Anne-Lydie Dubois has provided medievalists with an important and voluminous survey of thirteenth-century masculinity as it was conceived by clerical writers. She identifies a “pedagogical program” developed by the clergy during the thirteenth century and analyzes representatives of five main genres that supported this program: Biblical exegesis, manuals for confessors, ad status sermons, encyclopedias, and pedagogical treatises. Confessors’ manuals and sermon material specifically emerged from the agenda of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) to prepare parish priests for their new responsibilities to preach weekly and to hear the confessions of their parishioners at least once per year. Encyclopedias and pedagogical treatises emerged naturally as part of this educative program all underpinned by Biblical exegesis. All the sources were written in this new intellectual milieu that turned the attention of higher, well-educated clergy to simple parish priests and their spiritual care of the laity. Despite basing her study on the clerical literatures it mandated or inspired, Dubois says little about the Fourth Lateran Council itself and its focus on the education of the clergy. The study employs the method of close textual reading and is not particularly theoretically inflected. Although the works of Judith Butler and R.W. Connell appear in the bibliography, as does volume 4 of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, neither Pierre Bourdieu nor David Gilmore’s work on masculinity seem to have informed Dubois’s approach.

Dubois argues that those genres of clerical literature that were intended to implement the Lateran Council’s educational mandates were all gendered sources that specifically and deliberately distinguished male and female, men and women, and true masculinity from femininity or effeminacy. This was critical to meet the specific pastoral needs of individual members of the laity. This perspective on two distinct sexes was based on the Biblical exegesis of the Genesis 2 creation of Adam as the perfect man and is traced from the early Church Fathers through to the exegetes of the twelfth century, thus providing the ideological and theological foundation that underpinned the thirteen-century writers and their texts. Despite a flourishing area of literature, the analysis here depends on a narrow group of representative texts. For example, Jacques de Vitry and Jacobus de Voragine are analyzed for their exempla but it is not clear why the collections of Stephen de Bourbon or Thomas of Cantimpré were not consulted. Voragine, Bourbon, and Cantimpré were contemporaries and brother Dominicans, and they all compiled important collections ofexempla. The Dominicans also figure largely in the pedagogical treatises, focussing on the works of Vincent of Beauvais and William Perault. The encyclopedias by two Franciscans, Bartholomew the Englishman and John of Wales, are the sources for issues pertaining to inherent biological nature and physical virility, as well as social masculinity. The manuals for confessors are more diverse. The English authors, Robert of Flamborough, who arguably wrote prior to the Fourth Lateran Council, and Thomas of Chobham, who wrote just after, are complemented by the Dominican, John of Freiburg, who wrote at the end of the thirteenth century. The influence of the mendicants, especially the Dominicans, then, seems to overshadow any contributions by secular clergy and men in other orders. For example, no Cistercian work was consulted, perhaps because they did not live outside the walls of monasteries, but arguably Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles would have fit well with the other compilations of exempla.

Dubois argues that the clerical authors of her sources sought to cultivate, perhaps even impose, a particular view of masculinity onto laymen, through the intervention and inculcation by the parish clergy. Yet virtually all the sources emerged from the context of the Paris schools and the emergent University of Paris. Ultimately, they were written by highly educated clerics, notably Dominican friars, who wrote sophisticated treatises for other educated men. It is doubtful that the rural parish clergy, most in need of education, would have had direct access to any of the treatises, both because the local clergy had lower levels of latinity and the expense of tomes of this magnitude would place them beyond the means of the average parish priest, although the collections of sermon exempla may be the exception. Fundamentally, however, most of these treatises, designed to educate simple priests charged with the cure of souls, would have required redaction and simplification before they could have been used by those parish priests, and through them, influence lay parishioners. The scholarship of Leonard E. Boyle, who theorized, catalogued, and analyzed the genres of pastoralia that emerged from the Fourth Lateran Council’s reforms, particularly those pertaining to the education of the local clergy, weekly sermons, and annual confession, along with the work of his students, Joseph Goering and Frank A.C. Mantello, who edited and translated many of the smaller handbooks for confessors, ones which were more likely to have been used at the parish level, do not appear to have influenced Dubois’s discussion. For example, Robert Grosseteste wrote half a dozen small treatises on confession suitable for the average parish priest. Similarly, Alexander Stavensby and other bishops sometimes included what amounted to a manual for confession in their episcopal statutes. These and similar treatises might have tempered Dubois’s assertion that the large scholarly works she studied shaped lay masculinities. Moreover, it is unclear how much clerical ideology and theology influenced the lived reality of farmers, or carpenters, or serving women. Such simple folk, and likely their immediate local superiors, would have relied more on gender complementarity than biological sex difference to ensure familial, social, and economic success.

The thesis of this study is that the prelapsarian Adam was the perfect man and his qualities and traits were elaborated and perpetuated through Biblical exegesis from the early church through the twelfth century. Subsequent thirteenth-century didactic material promoted the notion that every man should strive for this Adamic perfection. It informed the education of boys and youths to repress their innate libidinousness, it shaped how social masculinity was evaluated among mature men, and, ultimately, it educated married men on appropriate behaviour towards their wife, domestically as “head of the woman” and sexually as chaste partner in procreation. One cannot help but wonder how this Adamic paradigm based on Genesis 2 might have been assessed had Leah DeVun’s analysis of the Genesis 1 creation story been available at the time of writing. [1]

Dubois presents her readers with an impressive bibliography of primary and secondary sources that will be particularly helpful to scholars and students. Readers, however, must be cognizant that, although the book was published in 2022, it is based on a thesis completed in 2019. The bibliography, then, is primarily based on literature from 1985 to 2015, with only a sprinkling of later studies. More specifically, the bibliography is reflective of the state of the field, especially the study of sexes and genders, as it stood prior to 2015. There are also some surprising omissions from the secondary sources, most significantly, the groundbreaking contributions of Leonard E. Boyle. It is Boyle’s earlier work that lends credence to Dubois’s choice of primary sources, and her structure, and mode of analysis. Boyle’s absence is particularly noticeable in the author’s discussion of the genres (pp. 27-29).

A work of this size (400+ pages), that contends with so many different genres and texts, and integrates ideas crossing a century, is worthy of being dubbed monumental. Its sheer magnitude also means that it allows for reviewers to focus on their own interests or on specific aspects of the study as opposed to its over-arching nature. Anne-Lydie Dubois has presented an impressive work of scholarship. Her sources, for the most part, are lengthy treatises; it is no easy task to juggle so many at once. Yet Dubois reads them authoritatively and integrates them into her argument about the clerical ideology of the perfect Adamic masculinity. Indeed, this argument is most persuasive among these high culture sources, although readers may be skeptical about the degree to which such views actually penetrated to the local level and influenced the values and beliefs of laypeople.

Dubois demonstrates incisive, deep, and integrative textual analysis such as is rare in the current study of medieval masculinities, which are more focused on uncovering fragments of secular life than exploring the theological context that informed it. This is an important book for appreciating the varied methodologies by which clerical writers sought to understand medieval laymen and how they sought to shape men as physical, social, and ethical beings. It is also an excellent exposition of clerical ideologies about men and masculinities, an area in which scholars of sexes and genders would benefit from greater familiarity. This volume fills that void and will serve as a useful reference for further research.

--------

Note:

1. Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 16-39.