Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- From salve to weapon: Torah study, masculinity, and the Babylonian Talmud
- Gender and hierarchy: Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (845–882) as a religious man
- The defence of clerical marriage: Religious identity and masculinity in the writings of Anglo-Norman clerics
- Writing masculinity and religious identity in Henry of Huntingdon
- ‘The quality of his virtus proved him a perfect man’: Hereward ‘the Wake’ and the representation of lay masculinity
- Episcopal authority and gender in the narratives of the First Crusade
- ‘What man are you?’: Piety and masculinity in the vitae of a Sienese craftsman and a Provençal nobleman
- ‘Imitate, too, this king in virtue, who could have done ill, and did it not’: Lay sanctity and the rewriting of Henry VI's manliness
- John of Bridlington, mitred prior and model of the mixed life
- Why men became monks in late medieval England
- Feasting not fasting: Men's devotion to the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages
- Index
Feasting not fasting: Men's devotion to the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- From salve to weapon: Torah study, masculinity, and the Babylonian Talmud
- Gender and hierarchy: Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (845–882) as a religious man
- The defence of clerical marriage: Religious identity and masculinity in the writings of Anglo-Norman clerics
- Writing masculinity and religious identity in Henry of Huntingdon
- ‘The quality of his virtus proved him a perfect man’: Hereward ‘the Wake’ and the representation of lay masculinity
- Episcopal authority and gender in the narratives of the First Crusade
- ‘What man are you?’: Piety and masculinity in the vitae of a Sienese craftsman and a Provençal nobleman
- ‘Imitate, too, this king in virtue, who could have done ill, and did it not’: Lay sanctity and the rewriting of Henry VI's manliness
- John of Bridlington, mitred prior and model of the mixed life
- Why men became monks in late medieval England
- Feasting not fasting: Men's devotion to the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages
- Index
Summary
At the time of writing it is twenty-five years since Caroline Walker Bynum published Holy feast, holy fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women; it has remained highly influential in the field of lay piety, and a major landmark in the historiography that argues for a distinctive feminine piety in the Middle Ages. But in the absence of an exploration of male devotion, and particularly eucharistic devotion or devotion to the person of Christ, the extent to which that can be deined as a distinctively feminine form of piety, as opposed to a form of piety which was distinctively medieval, will remain unclear. This essay will explore both the historiographical significance of the book and also address evidence of men's (both lay and clerical) devotion to the Eucharist and the body of Christ. One of the areas of medieval masculinity which has received relatively little attention is the nature or extent of specifically masculine forms of piety. While female and feminine piety has received extensive attention over the last thirty years, and there has also been very extensive treatment of the forms of an ungendered lay piety, there has been very little attention to men's experience as men. Very often that piety has been simply normalised or universalised. It may, of course, be that that is appropriate, and that there was no specifically masculine piety in the later Middle Ages, in which case we would also need to consider whether there was a specifically feminine form of piety, but unless we ask the question, we will not discover the answer.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Religious Men and Masculine Identity in the Middle Ages , pp. 184 - 200Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013