Meanings of masculinity in late medieval England: Self, body and society

Masculinity is a set of meanings, and also an aspect of male identity. Understanding masculinity in history, therefore, requires attention to culture and psychology. The concept of a “crisis of masculinity” cannot address these dimensions sufficiently and is of little use to the historian.;This analysis of evidence from late medieval England begins with the social world. Legal records show men defending, and therefore defining, masculine identity through interaction among male peers and with women. Defamation suits suggest a fifteenth-century identification of masculinity with “trueness”: an uncomplicated, open honesty. A “true man,” in late medieval England, was not just an honest man, but a real man.;Social masculinity constituted honest fairness, permitting stable social relations between men. Transparent honesty, good management of the household (“husbandry”), and self-command preserved males' social substance, their metaphoric embodiment represented tangibly by money and property. Lawsuits and personal letters show how masculine social identity took shape through competition and cooperation with other men. “Power,” “dominance” and self-fulfilment were less important than sustaining this network of relations.;Men's relations with women are best understood within this homosocial dynamic. Men's adultery trespassed on other males' substance, while women's adultery indicated poor management of one's own. Sexual slander against men could injure their social identity, but was unlikely to demolish it, as it would for a woman. The celibate minority of men shared these concerns.;Medical texts, late medieval men's clothing, satirical poems, and courtesy texts prescribing self-control show that the male body provided important meanings (phallic and otherwise), through failure, inadequacy or excess as often as not. Sexual activity, and other uses of the body, might be managed differently as self-restraining or self-indulgent discourses of masculinity demanded.;A psychoanalytic reading of medieval romances reveals fantasized solutions to the problem of males' desire for feminine and masculine objects. Romance literature displays a narcissistic subjectivity created in defensive fantasies of disconnection. Such features derive from a culture demanding incessant social self-presentation of its men, which permitted very little in daily life to be kept from the scrutiny of others.