In Thou Art The Man, Ruth Mazo Karras presents readers with a diligent study of the figuration of King David across the European Middle Ages between Judaism and Christianity. The book begins with the orienting question, “How do we approach the study of masculinity in the past?” (1). It is this question that leads us to David, seeking to understand how the Biblical David became an aspirational model of manhood, albeit an imperfect one, for medieval people. If the dichotomy of Eve/Mary structured the formulation of women as being “either virginal and maternal [. . .] or [. . .] fallen temptresses” (2), then the model offered by David/Jesus articulated the groundwork for masculinity. While Mary and Jesus were the perfect iterations of their gender, Eve and David were their imperfect counterparts. As Karras writes, “David was the imperfect man, the sinner, the disobedient upon several occasions. But unlike Eve, he carried with him the potential for repentance and eventual triumph” (2). It is this contrast that seems to undergird the medieval construction of masculinity in Karras's work.

In the book's introduction, Karras carefully outlines her methodological goals, while also providing a detailed introductory history to Biblical textual criticism and authorship, the story of David, and its medieval translations and transmission. The coverage is rich, but never dense, making the text eminently teachable for undergraduate and graduate students alike, while also making it accessible to the passerby interested in the Biblical story of David. In many ways, this is at its core a book about David, which organizes its articulation through the theme of masculinity.

Throughout five chapters, Karras systematically maps out the five conditions that defined David's masculinity: (1) his physical prowess and success in warfare, (2) his intimate friendships and bonding with men, (3) his adultery, sex with women, and indirect murder, (4) his compositional creativity and authorship, and (5) his establishment of a dynasty through his progeny and lineage.

In the first chapter, Karras begins where we would rightly expect: turning to the story of David's encounter with Goliath and his subsequent military victories. Moving from David's small stature in medieval narratives, Karras opens asking: “is he small because he is a child, or because he is weak and able to triumph only with God's assistance, or because Goliath is not a man but an enormous monster?” (23). These questions subvert our expectations, ask us to reevaluate our assumptions about the story, and deftly lead us to look at the David and Goliath story and its depiction in art with new sensibilities and attunement to the details. This leads us to precisely the fact that “David's masculinity is paradoxical” (24), a line that serves as the book's central thesis.

In the second chapter, the book turns to the topic of “love, friendship, and loyalty between men,” focusing on the relationship between David and Jonathan. Carefully looking at the challenges that these intimacies presented for medieval authors, who did not simply assume a chaste relationship but struggled with the various permutations of what these bonds between men could look like. As Karras writes at the end of this chapter, “David and Jonathan's relationship seems to fall into the general trend of medieval attitudes to male same-sex relationships: condemn those that are obviously and unavoidably sexual, praise those that involve intimate and loyal friendship, and turn a defiantly blind eye to any possible connection between the two” (100). This is must-do reading in a seminar on the history of medieval sexuality, because it demonstrates how critically and openly authors considered intimacies between men and their potential sexual dimensions, even in the context of men as central as David.

In the third chapter, we confront the greatest flaws to the figuration of a pious David in his various disobediences and sins: his adultery, polygamy, promiscuity, and indirect murder. In this chapter, we witness how Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors went to various degrees to remediate and excuse David's behaviors. One of the strengths of this chapter is precisely the varying tactics that the Abrahamic religions took, while also in many ways demonstrating the core privileges of medieval, Christian masculinity, whereby all these deeds could be easily overlooked or interpreted as merely allegorical (113) and reintegrated into ideals of medieval kingship (134).

In the fourth chapter, Karras takes on the matter of David's composition of the Psalms and his dancing before God, arguing for these as creative actions not often gendered as masculine, but rather feminine (136–137). And, in the final chapter, the book turns to the matter of genealogy, both in terms of David establishing the lineage of his house and thinking through the ancestry of Jesus and its own contradictions in the Gospels.

While Karras is interested in fleshing out the ideals of masculinity, through David, her book suggests other possible routes for examining how a normative, gender binary was established. Another book, for example, might have sought to trace the paradigm structured by the opposition of Eve/David, asking how a gender binary was reinforced through their dialogic figurations. To the present reader, what this book demonstrates very well in its chapters is how David's erring imperfection seems to define the formulation of medieval masculinity beyond any discrete attribute covered in the book's individual chapters. In other words, masculinity seems to be defined by the freedom to willfully err and sin, yet still find redemption. Masculinity almost seems to require that imperfection, sin, and error be present so that they can then be forgiven—a latitude (or, better yet, criterion) explicitly forbidden for women, who could only see Eve as the precipice from which there was no return.

Thou Art The Man is an immensely readable book, both for the novice and expert alike, that leads us to reevaluate and deepen all our assumptions of David's literary, theological, and artistic representation in the Middle Ages. This is a foundational book that will serve as the groundwork for not only further studies on David but also in that it urges us to think further about the masculinity of Jesus and the paradigms used to articulate a binary gender identity in the Middle Ages. Further research should work to shatter many of the cis-gender expectations of medieval gender studies and use this work to build new horizons for the complex dynamics of gender variance in the religious communities of the European Middle Ages.