This is in some ways a follow-up to the previous post, but at a slightly more theoretical level. What I want to discuss is the style of writing and talking about history that Irwin is trying to encourage in his class. It’s best summarised as teaching them to do flashy history.

Flashy history isn’t a matter of period or topic, but of technique. It is about showing off: showing off firstly that you know more than previous historians, in that you have a new and exciting angle on a old problem (or even a whole field), and secondly that you can write more entertainingly than other historians. Flashy history is punchy, exciting and provocative to read: its key tools are the aphorism and the paradox. It has the lightness and speed of an ice-skater: it makes its point and then moves on rapidly to the display of the next trick. It is not the same as pretentious history; it isn’t about heaping up obscure references. Instead it uses references or quotations to create a fleeting bond with the discerning reader, a momentary feeling of fellowship and admiration, and then hurries on. And nor is flashy history primarily about demolishing other historians. If you read an article or book where every second footnote is telling you that some other historian got it wrong, that’s just suggests petty-mindedness. Good quality flashy history doesn’t need that remorseless putting down of others; it’s motivated by pride, not envy. A few quick verbal rapier slashes on your opponents, showing how you can dance around them, like a bullfighter with a bull, that’s all that’s really needed.

What counts as flashy history is of course debatable (although no-one who’s heard David Starkey can surely deny the existence of the phenomenon). There’s also the fact that most historians who sometimes do flashy history use a less flashy style on occasions. Flashiness, on the whole, only works well in small doses; even in a short book it can start to become tedious. As a few nominations of medievalists who are good at flashy history (although they don’t invariably choose to practice it), I’d suggest Peter Brown, John Gillingham, Chris Wickham and Conrad Leyser. (Although the technique tends to be thought of as specific to Oxbridge males, in fact it’s not: Patricia Crone co-wrote the extraordinarily flashy history of early Islam Hagarism and although Michel Foucault wasn’t really a historian, some of his works have a lot of techniques of flashy history.)

Flashy history is, of course, prone to glibness, sometimes immensely irritating and to emphasise effect at the expense of accuracy. But it still has a useful role to play in historical study. In particular, it’s an important way of teaching history (which is why flashy history is so common in TV history and popular history). Firstly, because it makes history seems interesting to those who might otherwise find it uninspiring. Secondly, because it encourages the ability to play with ideas, which a historian needs to gain. Any would-be historian must gain the courage at some point to disagree with those who are more learned, or they’ll never do anything original. Reading flashy history or writing some yourself, can be a tool to break free from excessive reverence. Someone once told me that he’d read Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages (a classic bit of flashy history) just after starting as a postgraduate and it had been a wonderful way of getting himself started.

But I think flashy history, if written by someone who is actually knowledgeable, is also valuable for professional historians as well, even if they don’t write it themselves. In small doses, it’s a tonic to read, even when it’s wrong-headed; it peps you up and makes you examine and justify your own arguments properly, rather than simply taking them for granted. As someone once commented in a review: “To launch a thousand ships in academia you need a creative synthetic insight that is only about half-right.” However much the more staid of us may deplore them at times, every now and then it’s only right to celebrate both flashy history and the historians who create and sustain it.

I have finally now seen Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’, at least the film version of it. It was, as expected, entertaining, touching and thought-provoking, but also, in several ways, more than a little odd. In particular, for a work ostensibly about history, it had a bizarrely non-specific, if not actually nonsensical sense of period. The action, is set, at least according to the film, in 1983, and yet much of the plot makes little sense for that period. Firstly, there were few grammar schools left by that period (and the implication is that this is genuinely a grammar, rather than a fee-paying school still using the ‘grammar school’ label). Secondly, much of the plot is driven by the contrast of Oxbridge and provincial universities and the implication that this matters desperately. Speaking as somebody who got into Oxford in 1983, it didn’t by then. I had contemporaries who didn’t apply to Oxford even though they had the ability, because it didn’t offer the sort of course they wanted. The humiliation of the headmaster in admitting he studied geography at Hull seems archaic. Equally, the actual events of the early 1980s are nowhere to be seen. Despite mass unemployment in cities such as Sheffield, the boys can apparently easily get work ‘on the bins’ or as milkmen, whenever they want. And in the aftermath of the Falklands War, how likely it is that a boy could think that becoming a soldier would never involve fighting? Margaret Thatcher, meanwhile, is a barely mentioned irrelevance, not the central figure to young imaginations that she was.

Most of the plot actually makes far more sense if it is transposed back to about 1963, an era of grammar schools and acute snobbery about Oxbridge versus other universities. Similarly, Hector’s taste for World War One songs fits better for a master born in 1903 and 60 in 1963, than one born in 1923 and 60 in 1983. For a man who normally has such a precise sense of time and place as Bennett, either he has been unusually sloppy or the film was badly adapted in this way.

There are, I suppose, possibilities as to why they story Bennett wants to tell may have been ‘displaced’ by twenty years in this way. One is to get round the problem that all homosexual acts were still illegal in 1967, not just ones with 18 year olds. Another may have been to prevent the piece seeming too archaic, although any piece based around the seventh term Oxbridge entrance exam inevitably seems outdated now. I also wonder whether Irwin is somehow supposed to represent ‘Thatcherite’ tendencies in education. The problem, of course, is that Irwin is no Thatcherite. For all his philistine tendencies, he is also not a charlatan, but a genuine enthusiast about an old-fashioned subject: the later Middle Ages. No thrusting young right-wing historian of the 1980s would really be interested at looking at monastic accounts: Victorian or 20th century history would have been the way to go, probably focusing on economic history or high politics.

This leads me to my second problem with the story: is Bennett really trying to suggest that Hector is a better teacher than Irwin? If so, he is unconvincing, though I wonder if he deliberately hasn’t balanced the arguments rather better than that. The best pedagogy in the whole work, I would argue, is the debate about the Holocaust, and it’s really Irwin who drives that forward. Hector does set up the French brothel scenario, which is impressive, but otherwise, it’s only in his discussion of Thomas Hardy’s poem, that you really get a sense of him as a potentially inspirational teacher, someone who can convey something of the meaning of the great works he loves. Irwin, in contrast, with his demand for bold ideas, may be rather too glib, but he does at least get his students thinking. Ignoring entirely the issue of groping, I’d find Irwin more intellectually stimulating as a teacher than Hector, and probably more inspiring. But again, Hector v Irwin seems a curiously old-fashioned kind of contrast, a world away from a school history syllabus with nothing much beyond Hitler and Stalin and an emphasis on transferable skills. If Bennett does a period piece, that’s in itself fine, and can even be revealing: I just wish he’d been a bit more realistic about which period.

My entire pretensions to be internet-savvy took a bash when I got a comment that I had been meme-tagged and I had to investigate what that meant. Even more fuddy-duddy is that I can’t help vaguely feeling that this is somehow a variant of either chain letters or pyramid selling. But anyhow, now I understand what’s going on, I will start trying to cheat, or rather, mutate the meme.

The rules as I was given them were:

1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.

2. Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.

My variant is that rather than say 7 random/weird things about yourself, say them about a historical figure of your choice. (Let’s be generous, semi-historical, for all those interested in more or less mythical figures).

3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.

4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

So here we go on Charlemagne (of course):

1) Scholars can’t agree on the year of his birth (although April 2nd is often accepted as the day). The conventional view until the 1970s was 742, but in 1973 Karl Werner argued it was 747, and in 1992, Matthias Becher argued for 748. (As an aside, the first essay I ever wrote about Charlemagne discussed the arguments about the date).

2) Charlemagne really hated drunkenness. As well as capitularies of his condemning it, Einhard specifically mentions that: ‘he hated to see drunkenness in any man, and even more so in himself and his friends.’ Is this purely conventional praise? It’s unlikely to be so, given that neither of Louis the Pious’ biographers say the same thing about him.

3) We probably have written down some of Charlemagne’s own comments about one book he had read to him: the Libri Carolini. Ann Freeman’s introduction to her edition (under Leges, Concilia, 2 supplement 1) p. 48-50 discusses the notes on one manuscript.

4) When Charlemagne’s tomb was opened by Otto III in 1000, the Chronicon Novaliciense claimed that his nails had grown through the gloves he was buried in.

5) Charlemagne made such a lasting impact on the Slavs that several Slavic languages use Kral/Krol as their word for king (derived from Karolus).

6) Charlemagne was canonised (the first step to sainthood) in 1165, at the order of Frederick Barbarossa. If he had ever been fully beatified, he would not have been the first Carolingian saint with illegitimate children: there was already Angilbert.

7) Charlemagne became so famous later in the Middle Ages that there is an Icelandic Saga about him: Karlamagnus Saga.

I tag (with either variant of the meme or a completely mutated one):

Jonathan Jarrett, Modern Medieval team, Another Damned Medievalist, ArtemisToxia.

On the trail of the origins of courtly love again, I found a book by a literary scholar which does seem to me to have some very useful things to say to a historian: Gerald A. Bond, The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence and Power in Romanesque France. Bond sees the origins of twelfth century love poetry as starting with a literary development which forms a textual subculture. The texts which form this textual community are the works of Ovid, and in particular the emphasis on the use of different personae in the Heroides. Such ideas of impersonation and particularly self-impersonation were taken up by late eleventh century Latin poets, who were clerics but writing about non-religious subjects. Such techniques were then in turn taken up by secular rulers, who either created their own personae (as William IX of Poitiers) or patronised poets to create different images of themselves (as Adela of Blois did).

To Bond the change is therefore a literary development which then is patronised for political reasons. As I read his book, however, I was also conscious of a changed moral position in some of the developments. Bond sees two of the key early figures in the ‘conception of the private secular self’ as Baudri of Bourgueil and Marbod. In his chapter on Baudri, he focuses on the letter-poems and I immediately saw parallels to Alcuin in Baudri’s emphasis on friendship. Yet there’s also a contrast: Baudri in his poems stress that they are intended as play/entertainment and a harmless way for him to fill his spare time. The first poem by Marbod that Bond quotes meanwhile begins:

I usually take my recreation to the sound of the harp,
banishing as often as I want the ennuis of a carefilled life.
...
This one sings a song about a certain hapless knight
Whose lover mourns because fate has snatched him from her.

At this point, Alcuin (and several other Carolingian moralists) would be having apoplexy. Clerics should not be listening to harpists, let alone harpists singing secular songs. And yet this was already happening in the Carolingian period. How do we know? Because Alcuin, among others, denounced it.

Secular tastes among clerics aren’t new in the eleventh century, then; but what does seem to be new is that such men have the education to put their side of the story. And this, I think, relates partly to the dominant form of tenth/eleventh century clerical education, as discussed by Stephen Jaeger, The envy of angels: cathedral schools and social ideals in medieval Europe, 950-1200. The emphasis. Jaeger says, is on a classical education intended to produce the moral man. (I’m not convinced whether this ideal was entirely new in the tenth century, but that’s a different matter).

Th obvious problem with this is a basic one: despite the repeated claims, from the ancient Greeks to the modern liberal arts curriculum, a literary education doesn’t necessarily make you a morally virtuous person. Whatever Allan Bloom may have canonised, no-one is likely to canonise Allan Bloom. I suspect that the eleventh century educational programme sometimes produced the same unintended, but not unexpected result: men reared on classical, secular literature got a taste for secular pleasures and their literary celebration, but not for the moral uplift they were supposed to imbibe alongside it.

The role of ‘leisure’ is also interesting here. Both Baudri and Marbod feel that they have leisure and that this can be filled with entertainment. Most Carolingian authors, in contrast, come across as short on leisure (because they were devoting themselves to reform and politics) and tend to insist that what spare time one does have should be devoted to uplifting (i.e. Christian) literature. Part of this may be the relative political insignificance of Baudri and Marbod, unlike, say Alcuin, Theodulf or Lupus, who are advisors to kings. (Bond identifies most of Baudri’s correspondents as lower ranking members of the monastic and cathedral schools).

Bond sees such men, probably from non-noble backgrounds, as using their virtuosity and fine feelings to create a community around ‘poetic and amatory gaming’. The use of different personae by the poets, meanwhile, is not only an advanced poetic game, but also a way of avoiding being ‘subjected’, allowing the saying of things that are not ‘one’s own’.(It’s interesting that Baudri and Marbod are both men who are possibly ‘gay’, in John Boswell’s sense, which may have made personae even more appealing).

The second question is why some courts chose to patronise such a literary style. After all, Carolingian rulers patronised court poetry, but not court poetry about love. There’s little to suggest that Charlemagne’s court was much more morally pure than William IX’s, but when the daughters of Charlemagne are described (in the Paderborn epic) it is in images borrowed from an account of virgin martyrs, not from Ovid. The answer, presumably, is that a court takes its tone from its ruler. (Bond shows how Adela seems to have switched her image partway through her reign). As soon as you have rulers who share the Carolingian dynasty’s demand for poetry as prestige object, but not their relentless moral uplift, you are likely to get a different style of court and a different style of court poetry.

Bon’s genealogy of courtly literature seems plausible to me, but I’m not an expert. If anyone has any comments, I’d be interested to hear them. Meanwhile, his book may not have answered all my questions about courtly love, but it does at least give a reasonably coherent answer to why, whether or not Charlemagne’s court was a courtly society, it wasn’t a society of courtly love.

In my somewhat random search for material on the origins of courtly love I’ve started looking through C. Stephen Jaeger’s Ennobling love, but been distracted by a particularly blatant bit of Boswell bashing. John Boswell, for anyone who has not come across him, was a pioneering author on medieval homosexuality. He got a lot of things wrong in his book: Christianity, social tolerance and homosexuality: gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century (1980), but he still made a lot of important points and his arguments need to be engaged with.

In many ways, Stephen Jaeger does this: his main argument is that the much of the medieval behaviour which Boswell identified as homoerotic was actually a culturally acceptable form of male-male friendship that had no sodomitical overtones to observers. Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart may have shared a bed but this was a symbolic demonstration of a love that was political, but not sexual. The same language of love was used by Alcuin and a host of other monks, without it meaning what a modern sexualised view thinks it implies.

The problem is that Jaeger pushes what is a reasonable argument too hard. In particular, he claims that he will not discuss

the question of whether Aelred [of Rivaulx], Anselm [of Bec], and others who loved men were homosexuals. It is a bit like asking whether they were liberals, Jacobites or Unitarians. the category did not exist and using it thrusts an alien set of values onto a sensibility which is delicate and wants reconstruction on its own terms.

Jaeger argues, taking Foucault’s line, that the ‘homosexual’ was invented in the nineteenth century and therefore is an anachronistic category to use. The problem is that in claiming this, he obscures (perhaps deliberately) Boswell’s position.

Firstly, the suggestion that one shouldn’t use anachronistic categories is in many ways ridiculous. If you discuss proto-Indo-European, the Roman upper classes, the Carolingian economy, medieval anti-semitism or whether King Alfred had Crohn’s disease, you’re using an anachronistic category, in the sense of a concept that didn’t exist at the historical period under discussion. The question is whether a modern category is actually useful for a discussion of a particular historical period, whether it can be defined in a way that makes sense. I think it may be true that ‘homosexual’ is not a useful category for dealing with the Middle Ages, but that isn’t the main category that Boswell actually used. What Boswell talked about was ‘gays’, and he had a simple definition of them: people with an erotic preference for their own sex. (In CSTH he made this ‘conscious preference’, but later removed the qualifier).

Now this seems to me an entirely reasonable definition in one sense, in that it is suitable for use in any culture. It is difficult to imagine a historical period or culture which does not contain gays, as defined in this way. (And note that this is irrespective of what you believe is the cause of ‘homosexuality’, whether this is biological (genes/foetal environment), psychological, or chosen depravity. Under almost any circumstances, it is difficult to argue that there are cultures that have no-one with an erotic preference for their own sex. Claims of a pre-colonial Africa that was 100% straight are simple fantasies).

What this means is that it is a perfectly reasonable, non-anachronistic question to ask whether Aelred was gay. The problem for Boswell is that though you can ask this question, it’s almost impossible to give a convincing answer either way. We know very little about the erotic preferences of most medieval people and what counts as ‘erotic’ is pretty much in the eye of the beholder anyhow. Jaeger is probably right to decide that it’s not a question that he wants to discuss: what is more dubious is his implication that it’s not a question anyone should discuss. The refusal of the terms ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality’ for the Middle Ages can sometimes be useful in clarifying ideas. (Although it’s impossible to claim that there is intrinsically no such thing as a sexual identity in the Middle Ages. As several people, particularly Ruth Mazo Karras have pointed out, what is virginity, but a sexual identity?) But such a refusal needs to be handled very carefully, because it’s not symmetric. If you say there are no ‘heterosexuals’ in the Middle Ages, everyone will realise you’re making a particular theoretical point, not talking about actual desires. If you say there are no ‘homosexuals’, it all too easily implies that there were no gays (in Boswell’s sense). When Jaeger talks about sexual desire and sexual intercourse ‘infiltrating’ the discourse of male-male love, I am left with the faintly queasy sense that he’d really rather that both medieval and modern gays go away and leave him to his pre-sexual early medieval paradise.

Kate Cooper's new book on gender and Christianity in the late Roman empire, The Fall of the Roman Household has just been published. For Amazon's sponsored links, however, it fits best with tableware...

I am back to thinking again about one of my recurring problems: are there crises in medieval masculinity and if so how can one tell? This time (as a result of having to give a lecture on gender and the twelfth century renaissance) it's whether there is a crisis then, as several writers have suggested. As I've said in a previous post, part of the problem is how you decide what counts as a crisis. In particular, how do you tell the difference between specific men having a crisis (which statistically, is going to happen quite frequently) and men as a class having a crisis?

I've argued before that looking at discourse is key: there is a crisis of masculinity when men say there is. On that measure, clerical masculinity does look to be in crisis in the late eleventh century, since much of the rhetoric of the Gregorian reform is about there being horrible things wrong with the clergy, that they have been corrupted by women etc, etc. Given that it's an era that also sees the invention of the word 'sodomy' and the attempt to rewrite hagiography to show images of 'the lone manly bishop who single-handedly brings peace and prosperity to his city.' as Maureen Miller, 'Masculinity, reform, and clerical culture: narratives of episcopal holiness in the Gregorian era, Church History 72 (2003):1-28, puts it [conjuring up alarming visions of John Wayne in a mitre], the idea of a clerical crisis seems pretty well-based.

The problem is, is there a crisis in lay masculinity at the same time? This has often been claimed, but when you start looking it at it, there isn’t an enormous amount of evidence. Jo Ann McNamara is the standard bearer for this view in "The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050-1150," Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis, 1994), 3-30. She makes an awful lot of assertions (from a very essentialist view of men), but as specific evidence for laymen has

a) there are two kings in the eleventh century (Henry II of Germany and Edward the Confessor) who becomes saints partly due to their sexual abstinence

b) lots of men and women sought 'escape from the terrors of conjugal life' and entered religious orders

c) there were a number of sexual scandals and noblemen repudiating their wives

d) there were complaints about effeminate courtiers

e) laypeople must have been affected by the anti-marriage rhetoric of the Gregorian church

f) some sources describe laymen being brutal to women

g) some anecdotes show men as worried about impotence or being mocked if they're reluctant to marry

h) stress in Crusading literature on freedom from women, exemplified in Bernard of Clairvaux's praise of the Templars

A lot of these ideas don't add up to anything like a crisis and are even contradictory (since they combine men shrinking from marriage with those only too eager to contract multiple marriages). But I think the one idea that is significant is the criticism of courtiers as effeminate. This is a recurrent theme and it's also new: it's not there in the Carolingian texts. How does the 'rise of courtliness' connect to ideas of masculinity?

Stephen Jaeger's work on courtliness is probably the dominant view at the moment, though it's weakened both by a simplistic view of courtly as implying 'less violent' and by a lack of knowledge about the Carolingians. Recent work by Jinty Nelson and Matthew Innes has successfully argued that Carolingian courts were 'courtly', in the sense of places with a distinctive culture where you learnt how to behave. Notker the Stammerer also shows a place with both rampant ambition for gaining office and courtiers wearing unsuitable fancy clothes. So why doesn't the stereotype of effeminate courtiers develop there?

I would argue that being a courtier can be conceptualized in two ways. One aspect stresses royal service: this is marked by virtue, strength, excellent performance of duties. Models here would include Joseph and Daniel and King David's generals and more generally the relationship between lord and follower and God and man (which are often paralleled). Here there is always a sense of 'contract' in which loyal service is recognized by the ruler and rewarded, and (unlike in republican Roman culture), such service is honourable and manly.

The opposite model of a courtier stresses royal favour: it is about pleasing the ruler and the arbitrary winning of rewards not linked to virtue. This model is about appearances, not necessarily truth and is always liable to be gendered female. The women can be virtuous (such as Esther) or less so (such as all the queens with wicked wiles), but the emphasis is on a ruler who judges by superficial criteria, not necessarily correctly.

In most of the sources which discuss Carolingian court life, it is presumed that the ruler is able to judge virtue (one of the recurring themes of Notker is that you can't fool Charlemagne). The one exception and the most hostile criticism of the Carolingian court is by Paschasius Radbertus whose point is precisely that the palace has become a 'theatre of illusions', and that Louis the Pious is no longer able to tell the good (Adalard and Wala) from the bad (Bernard). In contrast, Stephen Jaeger shows Bruno of Cologne (who he sees as the first courtier) already acting as a talent scout: when he finds 'princes' who he thinks good, he wins royal favour for them. This includes those 'who a private life had obscured'. In other words, the king can no longer be simply expected to find the virtuous, they've got to be pushed.

Even for Paschasius, the court can be redeemed and restored. There is, in fact, no Carolingian writer who thinks that the court is beyond redemption, that it's irretrievably corrupt, although that becomes the default position of later court critics. I suspect that's because all the Carolingian elite (secular and clerical) are courtiers or would-be courtiers themselves. Criticism of the court may even be a ploy to get invited into it later (as Mayke de Jong suggests for Agobard). Criticism of courts as intrinsically, structurally corrupt only really takes off with the Gregorian reformation, when there are churchmen who have a secure position without the need for royal support.

The other thing that I think changes is the rise of courtliness as technique: learning the ways to 'win friends and influence people'. There are hints of this in Dhuoda and Hincmar on the government of the palace, but it's mostly about helpfulness and efficiency and cheerfulness (the resemblance to graduate management trainees is lurking there) and not about the more subtle arts. Where Jaeger, I think, is right is in seeing the rise of courtliness as a skill that can be taught; the cathedral schools produce men with the morals and manners to win high office. Once courtliness is seen both as a way to boost your chances in rising to the top and as something that can be achieved, rather than being natural, then a whole industry develops around it. (Industry may be too strong a word, but I would presume that as well as educators, those providing clothes, hairstyles etc to the nobility are also selling them partly on the basis of 'it'll help you get ahead, it'll make you stand out, don't be unfashionable').

I would say this produces if a not a crisis in noble masculinity, at least a permanent tension within it. Male courtiers (clerics and lay alike) become willing to use such courtliness as a means to success. In contrast, those who don't want to gain influence at court, those who have failed to do so, or those who already have gained it and got a safe position can pour scorn on the methods of those still in the struggle. The critics of the court have an obvious weapon in stressing courtliness as effeminate seeking of favour. But I think you can also see courtiers trying to fight back and emphasis the manly service aspect of court life. Romance, for example, stresses that fine words by knights must be backed up the physical prowess to fulfil them: the true knight is eloquent, but also brave. Meanwhile, troubadour lyric is always using the metaphors of both religious devotion and the lord-man relationship in addressing the lady. These both have the implication that the lady has a duty to respond favourably, but also that the service offered is respectable manly behaviour.

The courtier's dream goals are also impeccably masculine. For the cleric it is a position of rule, via a senior church appointment. For the layman it is a heiress: here the medieval courting man has an advantage over later ones. For at least 300 years, the (male) fortune hunter has been seen as contemptible or ridiculous (I think the female gold-digger has normally been seen more positively - compare Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Pal Joey). In contrast, the medieval knight who wins the lady, or his descendant, the fairy-tale poor man who wins the princess' hand is admirable. Why? Because he gets half the kingdom (or some smaller area to rule in real-life cases). The medieval hero takes on a role of defending and ruling a territory in a way that (theoretically) neither his wife nor any man she employed could do. As soon as that defensive role disappears, the fortune hunter’s achievement of the heiress' hand can no longer be seen as manly. Until then, a medieval courtier risks the temporary appearance of unmanliness (trying always to show his acts as honourable service) for the purpose of gaining a position in which his manliness cannot be questioned: at the top.