Medieval Masculinities

"Knights and Brides of Christ – Gender and Body in Later Medieval German Mysticism


Knights and Brides of Christ discuss the themes of gender and body in the writings of four later medieval German mystics, namely Mechthild of Magdeburg, Friedrich Sunder, Margaretha Ebner and Heinrich Seuse. It offers a new perspective to the issue of gender by bringing together the texts of male and female mystics writing in the same genre. The study shows that seeing certain characteristics as masculine or feminine could vary and that the same features could be considered typical either for women or men depending on context.

Heinrich Seuse and Friedrich Sunder have been named as feminine male mystics, but the study illustrates that the literal genre in which both men wrote had great influence in their expression. Heinrich Seuse’s Vita (Leben) indicates that he was eager to control the line between masculine and feminine. Even though the good religious life was the same for both sexes, Seuse’s text suggests that men and women were to behave rather differently in practice. Friedrich Sunder on the other hand crossed the line between masculine and feminine expressions of piety which confused the later editors of his text.

The comparison between the writings of female and male writers indicates also that the corporeality of women’s expression is not that different from the religiosity of men as has been assumed. Women knew the mystical tradition and used vernacular poetry to create new images of love and union and their writings were affected by the very same theology as men’s. Because the Soul was usually considered as feminine and depicted as a woman in religious writings and images, the line between real religious women and Soul was at times blurred and this has caused problems both for medieval and contemporary commentators.

The Knight and Brides of Christ is based on the large reading of both German literary studies and Anglo-Saxon gender history. It combines the approaches of both literary critics and historians in the manner of Gabrielle M. Spiegel by emphasizing the “moment of inscription”. The mystical texts can be understood only within the certain historical context which affected also the form of mystical expression.

The study is constructed around the three stages of mystical life, which can be considered to be cultural discourses, or some sort of sedimentations, that were shared among the medieval religious – as sort of preconditions. The division into three stages has been done on the basis of Heinrich Seuse’s description: “A detached person must be freed from the forms of creatures, formed with Christ, and transformed in the Godhead.” Building on this the role of gender and body is discussed within the themes of disciplines, imitation, and sensing God.

The study begins by introducing in detail the four texts and their writers. The second chapter, Ascetic Discipline, is devoted to the requirements of religious, such as living in enclosure, being chaste, and controlling the desires of the body and senses. All these practices were intended to turn the body and soul of a religious away from earthly things and to help him or her concentrate on God and spiritual growth alone. The second phase and, the name of the third chapter Transformation through Imitation, is a reference to the imitatio Christi. The chapter discusses how the imitation of Christ and Mary were treated in the mystical texts and in which forms mystics considered these kinds of imitation important. The fourth chapter is entitled To Sense God and it deals with the descriptions of mystical union or the consciousness of the presence of God. It concentrates on the ways mystic describe their being involved with the Godhead.

By reading the descriptions of the mystics concerning the requirements, practices, and experiences in religious life, this study looks for differences and variations as well as similarities. By testing the texts against each other the study reveals tensions that were acute at the particular moment a text was written. This comparative examination reveals the attitudes concerning the constructions of gender as well as the meaning of body in the religious reality of medieval people at large, but also the individual situations and perhaps even something of the personal experience of the women and men themselves.

"

With the rise of the royal bastard D. João (1357-1433), Master of Avis, to the Portuguese throne in the late 14th century and his marriage to the English noble Philippa of Lancaster (1360-1415), the kingdom witnessed the beginning of a new dynasty and a new royal family. Comprised by the couple and their six children, the first generation of Avis would be known over time by the significant expression of "illustrious generation". The construction of the image of an "exemplary" family dates back to the reign of the founder and continues throughout the 15th century, with the development of an entire legitimizing and propagandist program of the new royal house. Through word, expressively by drawing up a body of law, by writing royal chronicles, technical and moral treatises (composed by Avis princes themselves or royal servants), the house of Avis sought to corroborate their place in the Portuguese throne and the undeniability of its power. In a context of appreciation of the marital family by Christian morality, the first generation of Avis would identify itself and would be represented by values such as virtue, devotion, loyalty, honor, love and concord. Working toward a shared monarchy, the royal family would not be unscathed to the setbacks and political struggles of its time, going through hard times that partly fractured its exemplary image or the image of some of its members. However, the memoirs basis constituted by the royal couple King John I and Philippa would remain untouched, serving at different times to retrieve the image of the illustrious infants and even to propagandize the following kings of the dynasty.

Keywords: Avis Dynasty. Ínclita Geração. Family representation

In the Portugal of the 15th Century, the Avis’ Dynasty, which was founded by a royal bastard, established a wide program of political legitimation. Such program included the production of different textual forms, like royal chronicles, technical treatises, moral treatises and legislative compilations, produced both by members of the royal family as by servers. Our purpose in this communication is to point how the Avis’ legitimation also went through a moral claim, having, as one of its assumptions, the creation of an exemplary royal family image, starting from the figure of its founding father, D. João I (1385-1433). Thereby, through the cronistic and the moral treatises, we aim to apprehend how representations of D. João I as a father exemplify medieval values of paternity and, specifically, the complex royal paternity, which involves both the infants’ education as the association of the king’s figure represented as protector father of the kingdom. Therefore, we seek to perceive connections between gender and politics, noting how the relationship between father and children serves as a model for the relationship between monarch and subjects.

A guarda da esposa e a obediência ao marido: a reciprocidade dos deveres conjugais masculinos e femininos nos tratados do rei D. Duarte e de Christine de Pisan (séc. XV) The custody of the wife and the obedience to the husband: Thereciprocity of male and female conjugal duties in the treatises ofKing D. Duarte and Christine de Pisan (15 th century)

Representations of sexual violence in medieval literature are few, but not insignificant. Although historians have been studying the issue of rape in the Middle Ages since the 1980s, the study of medieval literary sources on this subject has remained largely in the hands of literature researchers. Yet literary sources are particularly rich material for the study of cultural history and the history of representations. The aim of this study is to understand the medieval literary sources that evoke sexual violence from a historical perspective. Thus, starting from the Arthurian novels of the late XII ͤ century and reaching the farces of the XV ͤ century, this study seeks to analyse the cultural stakes around the mise-en-scene of rape and the descriptions of sexual violence in medieval French literary texts. These representations are not meaningless, they carry the social norms that regulate - among other things - the relationship between men and women.Works of fiction offer both possibilities of subversion and reaffirmation of cultural codes ; the theme of sexual violence is far from being excluded from these logics.


Les représentations de violences sexuelles dans la littérature médiévale sont peu nombreuses sans être pour autant insignifiantes. Si depuis les années 1980 les historiennes et les historiens se sont emparés de la question du viol au Moyen Âge, l’étude des sources littéraires médiévales face à ce sujet est plutôt restée entre les mains des chercheurs et chercheuses en littérature. Les sources littéraires sont pourtant des objets d’étude particulièrement riches pour l’histoire culturelle et l’histoire des représentations. Cette étude a pour objectif de saisir les sources littéraires médiévales qui évoquent les violences sexuelles, à travers un regard historien. Ainsi, partant des romans arthuriens de la fin du XII ͤ siècle et allant jusqu’aux farces du XV ͤ siècle, cette étude vise à analyser les enjeux culturels autour des mises en scène de viols et des descriptions de violences sexuelles dans les textes littéraires français médiévaux. Ces représentations ne sont pas vides de sens, elles sont porteuses des normes sociales qui régissent - entre autres - les rapports entre hommes et femmes. Les œuvres de fiction offrent à la fois des possibilités de subversion et de réaffirmations des codes culturels ; le thème des violences sexuelles est loin d’être exclu de ces logiques.

Two disparate worldviews, the rabbinical and the chivalric, helped shape young Jewish men’s gender identities in medieval Germany. Alongside traditional rabbinical ideals of masculinity to which Jewish youngsters were exposed from an early age, they encountered the values rooted in chivalric culture that were central to the formation of gender identity among young Christian men in Europe during the Middle Ages.
Some young Jewish men embraced chivalric codes of masculinity to varying degrees, from dressing like their af uent Christian counterparts, to joining armies of local lords and actually adopting the chivalric way of life. Some also engaged in activities associated with the life of a knight, such as participation in tournaments, hunting, and falconry. The ideal of masculinity espoused by the Ashkenazi rabbis was sometimes at odds with chivalric culture and its values, prompting the rabbis to attempt to infuse values such as courage, pride, respect, love, and loyalty with content more in line with the ideals they sought to impart to the younger generation.

In the 1060s Peter Damian wrote “mirrors for margraves” to the rulers of two different Italian marks: Godfrey, margrave of Tuscany, and Adelaide, de facto ruler of the mark of Turin. Although he wrote to them both on the subject of rule and justice, Damian offered Godfrey and Adelaide different models for rule. Godfrey was to mete out harsh punishments; Adelaide was to act with mercy and restraint. Godfrey was presented with images of paternal care, Adelaide with maternal imagery. Godfrey was encouraged to emulate historical figures; Adelaide was to emulate biblical heroines. Through comparing and contrasting the gendered way in which Damian constructs the image of the ideal margrave in each of these letters, this article demonstrates that Damian consciously used different models for Godfrey and Adelaide on the basis of their gender, rather than their status or behaviour.
(Reprinted in: K. Weikert and E. Woodacre, ''Medieval Intersections. Gender and Status in Europe in the Middle Ages'' (Oxford and New York, 2021, forthcoming), pp. 8-20.)

The Regensburg Rhetorical Letters are fictional letters composed in the 1080s at the Regensburg cathedral school. They imitate Ciceronian texts to fashion a valorized masculine identity based in learning, eloquence, and public service for secular clerics in civil administration who were attacked for idleness and effeminacy by reformers like Peter Damian. Centering textual and rhetorical expertise, the Letters reveal the heterogeneity of clerical society and an early development of a professional rather than spiritual role for the clergy.

Petitions from the Cairo Geniza often emphasize that the petitioner is lonely or "cut off" (munqaṭiʿ) from social support. Such claims are gendered, as they are more common in women's petitions than in men's, and women occasionally use explicitly gendered expressions to highlight their social isolation. Claiming to lack social support had a special valency in medieval Islamicate societies due to the primacy of reciprocal social relationships in these societies. Since women's access to cultural and social capital was more limited than men's, women lacking effective and supportive male kin were particularly vulnerable and were recognized as deserving justice. Studying claims of social isolation thus sheds light on the social predicament of Jewish women in medieval Egypt. Finally, recognizing the currency of social isolation in women's petition helps identify an opposite trend of social belonging in men's petitions.

El present article ha furetejat en clau de gènere la coneguda cançó de gesta francesa la Chanson de Roland. Essent una història eminentment bèl·lica i amb gairebé nul·la presència femenina, l'anàlisi d'aquesta cançó ha servit per posar en relleu els valors socials vinculats a les masculinitats que planegen sobre l'obra. L’objectiu principal de la present anàlisi ha estat cercar els trets que sostenen l'homenia del protagonista de l'obra, el comte Rotllan, contrastant-los amb els tres principals personatges: Olivier, el seu company d'armes; Carlemany, rei dels francs i oncle de Rotllan; i Ganeló, padrastre i adversari de Rotllan.
L'estudi de les masculinitats d'aquests personatges s'ha abordat emprant les tipologies proposades per l'eminent sociòloga R. W. Connell. També s'han analitzat, amb perspectiva de gènere, els trets definitoris de l'època feudal de finals del segle XI i que tenen el seu ressò a la Chanson de Roland . Aquest trets s’han mostrat palpables en els substrats de l'obra i amb notòries connotacions pel que fa a les masculinitats.
Hem clos l’anàlisi amb el convenciment que els estudis de les masculinitats aporten una part de la realitat que permet albirar la totalitat del mosaic historicosocial.  Per un altre costat, analitzar la Chanson de Roland des de les masculinitats ha resultat d'utilitat per posicionar-nos a favor d’algunes teories sobre l'obra i per obrir debat sobre d’altres. Per tant amb el present treball, tot i tenir consciència de la seva qualitat de modest, es desitja aportar una reflexió respecte al fet que els estudis de les masculinitats, més que un mer exercici de justícia social, esdevenen una perspectiva amb clara utilitat acadèmica.

Quantitative studies of tax and court records have suggested that medieval Italian marriage negotiations involved a powerful older groom who might easily dominate his much younger bride. This article complicates this picture by qualitatively analyzing two marriage disputes from fourteenth-century Lucca featuring young boys depicted as passive victims of arranged marriages and forced consent. These unwilling grooms, who lacked the power and agency belonging to the average medieval Italian man, reveal that litigants and their representatives constructed the identity of unwilling grooms from a palette of options relying on the intersection of age, gender, and social status.

Abstract: This paper discusses medieval Jewish covenantal bromances, formed by Jewish men prior to embarking on an extended journey. For some medieval Jewish men, long distance trav-eling necessitated forming non-sexual homosocial bonding, which reinforced rabbinic masculinity. Two late medieval Hebrew sources, one from 14 th century Spain and the other from 15 th century Germany, reveal that entering a covenant before a long-distance journey was a known practice among medieval European Jewish men. Although these are the only two examples of covenantal bromances I found thus far, reading them carefully and contextualizing them with other contemporary sources, we may conclude that this type of male bonding was a recognized social institution in medieval European Jewish communities. What was the content of these relationships? Which rituals were employed to seal these pacts? And how did these covenantal bromances reinforce the boundaries of normative masculinity? These are the questions I discuss in this paper. 1

Special issue of The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture 5/2 (2019).

This article explores the gendered presentation of the First Crusade and the establishment of the Latin East in Book 4 of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum. Building upon the seminal work of Kirsten Fenton, it argues that William’s preoccupation with masculinity, and specifically his intention of pitching the First Crusade as a model of male fortitude for future generations, had a far greater impact on his account of events in Outremer than has yet been acknowledged. The use of gendered language in Book 4 of the Gesta regum is considered first, before exploring two ways in which this concern for gender shaped William’s portrayal of events in the East: namely, the paucity of references to both deserters and instances of Latin fear. The article ends with a comparative case study, analysing how William approached his principal source for King Baldwin I of Jerusalem’s career to determine whether his omission of Latin fear was a deliberate narrative strategy. In so doing, this article seeks to advance our understanding of William’s account of the First Crusade and the early years of Latin settlement, which remains relatively understudied due to his lack of eyewitness credentials, and to contribute to the growing corpus of scholarship on the gendered presentation of crusading in historical narratives.

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the protagonist is famously lauded for his ‘felaȝschyp forbe al þyng’, an assertion which the rest of the poem considerably complicates.  This lecture briefly reviews the striking amount of trouble the word has given to modern translators, ever since Tolkien’s rendering of it as ‘friendliness’ (surely an interesting choice from the author of The Fellowship of the Ring).  The word is indeed something of a false friend, strange in its familiarity.  The concept, constricted by its archaism, is strikingly in need of translation and yet at once evades it.  The same is true of its adaptation in a variety of medieval films.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach to explore the fractures and continuities in filmic translations of the medieval notion of fellowship, the lecture considers the disintegration of the Round Table in Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974) and its parodic counterpart in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and versions of medieval buddy/road-movies in Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale (both 2001).  Adopting and cross-examining Foucault’s ‘friendship as a way of life’ the lecture explores the similarities and differences between medieval and medievalist notions of homosocial community, and asks how far apart – or close – the two are as ways of life that might ‘yield a culture and ethics’.

At the court of King D. Fernando (1367-1383), the accusation of adultery that resulted in the murder of Maria Teles (sister of Queen Leonor) by her husband, Prince John, as well as
the execution of Count of Andeiro by the Master of Avis (justified by the dishonor that Andeiro committed against the King by becoming the Queen’s lover), show us how gender and politics combine each other, resulting in two murders that have had decisive consequences for the
kingdom. Our purpose is to analyze how the Avis Dynasty’s Cronistic discourse reported these deaths, using the gender to support certain behaviors linked to the foundation of the Royal House of Avis in Portuguese territory at the end of 14th century.

The Regensburg Rhetorical Letters are fictional letters composed in the 1080s at the Regensburg cathedral school. They imitate Ciceronian texts to fashion a valorized masculine identity based in learning, eloquence, and public service for secular clerics in civil administration who were attacked for idleness and effeminacy by reformers like Peter Damian. Centering textual and rhetorical expertise, the Letters reveal the heterogeneity of clerical society and an early development of a professional rather than spiritual role for the clergy.

My talk brings together my early and more recent research on the manuscript that I call the Welles-Ros Bible (Paris Bibliothèque nationale de France fr. 1) -- the most complete surviving witness and sole extant illuminated copy of the Anglo-Norman Bible, the earliest "full prose vernacular Bible produced in England" (Russell) -- and the subject of my monograph in-progress. I argue that this grand multilingual manuscript and the revised translation that it contains were produced in the later fourteenth century on the order of one or more matriarchs of the baronial Welles family of Lincolnshire.  I discuss the circumstances of the commission and the volume's functions and intended audience; and show how the Bible's rich pictorial and heraldic program reframes Christian salvation history as Welles family history.  Moreover, the manuscript's main artist clearly read the scriptural text assiduously, adapting or even rejecting his wide-ranging, trans-regional models in order to visualize for his noble clients both the sense(s) of the vernacular translation and its very words.  My talk sheds new light on lay literate and religious aspiration and pedagogy; the history of Bible translation and reception; women's cultural patronage; artists' literacy and working methods; medieval constructions of gender, sexuality, health, memory, and the emotions; and English art, society, and culture after the Black Death.

This chapter examines the interplay between perceptions of idealised martyrdom and masculinity in the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi (1217–22), a composite text commonly attributed to Richard de Templo. Its point of departure is the account of the death of Jacquelin de Mailly, a Templar knight from Touraine, who died during the battle of the Spring of Cresson on 1 May 1187, which the Itinerarium takes from one of its source texts, the so-called “Itinerarium Peregrinorum 1” (written c. 1191). According to both texts, Jacquelin conducted himself with such valour that even his enemies expressed admiration and pity. Unusually, the passage then describes how one bystander removed Jacquelin’s genitals, allegedly for the conception of an heir of similar courage (should such a thing be possible, the author remarks). Here the spiritual potency of the martyred Templar engages with ideas of procreative potency (this despite the vows of chastity expected of professed members of the order). It is argued that the representation of Jacquelin and other martyrs in these texts relies upon idealised masculinities, and that an appreciation of this dynamic can reveal much about the intended role of such episodes as they appear in narrative history.

Though strangely ignored until the mid-twentieth-century, Henry of Grosmont constituted the late medieval Great Man par excellence: descendant and ancestor of kings; England’s second duke and richest nobleman; a major military and diplomatic presence during the early Hundred Years War.  Moreover, since his Livre de Seyntz Medicines’ re-emergence in the 1930s, his authorial and spiritual persona has been available to scholars: it represents the only extant penitential treatise by a fourteenth-century English aristocrat.  As high status late medieval men go, he is accessible from an unusual range of angles.
This paper explores Grosmont’s attitude towards Christ’s lordship.  Grosmont’s relationship with Christ, his Livre makes clear, reproduced the age’s social structure: he was his Lord’s vassal.  His religious and knightly ideologies, however, were in tension.  Grosmont’s ostentatious conformity to pious and chivalric norms impressed contemporaries.  Some of Christ’s behaviour, though, as outlined in religious tradition, would have seemed weak or shameful in a secular nobleman.  How did Grosmont handle this?  His efforts to reconcile his secular idea of lordship and the notion of Christ-as-Lord are examined.
Grosmont’s aristocratic sense of the deference owed to himself, it will be argued, led Christ’s approachability to unsettle him even as he praised it.  His Livre has been compared with the works of the English mystics.  However, whereas mystics such as Rolle revelled in Christ’s unorthodox lordship, which collapsed the social distance between them, for Grosmont it undermined his relationship as it threatened the underpinnings of his own temporal pre-eminence.

The article explores the gendered imaginary in the Gnadenleben of Friedrich Sunder (1254–1328) and the formation of clerical masculinity in the context of feminine devotional life. Friedrich Sunder worked as a convent chaplain for a Dominican female community and lived within the convent's area. In his book Sunder employs language, images and devotional practices that can be considered in medieval culture to have been feminine. Almost simultaneously, however, he applied masculine roles and emphasised his own manliness. Although Sunder accepted female forms of religiosity and wrote on practices that were considered especially suitable for women, at the same time his priestly masculinity was defined by the physical boundary the cloister created between the enclosed feminine religiosity and that of a pastoral masculine priesthood. His discussion of gender within the mystical frame defined the boundaries of his own masculinity in the web of different traditions of both the proper way of life and the gendered nature of religious practices.

This article discusses the relationship between Dominican nuns and their caregivers (priests and friars) with the help of sister-books written by the Dominican nuns themselves in the first half of the fourteenth century. My main focus will be on analysing the way religious men were described in these books and asking how this discussion was related to the everyday life of the nuns in the Dominican convents. I will suggest that the sister-books can give a new and perhaps unexpected view of the relationships between Dominican nuns and their spiritual caregivers, as these texts suggest that nuns preferred local secular priests over the friars, even though they accepted the religious authority of the latter. I will argue that although the sister-books were literary products, they had a close connection to the lived reality of nuns and that they can tell us about the interaction between nuns and religious men in their service. However, these texts also formed the ideas of nuns and kept the old attitudes towards priests and friars live, even when the interaction might have already taken other forms in practice.

This article examines the portrayal of masculinity in the chivalric saga Viktors saga ok Blávus. After winning a duel, the protagonists lament their actions, stating that they were unmasculine. The article argues that what made the behavior unmasculine was the protagonists’ unwillingness to follow societal norms, resulting in them performing monstrous masculinity.

On the morning of June 1, 1346 the judge of the episcopal court of Lucca found himself confronted by a weeping pregnant woman, who fell to her knees before the bench and tearfully begged the court to demand the return of her husband. This woman claimed that her husband had abandoned her after learning of her pregnancy and refused to acknowledge their marriage, leaving her in "poverty and wretchedness." She was not alone: the episcopal court of fourteenth-century Lucca heard numerous complaints of abandonment and abuse from wives who sought to depict themselves as the poor and powerless victims of male violence and greed. Such women may have benefitted from an increasingly competitive divide between lay and clerical models of masculinity in late medieval Italian cities. In marriage disputes, male litigants often depicted themselves as civic patriarchs, whose duties involved the accumulation of wealth and prestige and the production of heirs. The judges hearing these cases, however, were priests, sworn to celibacy and, often, to poverty. Thus there was a fundamental dissonance between the models of masculinity used to measure lay male litigants and their clerical judges. This essay argues that some female litigants' denunciations of masculine greed, violence, and disorder pitted secular models of masculinity against clerical, exploiting a growing ideological divide in late medieval Italian civic politics.

Litigants in late medieval ecclesiastical courts understood the need to construct their legal identities in sophisticated ways. Rather than rely on simple gender constructs, litigants instead wove complicated tapestries of identity-markers in order to appeal to judges' understandings of wealth, power, gender, and civic order. Men depicted themselves as controlled and orderly heads of prosperous households, emphasizing their financial and social successes. Women, on the other hand, generally distanced themselves from power and wealth in the court. Instead, regardless of their true financial and social status, they depicted themselves as submissive, obedient, and dependent on male financial and social support, appealing both to ideologies of feminine subservience and to the theological tendency to associate poverty with virtue.

The Latin word virtus and its Italian equivalent virtù derive from vir ("man"). True "virtue" in this sense involves masculine excellence and accomplishment, but late medieval Christian thought-canon law in particular-viewed the relationship between power, wealth, and masculine ambition as particularly fraught. If left unchecked, the desire for power and wealth could give rise to violence and greed. The secular masculine ideology of wealth, power, and honor sharply contradicted the clerical ideology of poverty, obedience, and humility. Clerics ideally were charged with humbling the wealthy and powerful and protecting the poor and powerless. This was especially true in the fourteenth century, when popular anticlericalism and the Church's slow surrender of power to secular authorities put even more pressure on ecclesiastical judges to uphold the principles of Christian morality and canon law. To clerics who were taught to venerate poverty and humility, but had risen to lucrative positions of power, female litigants presented a chance to champion these virtues.

Arnulf of Chocques’ checquered career attracted diverse views from chroniclers rendering him a mercurial figure in the histories of crusading and the Latin East. It was to an extent a product of the unique political culture of the First Crusade that produced a higher degree of fluidity in social and political bonds, but was also affected by contemporary tensions between regnum and ecclesia throughout Christendom. His personal traits, education, reputation and the manner in which he performed his various roles were often measured against the contemporaries with whom he came into close contact, and such comparisons struck to the heart of contemporary debates about clerical masculinities. This article presents the first focused evaluation of Arnulf’s full career and examines the significance of these comparions as presented in contemporary sources.