Bringing together the work of both leading and emerging scholars in the field of medieval gender studies, the essays in Rivalrous Masculinities advance our understanding of medieval masculinity as a pluralized category and as an intersectional category of gender. The essays in this volume are distinguished by a conceptual focus that goes beyo nd heteronormativity and by their attention to constructions of medieval masculinity in the context of femininity, class, religion, and place. Some widen the field of medieval gender studies inquiry to include explorations of medieval friendship as a framework or culture of arousal and deep emotionality that produced multiple, complex ways of living intensely with respect to gender and sexuality, without reducing all forms of intimacy to implicit sexuality. Some examine intersections of identity, explicating change and difference in conventional modes of gender with regards to regional culture, religion, race, or class. In order to ground this intersectional and interdisciplinary approach with the appropriate disciplinary expertise, the essays in this volume represent a broad cross-section of disciplines: art history, religious studies, history, and French, Italian, German, Yiddish, Middle English, and Old English literature. Together, they open up new intellectual vistas for future research in the field of medieval gender studies.
Contributors include: Ann Marie Rasmussen, Clare A. Lees, Gillian R. Overing, J. Christian Straubhaar-Jones, Astrid Lembke, Darrin Cox, F. Regina Psaki, Corinne Wieben, Ruth Mazo Karras, Diane Wolfthal, Karma Lochrie, and Andreas Krass.
Author Biography:
Ann Marie Rasmussen is the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker Memorial Chair of German Literary Studies at the University of Waterloo. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde, co-edited with Jutta Eming and Kathryn Starkey (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).
