Chapter 1 offers a radical reinterpretation of the gender of Michael Psellos, one of Romanía’s most well-known scholars as well as one of few figures from the Middle Byzantine period to have received extensive gender analysis. The chapter starts with biographical information about his education and personal life. It continues with the role that learning played in his self-definition and his depiction of others, especially in his many encomia. It argues that, in his writings, education and learning could act as ‘masculine capital’, which, when accumulated, could be used to allow for less masculine behaviours in other areas of life, both propping up and subverting hegemonic ideals of physical strength. Finally, it considers the implications of this for Psellos’ work, from his descriptions of hunting and warfare to his emotional life.

The introduction sets forth the theoretical framework of the book by defining the two main lenses through which the material is viewed: scholarly masculinity and clerical masculinity. In doing so, it clarifies their relationship to other types of masculinities and highlights the role of animals in gender formation. This chapter also situates the book in its broader historiographical context, within both Byzantine and Western medieval Studies.

Drawing on race-centered Hamlet scholarship by Patricia Parker and Peter Erickson, and alluding to work by Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, “Engendering the Fall of White Masculinity in Hamlet” offers a racially focused analysis of this rich text that centers white people watching other white people. Hamlet surveys deviations from ideal white conduct and reveals how gender expectations are violated and how white people repeatedly disrespect, only to redefine, socially constructed racialized boundaries. I offer a critique of Hamlet that directly associates white unmanliness with Denmark’s “rotten” state, its socio-political ruin. Specifically, I read the intraracial discord against the play’s structure as a decomposition process. Hamlet depicts uncouth, less-than-ideal whiteness in relationship to gender expectations: unmanliness gets coded as black so the play can suggest certain Danish figures do not epitomize ideal white masculinity.

Chapter 4 treats the Cappadocians’ hagiographic biographies in conjunction with their polemic against non-Trinitarian theologians.The chapter begins by outlining the background and teachings of Eunomius of Cyzicus (c. 335–c. 395), a longtime heterousian rival to the Cappadocians. The chapter analyzes the narratives about fourth-century Nicene bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 298–372), Basil, and Macrina as hagiographies designed in part to contrast true (pro-Nicene) doctrine against the false philosophy of non-Trinitarians.These saints’ ascetic feats are recounted as spiritual ordeals fashioned as classical contests: in Athanasius, suffering multiple exiles because of standing up to false (heterousian) teachers; in Basil, countering threats to the Nicene faith by imperial officials; and in Macrina, enduring disease and death with unwavering resolve.In each case,Nyssen or Nazianzen emphasize that character is formed out of struggle; and that voice and speech (as a metaphor for doctrine) have been purified and validated in pro-Nicene theologians, but are corrupted and disingenuous in the untested charlatans they oppose.

The Epilogue considers anonymous pamphlets printed in the later part of King James’s reign that deploy the female voice as a form of political critique: Ester Hath Hang’d Haman, Hic Mulier, Haec Vir, and Muld Sacke. Of the cross-dressing pamphlets, Haec Vir in particular recruits the female voice for its association with militant Elizabethan values and the freedom of the subject, while the pseudonymous author Esther Sowernam ventriloquizes Esther, the biblical heroine who confronts the king. The female voice occupied a unique position in the seventeenth-century political landscape, allowing women writers to critique abuses of male power without compromising their position as dutiful subjects. Unlike the freedoms achieved by male citizens at the expense of women later in the seventeenth century, the “reasonable libertie” sought by men and women in early Stuart England authorized the voice of the wife/subject as a powerful political tool.

During the nineteenth century, “the effeminate man” was frequently named as an object of derision, transforming him into a complete specimen of person well in advance of his still-unborn cousin, the homosexual. Despite this visibility, the effeminate man remains largely absent within recent queer and gender histories. Against such critical neglect, this chapter proposes that the effeminate man occupies a pivotal position within the overlapping genealogies of American literature, feminism, and race. First, he came to be counted among white liberalism’s constitutive castaways. Effeminophobia aimed to a binary sex system that claimed buffered autonomy for men while quarantining femininity – understood as vulnerability to influence – to women. Second, the effeminate man came was seen as excessively white. As whites understood it, exposures to European civilization left the effeminate man enervated. Effeminate men therefore confronted their fellow whites with anxieties about white supremacy’s emasculating influences.