that, as a collection of outstanding contributions, it offers a more subtle representation of a period that is marked by paradoxes and contradictions and which necessarily reflects diversity and difference, however difficult it may sometimes have proved for medieval culture to accept these notions.
NoTEs ON CONTRIBUTORS
SARAH L. BASTOW lectures in medieval and early modern history at the University of Huddersfield and the Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds. She also teaches A-level History at Greenhead College, Huddersfield. Her research interests are in early modern religious history and her Ph.D. was entitled ‘Aspects of the History of the Catholic Gentry of Yorkshire from the Pilgrimage of Grace to the First Civil War’ (2002). She has also published two articles, ‘“Worth Nothing but Very Wilful”: Catholic Recusant Women of Yorkshire, 1536-1642’, Recusant History, 25 (2001) and ‘The Catholic Gentry and the Catholic Community of the City of York, 1536-1642: The Focus of a Catholic County?’, The York Historian, 18 (2001). These examine the role played by women in maintaining the Catholic religion and the position that the city of York held as a focus for Catholicism in the Tudor and Stuart eras.
EDWARD CHRISTIE took his Ph.D. from West Virginia University, where his research focused on the representation of the alphabetical letter as an atomic unit of text and a medium of cultural memory from the grammatical culture of Anglo-Saxon England to later typographical and digital remediations of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. He continues to research in Anglo-Saxon representations of literacy, history and the materiality of the sign.
CHRISTOPHER C. CRAUN is a doctoral student in Medieval History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is currently finishing his thesis entitled ‘A Contextualization of the Martyrologium Hrabani’ and plans on submitting it later in 2004. While his Ph.D. focuses upon the Carolingian West, Christopher is also deeply interested in early asceticism throughout the Mediterranean world of Late Antiquity. Aside from academic labours he and his wife, Kala, are busy raising their three children and the family currently resides in the USA.
P. H. CULLUM is Head of History at the University of Huddersfield. She has published widely on hospitals and charity in late medieval England, and has interests in female piety and clerical masculinity.
FIONA Ss. DUNLOP has recently completed a Ph.D. at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, with a thesis on the representation of young noblemen in the early Tudor interlude. She teaches English at Bootham School, York.
DAWN MARIE HAYES received her Ph.D. in medieval European history from New York University in 1998. Having taught at Iona College and for the City University of New York, she joined the history faculty at Montclair State University in the fall of 2003. She is the author of Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389 (2003) and will soon publish ‘Body as Champion of Church Authority and Sacred Place: The Murder of Thomas Becket’, a chapter deconstructing accounts of the archbishop’s murder in 4 Great Effusion of Blood’?: Interpreting Medieval Violence (2004). She is currently working on Medieval Maternity, an examination of pregnancy and childbirth in medieval Europe. She has been a Speaker in the Humanities for the New York Council for the Humanities and a participant in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on Gothic architecture in the Ile-de-France.
MERI HEINONEN Is a Phil. Lic. (Licentiate of Philosophy) at the University of Turku, Finland. She is currently completing her dissertation which is entitled ‘Mystical Experience and Gender in German Mysticism, 1200-1400”.
KATHERINE J. LEwis is a Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield. She is the author of The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England (2000) and co-editor of A Companion to Margery Kempe (2004). She is currently working on a study of gender and society in late medieval England (forthcoming, 2005).
ROBERT MILLS is a lecturer in English at King’s College London. His research interests include medieval visual culture, late medieval literature in the vernacular and modern critical theory. Recent publications include The Monstrous Middle Ages, co-edited with Bettina Bildhauer (2003) and Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image, co-edited with Emma Campbell (2004). His book on medieval punishment iconography is forthcoming, and he is now working on a new project: a study of the links between eroticism and religious devotion in medieval culture.
CAROLYN DISKANT MuIR received her BA from Wellesley College and her MA from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts of the University of Hong Kong, where she teaches European art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Her research focuses on issues of religious iconography in early European art, especially the imagery of saints. Recent publications include articles on St Catherine of Alexandria and St Hermann-Joseph. She is currently working on a large-scale study of mystic marriage imagery of male and female saints in Northern Renaissance art.
JACQUELINE MURRAY is Professor of History and Dean of the College of Arts at the University of Guelph. She has published widely on ideas about sexuality and gender and marriage and family in medieval society. Her publications include Love, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages (2002) and Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West (1999). Her current work focuses on masculinity and male embodiment.
w. M. oRMROD is professor of Medieval History at the University of York. He is the author of The Reign of Edward IT (1990), Political Life in Medieval England, 1300-1450 (1995) and numerous articles on the politics, government and political culture of later medieval England.
EMMA PETTIT has recently completed a Ph.D. at the University of York. Her thesis is entitled ‘Aldhelm’s opus geminatum De virginitate in its Early Anglo-Saxon Context’. She considered how this double treatise on sexual renunciation related to Aldhelm’s influential ecclesiastical and political career, the composition of the text’s audience and the purpose and nature of its spiritual advice.
SHAUN TOUGHER is Lecturer in Ancient History in the Cardiff School of History and Archaeology at Cardiff University, and has also taught at the Queen’s University of Belfast and the University of St Andrews. He specializes in late Roman and Byzantine history, and has written several articles on subjects such as eunuchs, Julian the Apostate and Leo VI. He is the author of The Reign of Leo VI (886-912) (1997) and the editor of Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond (2002).
Introduction: Holiness and Masculinity in Medieval Europe
P. H. CULLUM
his collection is the product of a conference called ‘Holiness and
Masculinity in the Middle Ages’ organized by the editors at the University of Huddersfield in 2001. We had recently taught a new final year course for the first time, entitled “Gender and Society: Men and Women in the Middle Ages’. Both course and conference had grown out of a long conversation conducted on the drive back from the annual ‘Gender and Medieval Studies’ conference, which was held at Canterbury in January 2000. That drive, from the senior ecclesiastical centre of medieval England to the next most senior (York), gave us time and space to consider relationships of gender and religion. For both of us our research was extending from considerations of women’s religiosity to include that of men. We wanted to be able to teach issues that we were researching, but we did not think that our (or indeed anyone’s) library resources were at that point sufficiently developed to be able to sustain a course only in aspects of the history of medieval masculinity.! Although we had both written on and taught women’s history, we believed that gender history, as a properly integrated subject and not just as a euphemism for women’s studies, was what we could and should develop, hence the subtitle of our course. There has been a significant expansion in published work on medieval masculinity since the beginning of the current millennium, but at its dawn on that early January 2000 drive there was very little that we could give to students. So we decided to add to it ourselves.
Our own research interests were focused on intersections of gender and religion, and although we knew other people who were interested in aspects of medieval masculinity, we felt that the issue of holiness and masculinity was an area that had not had much attention yet paid to it. We knew that there were both established scholars and graduate students working in the field but no conference had brought them together, and little had been published in the field. Moreover the intersection of women’s history and religion has been a very fruitful one in medieval studies, and we thought that could also be the case for studies of masculinity.* To adapt a formula used by Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih, we were particularly interested in exploring the ways in which holiness has a bearing on masculinity, and masculinity has a bearing on holiness.* Another focus was consideration of the ways in which the performance of both holiness and masculinity intersected with, and was informed by other categories such as monasticism, kingship, mysticism, sanctity, body and age. We felt that a conference and a collection of essays devoted to holiness and masculinity would answer our needs, those of our students and those of others in the field. We deliberately threw our net as wide as possible in seeking contributions. As we are both products of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York we have taken an interdisciplinary approach to our research and we wanted to bring together scholars not just of history, but of literature and art history as well, so that different disciplines could throw light on each other. We also wanted as broad a geographical and chronological range as we could, to highlight the ways in which masculinity and masculinities varied across time and place, and could be contested or diversified even in relation to a single individual. (For instance, the essays by Carolyn Diskant Muir and Meri Heinonen explore the differing means which Henry Suso used to conceive his own identity and relationship to the divine, and the changing ways in which he could be represented, by looking at visual and literary representations of him, respectively.) Thus the current collection, while focusing primarily on northern Europe and on the high and late Middle Ages, also draws on other periods, for instance fifth-century Syria, divided by a serious theological controversy that had crucial implications for perceptions of the embodiment of holiness and the divine. It also includes essays which examine other traditions that informed ideas both of masculinity and forms of holiness, from the Byzantine tradition of eunuchism which produced a rather different gender system to that of the West, to Reformation England where Catholic gentlemen were faced with the disappearance of Catholicism as the dominant culture. The chapters address the experiences of lay and clergy, the saintly and the secular, the royal and the obscure. In most cases the body, although sometimes problematic in its submission to the will, remained in other respects unproblematically male, but two papers address the altered male body: Shaun Tougher considers the extent to which the post-male physical body of the eunuch might continue to house a masculine spirit, while Robert Mills addresses how and with what purpose the tonsure could be a physical sign to both the cleric and laity of the particular status of the career holy man, and a site of anxiety at the same time.
For women in the Middle Ages religion offered both opportunities and problems in establishing themselves as authorized and authoritative holy persons. For women, authority was often particularly difficult; to claim to speak authoritatively on matters of religion and to have that claim validated was a difficult act to manage. One of the ways in which women might do this was through use of conventional ideas of female submission such as the prophetic claim merely to voice the word of God in a form of ventriloquism in which the female speaker was merely the puppet through whom God’s voice was transmitted to the world. In this case the woman sidestepped all claims to personal authority. In a slightly different way the female mystic who sought union with God could use the fact of her female body to position herself as the Bride of Christ entering into a ‘natural’ relationship of courtship or marriage.
By contrast men could find these kinds of relationships with God difficult precisely because they might challenge conventional ideas of masculine autonomy. Thus Carolyn Diskant Muir and Christopher C. Craun explore the extent to which male hermits and mystics might, in seeing God as male, choose to place themselves in a female subject position and the effect that this had on representations of their gender identities. Muir also explores instances where men such as Henry Suso and St Hermann-Joseph contracted mystical marriages to a female figure as the male partner. In the case of Suso this involved a masculine subject position which is rather at odds with much current scholarship which tends to emphasize the female-centred nature of his spirituality. Meri Heinonen’s essay provides a challenge to this approach as she focuses instead on one text in which Suso used male and female characters to delineate forms of holy life appropriate to men and women, borrowing from contemporary aristocratic secular models of masculinity to emphasize that only men should attempt the endeavours of holy masculinity.
Indeed, this emphasis of Suso’s on the divine knighthood leads us to consideration of the other side of the problem; namely that aspects of the religious life required the setting aside of emblems of masculine authority or autonomy which might have implications for the subject’s sense of his own masculinity, and others’ views of it. Emma Pettit argues that Aldhelm constructed a model of active masculine sanctity for his monastic audience precisely because Anglo-Saxon monks had to leave a warrior lifestyle behind. Jacqueline Murray explores the problem of the monk who, in relinquishing sexual activity and accepting submission to the will of others, might have been thought to have relinquished masculinity itself. But instead the ‘struggle for chastity’ was re-envisioned as a specifically masculine arena of battle, again borrowing from secular and aristocratic codes. Thus the willed abandonment of conventional male behaviour was used as a sign of the specifically masculine spiritual endeavour. Knights might see themselves as the truly masculine ‘hard men’, but their lives were soft in comparison to the spiritual battles to be fought by monks and clerics in ensuring the submission of the body to the will, in the practice of chastity and in the triumph of martyrdom.
For kings the meshing of religious values with the practice of authority presented other demands, as it was necessary to balance the requirements of religious observance with the proper practice of regality. This was a blend successfully achieved by Louis IX, whose canonization made a statement not just about his holy kingship, but about the nature of the French royal line more widely. The enhancement and blazoning of the reputations of France’s male royals was made possible through their physical location in the monastery of Saint-Denis, surrounded both by the monks and earlier emblems of French royal sanctity, as Dawn Marie Hayes shows. However, other king-saints present more awkward models; an overly religious king, like Edward the Confessor, who was believed to have placed his inclination towards chastity before his duty of providing an heir to the throne, could create extreme difficulties for himself and for his kingdom. Even more problematic were those kings who met death in the defence of their kingdoms or rule, for they could all too easily be seen as failures. The ignominious end of a king such as Edward II not only cast shadows on his own reputation but that of his dynasty. W. M. Ormrod argues that Edward III’s concern for Edward II’s posthumous reputation was a matter that not only reflected on his father but on his mother, and thus himself as well. The attempts to have both Edward II and Henry VI officially recognized as saints also provided a means of remasculinizing rulers whose equivocal gender identities had provided important ammunition for those who sought to depose and disgrace them. Rewriting both kings as martyrs had an important recuperative effect on their masculinity. Similarly Edward Christie argues that the deaths of Anglo-Saxon kings embodied contemporary values because they knew that they faced death and actively chose both it and submission to the will of God. They could thus be presented not as failed kings, but as successful martyrs. To die was an act of masculine will and enhanced rather than detracted from the king-saint’s authority. The posthumous creation and recreation of a king’s reputation allowed the representation of events in the light of an understanding of his holiness of life.
Holiness had to be learned before it could be willed, and Fiona S. Dunlop’s paper explores the use of drama as a didactic method for the instruction of young laymen on the brink of manhood, through analysis of a play which offers them status-specific lessons about desirable masculinity. She considers the role of didactic literature such as mirrors for princes, and these are also examined in Katherine J. Lewis’s discussion of the model of holy kingship offered to Henry VI in St Edmund of East Anglia. Henry perhaps demonstrates that the lesson learned was not always the one offered, but it is nevertheless clear that his keepers were concerned to offer him appropriate role models who incorporated both the holy and the military. The Catholic gentlemen of the northern English Reformation by contrast preferred a quietist response which involved (on the whole) neither a military reaction nor a martyrdom but the survival of the family and its faith in the face of difficult circumstances. Nevertheless, the behaviour of their wives and daughters, who were apparently less willing to conform than their menfolk, could have been and sometimes was seen as evidence that the men were unable to exercise proper patriarchal authority over their households. In these cases Sarah L. Bastow argues the apparent failure of masculine authority was nothing of the kind, for the female civil disobedience was tolerated, if not encouraged, by the men of the family.
This collection is necessarily limited in scope. The majority of the papers relate to monks and to a lesser extent secular clergy, and to elite laymen. These are a well-documented but small minority of the population. There is much work still to be done, for example, on lower status or peasant men’s piety, and the ways in which it intersected with issues of gender. Some of the papers signal interactions between clerical and aristocratic ideals, but we were unfortunately not offered a paper on one of the potentially most fruitful areas for the examination of this topic, the military orders. Indeed, issues of holiness and masculinity underpin the events and ethos of the Crusades, but this is an area that has seen very little research to date.* This is an exploration of Christian masculinity and holiness, but neither category is confined to Christians, there is much to be said about Muslim, Jewish and indeed pagan conceptions of the intersection of holiness and masculinity in medieval Europe. We look forward to further work in this field.
Whatever the specific forms of holy masculinity under discussion, throughout there is a strong emphasis on the masculine ability to exercise self-mastery. Even those who apparently preferred to adopt a feminine subject position chose this as an act of will. The abandonment of authority and submission to the will of God or to an earthly superior was also a willed choice, in which the subject exercised a form of power. The practice of holiness embodied the masculine capacities of self-control (whether physical or mental) and intellectual decision. No man could be holy who did not choose to be so, however much he might consider himself to be dependent on the will of God.
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