The eleven essays published here under the rubric of ‘gender studies’ are the second collection resulting from conferences on masculinity and religion organised by the volume's editors. Focusing on religious men and masculine identity, seven treat cases from the Anglo-Norman world (three) or later medieval England (four), with one each on Carolingian Europe, First Crusade chronicles, thirteenth-fourteenth-century Mediterranean realms, and Jewish study of the Torah. The editors construe gender as a metonym for anatomical sex in relation to men, women and sex-based social roles, with both masculinity/masculine and male used as synonyms for those qualities deemed to make a man a man, or, manliness; i.e. the primary referent of those terms is overwhelmingly humans sexed as men, not intellectual concepts or hierarchical systems of relations. The few essays whose authors construe gender in broader symbolic ways and distinguish it analytically from sexed bodies, most notably M. Mesley's on depictions of the crusading bishop Adémar of Le Puy and M. L. Satlow on how the discursive creation of rabbinical masculinity as self-mastery fuelled aggressively competitive practices of Torah study, are of greater value for doing so. One need not accept any or all of the conclusions reached by Caroline Walker Bynum – the only pioneer of a gendered approach to religion whom the editors evoke – to note that reducing her contributions to the field as the delineation of a ‘distinctive feminine piety’ centred on the eucharist and extreme fasting (pp. 15, 184) is a one-dimensional caricature. Bynum's views are not so much ‘fluid and complex’ (p. 185) as rigorously systematic in the ways in which she distinguishes gender as a way of ‘signposting relationships of power’ (p. 109, quoting J. W. Scott) amongst men and women of diverse ethnicities, social ranks and sex-based lived experiences from the multifaceted mapping of gendered traits and identities onto individual men and women that then results: if there are ‘varieties of masculinity’ (p. 4) it is simply because what can be deemed masculine transcends sex and not all men – or women – are alike. Ironically, the one essay that directly criticises Bynum reaches conclusions for laymen that she had postulated but not explored: when lay folk imitated Christ's redemptive powers by paraliturgically feeding others, men would likely do so with the material resources that they frequently controlled (for example, household goods); women, as Bynum had elucidated, the ones that they could more readily control (fleshy matter from their bodies). Further methodological issues emerge. Just how individuals forged subjective gendered identities and how extant sources can reliably inform scholars on that topic are significantly under-theorised. The authors who do address those issues could either benefit from, or reach, conclusions already methodically argued by Bynum in 1982 (‘Did the twelfth century discover the individual’, in her Jesus as mother). Analytic precision is lost by authors who subsume ‘spiritual masculinity’ into ‘clerical masculinity’ – both rooted in the mastery of carnal desires and personal will – not simply because not all male ‘religious’ were in clerical orders, but also – as R. Stone notes, K. J. Lewis suggests and M. von Weissenberg explains – spiritual masculinity is a notion applicable to women and laymen, as well as to ‘churchmen’ (monks and clerics alike), though with differential impact on their subjective identities. For example, essays treating the defence of clerical marriage in the face of monastically-trained reformers' campaigns to impose clerical celibacy on all churchmen are a lost opportunity. Setting discussions in the broader context of spiritual masculinity and noting analogues rooted in post-lapsarian human weakness and vulnerability to sexual sins found in arguments for both married clergy and women's capacity for virtue would underscore J. McNamara's perception of the misogyny inherent in purity-based arguments for clerical celibacy even as it would lead to a more detailed and nuanced account of the processes of historical change during the fifty-eighty years that its imposition was openly contested. Unless both the instrumentality of women in construals of masculinity and the symbolic dimensions of gender are taken into account, masculinity studies are not gender studies but yet more discussions of the power games played by boys competing with each other at women's expense: even the lowliest men can be players while all women, even the mightiest, are excluded from the field.