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
‘What man are you?’: Piety and masculinity in the vitae of a Sienese craftsman and a Provençal nobleman
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
As the historian Jacques Dalarun has written: ‘The saint is abnormal because he is a being of exception, but also because he places himself against the norms, separate from the world.’ Te norm for laymen in the Middle Ages was to marry and raise a family. They secured their livelihoods through landholding and farming, or mercantile enterprise and other worldly activities. As is well known, the majority of saints rejected this secular world – they became monks, tertiaries, hermits, and so on. However, several male saints married, and fathered and raised children. Many bought, sold, or manufactured goods. Saints from among the royalty and nobility had to uphold the law, even if it meant sentencing people to death; and men-at-arms had to participate in warfare. Several married saints were wealthy in money and chattels. Of course, some abandoned such secular lives to join religious orders, but others remained in the world as laymen, performing the duties associated with their stations in life as husbands, lords, merchants, artisans, or pursuing other means of livelihood. They lived ‘ordinary’ lives of laymen in their secular circumstances. However, they were hardly ordinary: they came to be viewed as saints. As such, their lives, motives, actions, thoughts, words and, above all, faith were understood to be exceptional and exemplary. Some biographies, vitae, of husband-saints who remained in the world, performing their duties as secular men while at the same time pursuing a religious calling, show that this paradox could have implications both for the individual's reputation of sanctity and for his performance as a secular man. My argument is twofold.
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- Religious Men and Masculine Identity in the Middle Ages , pp. 112 - 125Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013