Male Saints and Devotional Masculinity in Late Medieval England

Abstract

Medieval saints' lives and their cults were inherently malleable and brought into the service of a variety of interests, thus constituting a crucial means of understanding the individuals, communities and societies by whom they were valued. 1 Saints were chosen as objects of veneration, in part, because of the ways in which they reflected the experiences of their devotees and spoke to their identities. This article considers the ways in which the lives and cults of male monastic saints circulating in latemedieval England were underpinned by certain ideals of masculinity and explores the devotional and cultural ramifications of this for a lay audience. The moral and didactic nature of the discourse makes hagiography an important source for understanding medieval ideologies of gender and saints were often presented explicitly as genderspecific behavioural models. 2 Some of the saints' lives considered here are among the very oldest sort of hagiographic narrative: the lives of the early desert fathers, second only to martyrs' lives in their antiquity. Initially they were a product of the early Christian period and its concerns, intended to provide models for men following the new monastic form of life. 3 But these lives were re-told throughout the medieval period, and increasingly aimed at a lay audience of both men and women. 4 A contextualised reading of them enables analysis of a particular version of ideal holy masculinity, the ways in which this was presented to lay readers for imitation and the implications of this. 5

‘Give Me Chastity’: Masculinity and Attitudes to Chastity and Celibacy in the Middle Ages

“…4 That attitude may be beginning to change, and this article explores some of the evidence for an interest in chastity and celibacy on the part of laymen in late medieval England. 5 The relative absence of such consideration for medieval men is partly a product of the relatively undeveloped state of the field of late medieval masculinity, which has largely focused on high status men, but is partly also a product of the development of a late twentieth/early twenty-first century blind spot about male sexuality. We have moved from a position of heteronormativity which developed (according to different scholars) sometime between the Reformation and the nineteenth century, and which produced a model of hegemonic masculinity predicated upon heterosexual marriage, with deviant sexualities of heterosexual behaviours outside marriage and homosexual behaviours in any context, to a late twentieth/early twenty-first century model of compulsory sexuality for men.…”

“…She also points out that both the saints' lives and pastoral literature often characterised striving against sin as a battle which would have appealed particularly to an elite audience or one which aspired to knightly values. 27 High status men were also exposed to texts designed both to show them how to exercise authority and, as a corollary, dissuade them from giving in to the temptations of lust lest they be rendered both unmanly and bestial: sett nought thyn hert in lecherie of women, for þat is the lyf of swine. Ioy and worshipe shalt thou noon haue, while thou governyst the aftir .…”