Some authors have isolated specific aspects of male identity and provide analyses that are both synthetic and focused. Cohen and Wheeler 1997 presents an equally broad cross-section, but the collected essays bring more theoretically inflected interpretations to the subject. Although these volumes cross wide geographic and temporal divides and incorporate information from broad and diverse sources, the essays also denaturalize masculinity, as originally encouraged in Lees 1994. The need to view men and masculinity from a critical and gendered perspective is evident in the collections by Murray 1999 and Hadley 1999. The perspective of the volume-that the study of medieval masculinity emerged from feminist research-set the tone for much of the subsequent research agenda. These essay collections have opened the field, and even the earliest collection remains highly current ( Lees 1994). Instead, a wide array of essay collections has opened multiple perspectives on men in their gendered specificity and on theoretical and practical views of their life experiences. The field awaits overviews similar to those available on other areas of social history, such as women or the family.
Individual topics include secular men and ecclesiastical men and the way in which men are portrayed in specific genres of sources, such as law or theology, court records, or imaginative literature. The historical scholarship on men and masculinities is a burgeoning field with a rich and diverse scholarship. In order to produce an overview of a topic, a sufficient body of research is necessary to support the process of synthesizing research to arrive at general conclusions. The nascent and innovative state of research into medieval men and masculinity is demonstrated by the absence of books offering a synthetic overview of the field. Thus, this article serves as a topical overview, a theoretical introduction, and a starting point for further reading. Finally, additional material discusses nonnormative sexualities and men otherwise considered to have been marginal. The literature reflects on social ranks from royalty to rags and provides insight into cultural and sartorial expressions of masculinity. The sources range from Scandinavia to Portugal to the eastern Mediterranean, from late Antiquity to the transformation of early modern society. Rather, representative studies provide an introduction and overview to questions that historians are asking about men and masculinity. The historical sources cited in this article represent a cross-section of research, not specific questions. Sermons and saints’ lives provide different worldviews than do paintings, chivalric epics, or court records. Finally, the image of men, their beliefs, and their values varies with the sources. Not all churchmen thought alike, and not all laymen performed their masculinity identically. Moreover, these two segments of society were composed of men of different power, rank, wealth, money, and opportunity. Ecclesiastical and secular values had a tremendous impact on men’s lives, yet these were often in opposition. The history of medieval men is also complicated by the intricacy of medieval society. Importantly, these areas have rich sources to support research on men. On the other hand, there is considerable interest in social history, including masculinity and male sexuality, in Italy and the Anglo-French world. For example, few studies about men and masculinity in Byzantium are available because historians focus on the Islamic pressure on the Byzantine borders.
Although the study of men and masculinity has continued to grow, it has not been systematic in terms of temporal periods or geographic locales. Some historians believed that so much was still to be learned about traditional history that focusing on men as sexed and gendered beings would distract from more important areas. For medieval men, this process began in the mid-1990s, although not without controversy. Men’s experience as men can only be recuperated when they are considered a marked category. Consequently, men have been overlooked in their sexed and gendered specificity. Thus, male experience has been universalized as human experience. Although men have traditionally dominated the historical discourse, they have done so as the universal, against which others-i.e., women-were measured. The history of men in the Middle Ages is a recent field of study.
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