What Can Historians Do with Clerical Masculinity? Lessons from Medieval Europe

Abstract

The title of this essay is a conscious homage to John Tosh’s groundbreaking article of 1994, ‘What Should Historians Do with Masculinity?’, which set out the methodological issues and political concerns involved in what was then quite a new subject of historical study.1 Tosh’s eloquent argument that historians must recognize the complexity and multivalence of masculine identity has lost none of its relevance. It was, however, framed in comparatively modern terms, since Tosh, a historian of Victorian Britain, drew on nineteenth-century evidence and examples. Since the mid-1990s, medievalists and early modernists have been responding to the challenges Tosh laid out in that article. An important, if sometimes discouraging, lesson we have learned is the degree of difference in approach and assumptions between those who study masculinity in premodern history and their modernist colleagues. At some point between 1500 and 1700, as we define our periods of study, a dividing line still appears.