Chapter 5 investigates the impact of prohibitions against fighting on clerical masculinity. It examines two clerical groups: those who acted violently but wished to remain clerics and those who abandoned their religious status. Both Western and Eastern canon law forbade clerical fighting, with an important difference: the Western Church put emphasis on bloodshed; the Eastern was more concerned with the clerics’ state of mind and the avoidance of anger. This meant that, in Romanía, outside of strict prohibitions against killing, there was more of an overlap in the exercise of moderate force. The situation was different for clerics who abandoned religious life. Eastern canon law insisted on strict religious/secular distinctions through a focus on vestments, but authors of histories accepted such shifts with little comment. In Romanía, religious status – and, as a result, one’s gender – could prove to be rather fluid throughout one’s life. The chapter ends with a case study focusing on Michael Chōniatēs’ Life of Niketas, the eunuch bishop of Chonai, who fought visible and invisible enemies. His example offers a limit case for how an ecclesiastic could show his masculinity while maintaining an attitude that was considered acceptable, and even ideal, for a clerical man within religious circles.

In this chapter, Clara and Robert are shown to have embraced the Androgyne principle in their romantic relationship and marriage. Theorized by Jakob Boehme and adopted by the Jena romantics, the Androgyne ideal promoted the fusion of marital partners as well as gender-fluid behaviours in the name of spirituality. Of particular interest are Clara’s deeds in the period following Robert’s institutionalization in March 1854. Instead of decreasing her commitment to idealized matrimony, she deliberately strengthened it and maintained that outlook, even after Robert’s death in July 1856, until the end of her own life in 1896. This chapter investigates several questions: Why? What informed and motivated Clara’s actions? Were they simply displays of female heroism and/or conjugal fidelity? Whose interests were being served? What did her decisions imply about her perceptions of gender and gendered conduct? And why were her choices accepted, socially and culturally? The Schumanns’ correspondence and diary entries, published statements issued by Clara, and reviews of her playing are analysed in social-historical context. In her role as Robert’s posthumous Androgyne, Clara brought together diverse strands: their bond, certainly, but also philosophical-literary beliefs about perfect love, set within a Lutheran Pietist cultural framework that promoted female strength.

There are three truly pioneering versions of King Lear on film: Grigori Kozintsev’s Korol Lir (1970), Peter Brook’s King Lear (1971), and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985).These adaptations not only represent the best versions of King Lear ever made but also rank among the most important Shakespeare films of all time.None of these films are inventive or subtle in their representation of women, nor are they sophisticated in their approach to gender roles in what is arguably Shakespeare’s most misogynistic play.Silent and obedient, Cordelia is in many ways the perfect Renaissance woman, while Goneril and Regan play the demons to her saint.These rigid binariesand the impossible subject positions they impose on women are the inventions of patriarchy, and of misogyny in particular.Of the three films that I will examine here, only one of them begins to challenge this disabling binary and the concomitant spectacle of patriarchy restored over women’s dead bodies.