The eleven essays in this collection seek to challenge the view that in the Middle Ages “religion had nothing much to do with men as men” (2). In their useful introduction, the editors note that, in the last two decades, medievalists have tended “to employ theories of masculinity as a tool of analysis to complement and amplify existing understandings of medieval gender identities” (2). This is a discreet way of saying that the study of “gender identities” has excluded men, whose spirituality can be explored now, apparently to amplify the well-established spiritual world of medieval women.

The volume's purpose is “to examine and re-evaluate medieval men's relationship with religion” (3). That sounds reasonable. But when was men's relationship with religion ever evaluated or examined? Little has been said about “men as men” in relation to religion, history, or language. Gender scholars have long claimed that men did not have to be considered because almost everything already written was about them. But surely it was not written not about them as men. The essays reach from early to late medieval. The disciplinary focus is narrow; a few studies of medieval masculinity, cited in many of the essays, supply the volume's theoretical foundations. This uniformity has silver lining, however, in that it shows how much remains to be done to recover the history of men as men.