Isabel Davis, Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages

Medium Aevum, Fall-Winter, 2008 by Cory James Rushton

Isabel Davis, Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xiii 222 pp. ISBN 0-521-86637-5. 48.00 [pounds sterling]/$85 .00

Isabel Davis's book seeks to 'explore ... intersections between medieval masculine subjectivity and the ethics of labour and living' within a particular period, 'the two generations between c.1360 and c.1430' (p. 2). Davis prefers the phrase 'life writing' to the contested and contestable 'autobiography' (p. 5), although some of the texts discussed lend themselves to this approach more comfortably than others: Thomas Usk, Thomas Hoccleve, and (with some caution) William Langland seem to record more of themselves in their texts than Chaucer does in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale or Gower does in the Confessio Amantis. What these authors do appear to have in common is an uncomfortable tension between writing, a clerical skill, and a secular life which often included marriage (p. 9).

Davis begins with Langland's Piers Plowman, appropriate given that poem's interest in 'the project of restoring social order as an especially masculine commission' which is linked 'particularly to male domestic roles' (p. 13). Langland 'marginalizes the standard medieval preference for virginity, negotiating a more privileged place for marriage and fatherhood' but pays a price for it, his narrator under constant scrutiny by his own 'interior faculties of Will, Reason and Conscience' (14f.). Ina poem deeply concerned with its own social context, the labour shortages and related itinerancy of workers, the marriage of Piers the Plowman becomes 'a masculine model of the industrious and married man ... a remedy for both population and labour shortage' (p. 20), as opposed to Will's identity as a 'peripatetic figure' whose own marriage must be equally migrant (p. 19)' Davis concludes that Will, if not Langland, never manages to reconcile himself to his own marriage, necessitating a series of revisions to his matrimonial argument in the C-text. Hoccleve, Davis argues, can be most directly compared with Langland: 'For Langland, marriage is a labour bond; for Hoccleve, marriage--the source of his shame--can only detract from work, disrupting its homosocial communities' (p. 153). Hoccleve 'distances his narrator ... from his marriage and indeed from women generally' in an effort to construct himself 'as a natural celibate whose marriage is an aberration' (p. 143). The implication that Hoccleve was swept up by social change which did not agree with him, but which is perfectly normal to us, is intriguing and worthy of further development.

The book's discussion of Thomas Usk's Testament of Love ably charts a difficult path between critical traditions that either blame Usk for 'failing to be a revolutionary hero' or criticize him with the same 'language of betrayal and infamy' used by Usk's contemporaries. Davis carefully demonstrates how Usk's interest in private space--especially new ideas of the private home--is integrally linked with his political ambitions and his deep loneliness following the failure of those ambitions. Usk develops the idea that marriage should be a matter of choice through his narrator's metaphorical pursuit of Margarite Pearl, which offers less than it would seem to women--Usk's concern is with marriage as a 'positive masculine lifestyle choice', one with the power to raise a man's social status if he becomes 'one flesh' with someone of higher status (pp. 72f.).

The book's exploration might have benefited from a conclusion which could draw the various texts together, but as it stands Davis has produced a readable and intriguing addition to the growing field of medieval masculinities.

CORY JAMES RUSHTON

Antigonish, Nova Scotia