CFP: Masculinities in the British Landscape

14-17 May 2015

A multi-disciplinary, multi-period conference to be held at Harlaxton College, the British Campus of the University of Evansville, outside of Grantham, Lincolnshire.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Howard Williams (Chester): ‘From Stonehenge to the National Memorial Arboretum: Megaliths and Martial Masculinity in the British Landscape’

This conference seeks to explore current and historical concepts of masculinities in the British landscapes. From depictions of masculine control to landscapes of masculine employment, the conference wishes to explore the ways masculinity has been marked on the landscape and expressed in landscape terms.

Proposals will be accepted from all eras from the prehistoric to the contemporary. The geographic area covered will be not only England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but also the historic scope of ‘Britishness,’ including former British Empire states in their colonial and post-colonial periods.

Proposals are encouraged from any discipline, including (but not limited to) archaeology, art history, criminology, folklore studies, history, literature, philosophy, sociology and theology. Topics might include:

- The naval seascape
- Sculpted and symbolic landscapes
- Agricultural landscapes
- Ritualized landscapes
- Gender, crime and urban topography
- Employment and land
- Geographic concepts of masculinity
- Masculinity, empire and the landscape
- Religious masculinity and the monastic landscape
- Landscapes of masculinity through war, rebellion and protest
- Textual depictions of masculinities and landscapes

Please send 200-word proposals for 20-minute papers or 600-word proposals for 3-paper panels to the conference convenors by 1 December 2015. Informal queries can be made to Dr Edward Bujak or Dr Katherine Weikert.

Please click here for the conference website.

The Conference is generously supported by the Economic History Society.

Guest Post: ‘Weaponed’ men, impotent men, and ‘not-men’: sex and manhood in Anglo-Saxon England.

by Dr Chris Monk

It’s a great pleasure to be invited to guest blog for the Manchester Medieval Society blogspot, for which I’d particularly like to thank the Treasurer, Hannah Priest. Hannah suggested I write something about my specialism – medieval sex – as a previous post with ‘sex’ in the title had proved rather popular. Well, I’ll do my best to hold your interest.

What I want to talk about is as much about gender as it is about sexual intercourse, and my idea was prompted by the title of next year’s MANCASS conference: ‘Manhood in Anglo-Saxon England’.




The Arundel Psalter (Canterbury, between 1012-1023), British Library, Arundel 155, fol. 93r
Detail of historiated initial: David slays Goliath
This image is identified by the British library as free from known copyright restriction.
What did it take to be a man? A big weapon, apparently.

So manhood ... umm. A rather loaded term, wouldn’t you say? Is it a status or an identity? A taxonomy, perhaps? Is it even a reality?

The Anglo-Saxons, as you may know, generally used the word mann, the etymological root of present-day English ‘man’, to mean a person of either sex; and the word had, from which ‘hood’ derives, had the sense of rank, status, or position, something that was conferred and indeed could be lost. So, for example, a priest or a monk who seriously strayed from his vow of celibacy could have his had removed.

Today, the word ‘manhood’ is distinctly gendered. We’re not talking ‘personhood’ here. But the idea of status – legitimate or otherwise – seems to be integral to the concept. However, we often question manhood, we challenge it, and we even laugh at it at times. We may see ourselves or others as either living up to or not living up to one’s manhood. And, of course, at times we link manhood directly to sexual performance, which is often where the humour creeps in.

So what about the Anglo-Saxons? Did they have a concept of manhood that shares any of our preoccupations? How important, for example, was sexual performance in defining manhood?

One of the most useful resources for understanding Anglo-Saxon ideas of sex and gender is the collection of texts known as the penitentials. These handbooks of penance contain lists of various sins with a corresponding ‘tariff’ of penance: usually specified amounts of fasting.

In the past, scholars were somewhat scathing of the penitentials, thinking of them, especially when they dealt with matters of sex, as prurient taxonomy, an obsession with categorising all sin, and therefore not representative of what medieval people actually got up to. This is rather a narrow perspective, I would suggest, and one which speaks more about mid-twentieth-century prudery than it does a desire to accurately understand the past.

I think it is fair to say that we can gain much insight into the Anglo-Saxon world by carefully considering what the penitentials have to say about sex. It is helpful to think of the penitentials as narratives of life, in the sense that they capture in condensed form the many interviews between confessor (priest) and sinner that took place for centuries in England, as well as in Ireland and on the Continent. In other words, though the penitentials are not actual transcripts of dialogue, their form and content evolved out of innumerable conversations between priests and laypersons.

During the tenth and eleventh centuries, vernacular penitentials were produced to reflect English needs to equip priests with usable pastoral tools (the priesthood at the time was not considered especially skilled in Latin). Earlier Latin penitentials were not simply translated but were adapted to meet indigenous needs. The following two judgements, or canons, reflect a particular Anglo-Saxon take on manhood.

The first canon is arguably not even about penance, as no fasting is prescribed. This canon explains what a woman may do if her husband is impotent:

Wer 7 wif gif hig geþeodde beoð 7 se wer mid hire hæman ne mæge, þæt wif hine mot forlætan 7 hire oþerne niman, gif þæt on þone ceorl cuð byð.

Man and woman, if they are joined [in marriage] but the man is not able to have sex with her, the woman may abandon him and take for herself another, if that is known about the man.

This canon may well be about unconsummated marriage, rather than about impotence after initial consummation, though this is not explicitly stated. The reason I say this is that Anglo-Saxon versions of Canon Law did not permit a man to leave his wife once they had sex, even if she was barren. (The presumption here was that barrenness was always seen as an issue of female infertility.) If the penitential statement above meant a woman could divorce her husband at any time that he was impotent, even if they had already had intercourse, then it would fly in the face of both Canon Law and Christian Scripture, which forbids divorce other than on the grounds of adultery. So it does seem that this penitential ruling anticipated later medieval laws in England that insisted on consummation as a requirement of marriage.

So what do we learn here about manhood? Well, imagine the scenario suggested by the language: if it is known about the man (here the word ceorl is used, by the way, meaning a freeman but not a man of nobility). A woman may well have had to prove somehow that her husband was impotent. A parallel canon in another penitential states just that – that the burden of proof was with the woman. How would she prove it? Would she have to subject herself to a physical examination of her hymen, for example? Whatever the case, the situation would have led to the husband’s status – his ‘hood’ we might say – coming under scrutiny. Since the Church’s model of marriage was that God created humans male and female, and that is why they were joined together, it is possible that an impotent man was not really seen as truly male. So it made no difference if the couple had been ‘joined’ in marriage: from the woman’s perspective the union was no longer viable or authentic. And as long as she could prove the man’s impotence, she would suffer no disapprobation from the Church should she choose to take another man as husband.

It is interesting that the word wæpnedman (literally, ‘weaponed man’) was not the choice of word by the writer of the penitential, but rather the basic word for man, wer, was selected. The euphemistic quality of wæpnedman (I assume I don’t need to spell out the euphemism) is important in another canon that relates to masculinity, where both virile men and ‘not-men’ are discussed:

Se þe mid bædlinge hæme, oþþe mid oþrum wæpned men, oþþe mid nytene, fæste x winter.

He who has sex with a bædling, or with another virile male, or with an animal, should fast 10 years.

This is one strange canon! First, what is a bædling? A number of scholars have discussed this very rare Old English word, for which there is no direct corresponding word in Latin. It may derive from OE bæddel which probably means ‘hermaphrodite’, thus making a bædling a descendent of a bæddel (the suffix –ing is used in Anglo-Saxon genealogies to mean ‘the son of’). The writer of the penitential above later explains that bædlings are ‘soft like a harlot’. The baedling thus seems to be considered effeminate in some way, which is the sense here behind ‘soft’ (OE hnesclic). David Clark considers bædlings as ‘not-men’, part of a continuum of gender including women, boys and effeminate men. There may be a clue of sorts to their identity in an earlier Anglo-Saxon text, Liber monstrorum (Book of Monsters), which refers to ‘the person of both sexes’ who looks physically more masculine than feminine in the upper body but loves feminine occupation (not specified), and who also goes around fooling ignorant men ‘in the manner of a whore’. Perhaps there is a link between this so-called ‘monster’ and the bædling.

I believe the bædling was probably understood as a person of problematic gender, one who didn’t fit into the Anglo-Saxon ideal of manhood but was not exactly a woman either. What we can say for sure is that the penitential canon above does not show the bædling to be a wæpnedman, a virile man.

The curious thing, however, is that the sinner under consideration here – the ‘he’ of the sentence – can have sex with ‘another wæpnedman’. Scholars, mistakenly I feel, often tend to emphasize that in terms of sexual sin this canon is about penetrator and penetrated. Yet here we are told about a ‘he’ having sex with another virile man, or with a bædling, or indeed with a beast. Confused yet? Well the canonist goes on to also speak about baedlings having sex with each other!

What are we to deduce? The point I want to make is that though this canon is about ‘deviant’ sex (deviant from the Anglo-Saxon Church’s perspective), it’s also as much about gender. I would suggest that in Anglo-Saxon society, there was a perceivable ‘virile man’, a kind of default figure of manhood but whose status was not entirely, or simply, determined by the one with whom he had sex. Two wæpnedmen could have sex together and still be men, we might say. However, there existed (in the mind of at least the writer of the penitential) another type of person who was effeminate or soft and probably thought of as promiscuous like a female prostitute. These bædlings, it may well be inferred, would have sex with virile men or with each other – it wasn’t their sexual acts per se that defined them.

So manhood? Anglo-Saxon manhood? Umm ... a difficult one, that. Perhaps I should sum it up like this:

If you couldn’t quite manage it on the wedding night, then from your new wife’s perspective – and perhaps from the local community’s perspective too – you were not viable as a ‘true’ man. But if you didn’t need the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Viagra, and no matter with whom you had sex, you could still be viewed as He-man. However, if you happened to be ‘a son of a hermaphrodite’, then you weren’t to even bother applying for ‘manhood’!

Useful reading: David Clark, Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2009); R. D. Fulk, ‘Male Homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore’, in Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Carol Braun Pasternack and Lisa M. C. Weston, pp. 1-34; Allen J. Frantzen, ‘The “Literariness” of the Penitentials’, in Frantzen’s The Anglo-Saxon Penitentials: A Cultural Database; Christopher Monk, ‘Framing Sex: Sexual Discourse in Text and Image in Anglo-Saxon England’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Manchester, 2012), esp. pp. 127-40.

About the Author: Dr Chris Monk is a freelance consultant, researcher and writer. He obtained his PhD at the University of Manchester in 2012, where until recently he also lectured on medieval literature and narrative art. His area of research is broadly Anglo-Saxon culture, and his specialism is the history of sexuality in early medieval England (c.700-c.1100). He is presently a consultant for Rochester Cathedral’s ‘Hidden Treasures, Fresh Expressions’ project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, carrying out research on its great treasure, the twelfth-century manuscript Textus Roffensis. His monograph, Sex, Genesis and the Anglo-Saxons is presently under review at Manchester University Press. He also writes feature articles for magazines, most of which to date have not been about the Middle Ages, though he has a few medieval themed pieces in the pipeline. Over the next few months Chris will be producing ‘The Sex Lives of the Anglo-Saxons’, a series of video blogs for his website.

CFP: Manhood in Anglo-Saxon England

Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (MANCASS)
Easter Conference 2015

Hulme Hall, University of Manchester, UK
7-9 April 2015

Proposals for 20 minute papers on this topic are invited. Topics that the conference will include, but are not limited to:

• Male identities and constructions of masculinity
• Literary presentations and representations of manhood
• Laws and Penitentials
• Male sexualities
• Manhood and Archaeology
• Representations of masculinity in art

We are looking for submissions (approx. 300 words) on these and related subjects to reach us by 30th November 2014. Please send submissions, and direct enquiries to the conference director, Dr Charles Insley, Department of History, University of Manchester.

Conference Review: Religious Men in the Middle Ages

University of Huddersfield, 6-8 July 2012

by Dr. Hannah Priest

At the beginning of July, I attended the Religious Men in the Middle Ages conference at the University of Huddersfield. This conference was an interdisciplinary exploration of the intersection of masculinities and religious identities, across the entirety of the Middle Ages.

The conference began with the first of three plenary sessions: Professor Michael L. Satlow (Brown University) speaking on ‘Antique and Early Medieval Rabbinic Thought on Constructions of Masculinity and Religiosity with Particular Reference to Torah Study’. Satlow explored the representations of religious masculinity in Rabbinic thought, particularly as relates to hegemonic discourses of masculinity and desire. Using ancient and early medieval examples, he argued that the evident shift from the metaphor of Torah study as the ‘salve’ or ‘cure’ for desire to the martial imagery of ‘conquest’ and ‘domination’ of desire created a discourse of masculinity that, though it differed from hegemonic discourse, did not oppose it. Satlow’s engaging and informative address set the tone for the conference to come – the definitions of ‘religious’, ‘men’ and ‘Middle Ages’ were to be broad, but also understood with close attention to specifics and contexts.

My own paper – ‘Intersections of Christological Devotion and Romance Masculinity’ – was in the first of the parallel sessions that followed the coffee break. The panel I was in was entitled ‘Christocentric Piety’, and also included Matthew Hoskin (University of Edinburgh) – speaking on ‘The Close Proximity of Christ to the Male Monk in John of Ephesus’ Lives of Eastern Saints’ – and Carolyn Muir (University of Hong Kong) – ‘Bride/Bridegroom Revisited: Further Thoughts on Men and Mystic Marriage’. Both Hoskin and Muir gave fascinating papers, and I was glad to be first in the session so I could devote my full attention to my co-presenters. Hoskin’s paper struck a good balance of depth and accessibility, which was good for those of us less familiar with the Eastern traditions. Muir spoke on various presentations of John the Evangelist as ‘bride of Christ’, and was illustrated with both visual and textual examples. That our panel spanned literary, historical and art historical perspectives, with some good discussions and parallels drawn, indicates the interdisciplinary nature of the conference as a whole.

Highlights of the first day also included, for me, papers by Lisa Kranzer (University of Birmingham) and Sarah Bastow (University of Huddersfield) discussing self-perception, writing and exile during the Reformation. It is still somewhat unusual to get papers on Reformation writings at a self-styled ‘medieval’ conference, but Kranzer and Bastow’s contributions allowed for a consideration of periodization and cultural shift, while also highlighting the continuity of certain (gendered) constructions of identity.

So, the first day began with a discussion of ancient Rabbinic thought, and ended with papers on Elizabethan Protestant reform.

The second day was equally diverse. I attended papers on male devotional practice, demonstrations of personal faith by warriors, pastoral responsibilities of laymen in the late Middle Ages, seventh-century Eastern traditions of the monk as mourner, male tears in the fourteenth century, Jewish bans on polygamy, Henry of Huntingdon, Hereward the Wake, and the Buddha Gautama. All the papers were of a very high standard, it is difficult to choose ‘highlights’ from a consistently strong programme. However, I was very taken by James MacGregor (Georgetown University)’s ‘Dude Prays Like a Lady? Varieties of Male Devotion to Saint George in Late Medieval England’ and Hannah Hunt’s ‘The Monk as Mourner: Eastern Christian Self-Identity in the Seventh Century’ – the former, because it spoke clearly to my own work on chivalric and martial masculinity in late medieval literature; the latter, because it was so far removed from my own research that it served as an engaging and enlightening introduction to something almost entirely new to me.

The second plenary of the conference, in the late morning session of the 7th July, was Professor James Clark (University of Bristol), speaking on ‘The Attractions of the Monastic Life for English Men Between the Black Death and the Reformation’. Drawing on Steve Rigby’s argument that there was a 30% increase in the number of men living in monastic houses in 1500 as compared to 1400, Clark explored the numerous reasons ‘why men became monks’. He argued that the number of dispensations sought at this time to ordain young men below the canonical age suggests that there was a ‘ready supply of young men’ seeking to swell the numbers of older monastic houses; this, Clark asserted, may well mean that the ‘last’ monks of medieval England were also, in many ways, the youngest generation of monks for some time. The main body of Clark’s lecture, however, was concerned with the reasons for this shift, and he explored the idea of monastic ‘career progression’ in depth, as well as the potential for establishing social capital exploited by merchant families entering their sons into monastic houses. Clark’s argument was compelling, and went a long way to dispelling some of the myths of the decay and decrepitude of the decades leading to the dissolution of the monasteries.

The final half-day of the conference offered parallel sessions, followed by the third plenary. The session I attended first had papers from Emma Wells (University of Durham), Marita von Weissenberg (Yale University) and Andrew Fleming (University of Oxford), who spoke on the experience of royal pilgrimage in the late Middle Ages, married male saints (also in the later Middle Ages) and Thomas of Cantilupe respectively. The papers worked well together, and led to some interesting discussions in the question sessions afterwards.

To end the conference, there was a plenary session with Dr. Jennifer Thibodeaux (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater) speaking on ‘The Discourse of Clerical Masculinity: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Writings of Norman Clerics’. Thibodeaux’s paper focussed on the Anglo-Norman pro-clerical marriage tracts that appeared after the First and Second Lateran Councils’ voiding and banning of clerical marriage. With close readings of particular tracts, Thibodeaux argued that the writers drew on certain Pauline writings on marriage to suggest that disorder would necessarily follow a ban on clerical marriage. She went on to illustrate some of the ways in which these tract writers negated the reformed new model of masculinity (based in celibacy) by relying on a ‘householder model’ of the male as husband and father. While, as Thibodeaux pointed out, these tracts were localized both geographically and temporally, this final plenary offered a thought-provoking interrogation of a ‘battle’ for religious masculinity that is often overlooked.

In conclusion, I would offer a warm congratulations to the conference organizers (Dr. Pat Cullum and Dr. Katherine J. Lewis) for putting together such a full and stimulating programme. I know they are in the process of putting together an edited collection based on the conference, and I will look forward to seeing this.