Ranging from classical antiquity to the early seventeenth century, and across German, French, Italian, and English writings, the essays in this volume present a picture of medieval and Early Modern authors and audiences as keenly aware of the inherent mutability of gender and sexual identities, categories Kiefer claims are often taken as a priori and static. The volume broadens the textual archive of medieval and Early Modern writings that seem to take masculine, feminine, and sexual desire as plural and variable categories; the contours of those categories, these essays demonstrate, are alternately contested, negotiated between, transgressed, transformed, and even refused.
Masculine sexuality is negotiated in Tracy Adams' examination of clerical writings from Augustine to the Romance of the Rose. Nominally written in a context of misogamy and heterosexual repression, Adams argues that, rather than total sexual repression, clerical writings often negotiated, even usefully integrated, sexual desire into a model of both clerical masculine identity and spiritual or philosophical progression. Offering a preliminary trace of erotic nostalgia and longing, she maintains that clerical writings, "offered their clerical readers a way of imagining their sexuality that allowed for emotional relationships with women to be dovetailed into the ascent towards wisdom" (4). The centrality of emotional registers in maintaining gendered identities is likewise explored in Victor Scherb's treatment of shoulders and "shoulder-companions" in Beowulf, where he argues that Beowulf's construction of masculinity, its warrior ethos, and elegiac tone are aptly symbolized in the deployment of physical and metonymic shoulders. Both in the compound eaxlgestealla (shoulder-friend) and the recurring image of the shoulder rent from Grendel's body, the image of the shoulder illustrates the intimacy of the comitatus bond, and thus serves as a site of emotional potency, contributing to the emotional landscape of poignant desolation that permeates the poem. Like Adams' refusal of totalized sexual rhetoric, Albrecht Classen suggests that gender identities are likewise contested and negotiated. Examining the medieval German maeren tradition, he maintains that figures of independent-minded women who prevail in social and domestic struggle reflect the centrality of gender negotiations for medieval German audiences, as well as the juridical independence of medieval German women and a near universal acceptance of the social need for collaboration across genders.
Lynn Shutters' essay on chivalric masculinity contributes yet another model of gendered identity formation, as she traces the narrative intersections of animals and humans in the romance that are nominally deployed to create and reinforce Richard's idealized chivalric aura. Rather than figuring a supersession of bestial power, however, Richard's ingestion of animals and animal-like bodies figures a human- animal hybridity that destabilizes fixed boundaries between the human and the animal. In the process, Richard becomes a figure that exceeds the static limits of idealized chivalric masculinity in a way that "belies the notion of chivalric integrity" (83). Shutters argues that Richard's hybridized intersection with the bestial troubles his full participation in masculinity, Christianity, and even humanness; and as such her essay offers a potent counterpoint to gender and sexual identities retaining discrete parameters even in negotiation.
The ability of the emotional register to offer a profound, though perhaps transient, space of gendered self-expression figures in Megan Moore's examination of wounds and grief in Yvain. While the wounded male body constitutes a permanent site of valorization and masculine affirmation, Moore suggests that women's wounding, self- inflicted in this narrative, ultimately serves as a locus of and vehicle for male desire. Though this sexual appropriation of the self-mutilated female body serves as a kind of subjective erasure, Moore reads women's wounds as an important temporary site of intense emotional expression and corporeal writing. Medieval masculinity as itself a contested terrain is the subject of Elizabeth Schirmer's essay. Turning to late medieval English Lollard texts, she reads Lollard sexual rhetoric as reconfiguring sexual and marital valuation within a clerical context, replacing "clerical masculinity-- grounded in ordination and signified by celibacy--with a new model of pastoral masculinity, grounded in the Word and signified by marriage" (117, italics hers). Thus, she sees Lollard notions of masculinity as negotiated in a complex rhetorical nexus surrounding the function and activity of marriage. In this model, physical procreation not only symbolizes, but becomes the necessary physical sign that facilitates, spiritual fecundity.
Like Moore's discussion of feminine self-expression, perhaps under erasure, Judith Bryce examines the da Vinci portrait of Ginevra de'Benci alongside the historical subject of representation, to trace both how a woman speaks her self and how her image is appropriated and exchanged among men. She maintains that the portrait functions as the site of the social and political construction of the feminine as an object circulated to shore up male homosocial bonds in fifteenth century Florence. In response to this objectification, in the second half of the essay, Bryce attempts to recuperate the historical, and perhaps unmediated, Ginevra via a lone surviving epistle, which the author suggests might offer a site of authentic self-representation. Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum offers a more explicit, and more nuanced, poetic of authorial self-expression. Tracing a visual rhetoric of artistic and spiritual authority, Ryan Singh Paul reads Lanyer as participating in a discursive economy in which the ability to visualize creates the ability to inscribe eternal identity as well as to commune with the divine, so that Lanyer's visual capabilities allows her to capture finite and infinite in her poetic line of sight. Lanyer asserts an independent authorial subjectivity that comes into being in her ability to see, creating a literary world that "supplants the physical and perhaps even the spiritual, as its words when read become what they represent" (188).
The volume ends with an exploration of the limits of the human, where, like Shutters' analysis, Paul Hartle finds the boundaries of human identity blurred via the trajectories of sexual desire. Hartle considers the erotics of pet-keeping from classical to Early Modern texts, arguing that for much of early Western history zoophily was an accepted practice. In these accounts of human-animal love, Hartle finds a reciprocity of volition and desire between human and beast, ultimately transgressing the limits that distinguish human and animal identity. He suggests that a shared creatureliness, animated by desire, might be a more apt way to envision human sexual identity.
Rather than staking a new terrain in this discussion, these essays contribute to our understanding of the breadth and complexity of discourses surrounding gender and sexual identities in classical, medieval, and Early Modern writings. These authors show that what it means to be masculine or feminine, and what it means to desire, are questions variously negotiated between conflicting positions, and often via emotional self-expression. At the limit of this discussion are paradigms in which the boundaries of gender and sexual categories are transgressed, even to the point of suggesting new models of being alternately organized (around creatureliness, for example, or hybridity). Taken together, the essays in this volume attend to the ways in which masculinities, femininities, and desires are in riotous display in medieval and Early Modern literature, coming into being precisely in the intersectional tensions of their various articulations.