In studies on premodern masculinities that have enriched scholarship in recent years, relatively little attention has been paid to the eroticizing of the male body. Masculinities and Representation seeks to fill this lacuna, illustrating how gender construction served to affirm but also diversify premodern masculinity. In so doing, this collection details how, as a social construct, masculinity was not a single concept, but a dynamic and intricate notion.
Focusing on the premodern period, Masculinities and Representation reveals how heteronormative masculinity was affirmed, but also how it was challenged when the male body was eroticized in art, literature, and devotion, or when “masculine” norms were transgressed by the assumption of “feminine” behaviours. Ultimately, the book demonstrates how masculinity itself could be transgressive in its focus of affection or in its inherent ambiguities.
List of Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
James M. Saslow
Part I. Religion, Heavenly Art, Earthly Bodies
1. Bathing and Bonding: Sensual Male Imagery in Italian Paintings of
Baptism
Steven F.H. Stowell
2. Blasphemous or Beautiful? Leonardo da Vincis St John the Baptist, Holy
Masculinity, and Its Ambiguities ca. 1500
Anne L. Williams
3. Sharing a Bed with Dominic: Celibacy and Masculinity in the Cult of St.
Vincent Ferrer
Laura Ackerman Smoller
4. The Body of Christ: Suffering and Desire in Gianfrancesco Pico della
Mirandolas De Venere et Cupidine Expellendis
Marco Piana
Part II. Women and Men: Masculinity, Effeminacy, and Desire
5. A Dio Zerbini a Dio, a Dio Narcisi: Satirizing Effeminacy in Margherita
Costas Florentine Works (16381641)
Sara E. Dķaz
6. Masculine-Feminine Dichotomy in the Sixteenth Century: Mythological Donna
con Donna Images from Fontainebleau and Northern Italy
Tara White
Part III. Knowledge and Emotions: Forbidden and Required
7. Wounded Histories on the Stages of Old and New Worlds: Vivaldis Motezuma
and the Cries of Conquest
Kate Driscoll
8. Male Courtly Feeling and the Historical Performativity of Shyness in A
Midsummer Nights Dream
Tiffany Hoffman
9. Latin Epigrams and Early Modern Sexual Knowledge: Or, How Jonson Read His
Martial
Ian Frederick Moulton
Index
Konrad Eisenbichler is a professor emeritus from the University of Toronto.
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