Thou Art the Man Thou Art the Man
The Middle Ages Series

Thou Art the Man

The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages

    • 59,99 €
    • 59,99 €

Publisher Description

"How do we approach the study of masculinity in the past?" Ruth Mazo Karras asks. Medieval documents that have come down to us tell a great deal about the things that men did, but not enough about what they did specifically as men, or what these practices meant to them in terms of masculinity. Yet no less than in our own time, masculinity was a complicated construct in the Middle Ages.

In Thou Art the Man, Karras focuses on one figure, King David, who was important in both Christian and Jewish medieval cultures, to show how he epitomized many and sometimes contradictory aspects of masculine identity. For late medieval Christians, he was one of the Nine Worthies, held up as a model of valor and virtue; for medieval Jews, he was the paradigmatic king, not just a remnant of the past, but part of a living heritage. In both traditions he was warrior, lover, and friend, founder of a dynasty and a sacred poet. But how could an exemplar of virtue also be a murderer and adulterer? How could a physical weakling be a great warrior? How could someone whose claim to the throne was not dynastic be a key symbol of the importance of dynasty? And how could someone who dances with slaves be noble?

Exploring the different configurations of David in biblical and Talmudic commentaries, in Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular literatures across Europe, in liturgy, and in the visual arts, Thou Art the Man offers a rich case study of how ideas and ideals of masculinity could bend to support a variety of purposes within and across medieval cultures.

GENRE
History
RELEASED
2021
30 April
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
368
Pages
PUBLISHER
University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
SIZE
9.2
MB

More Books by Ruth Mazo Karras

Entangled Histories Entangled Histories
2016
Unmarriages Unmarriages
2012
Common Women Common Women
1998
The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe
2013

Other Books in This Series

Fixing the Liturgy Fixing the Liturgy
2024
Knowledge True and Useful Knowledge True and Useful
2023
England's Jews England's Jews
2023
Reimagining Christendom Reimagining Christendom
2023
Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century
2022
What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric?
2022