Music and Masculinity in the Middle Ages

Abstract

This chapter describes masculinities as constructed within the celibate, all-male environment of the monastery or university were rather different from the chivalric forms of masculinity in the mixed-sex, itinerant, politically active court. Medieval society was essentially patriarchal, but the position of men within it–and thus the construction and expression of masculinity–varied depending on age, marital status, wealth, education and class. One aspect of masculine formation largely neglected in studies to date is the educational role of music in the construction of medieval masculinities. A concern with music's role in teaching masculinity surfaces at the very outset of the central pedagogical text of the middle Ages and Renaissance, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius's De institutione musica . The vagueness of Boethius's definition of masculinity in music allows later theorists to define as effeminate anything that they want to denigrate, and anything they wish to praise as masculine.

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