In her first book, Isabel Davis presents a close reading of a number of late medieval English texts to argue for the emergence of a new type of masculine self-representation, subjectivity, if not identity in an urban setting: Geoffrey Chaucer's “Canon's Yeoman's Prologue” and “Tale,” John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Thomas Hoccleve's The Regiment of Princes and The Series, William Langland's Piers Plowman, and Thomas Usk's The Testament of Love. She argues that these texts betray a profound anxiety and ambiguity about masculinity when read in light of urban labor ideals and expectations in their tension with changing definitions of “home” and “family.”

Interrogating the professionally more established yet increasingly outdated (or socially disempowered) nonurbanite roles of agriculturalist (Piers Plowman) and knight errant (Confessio Amantis) with the emerging urban labor models of apprentice (“Canon's Yeoman's Prologue” and “Tale”) and professional writer (per Hoccleve and Usk), Davis proposes that these texts illustrate the widespread unease with which the demands of an emerging urban bureaucracy, focused on productivity and conformity, were filtered through individual masculine desires and subjectivities. Many of the emerging class of bureaucrats were clerici uxorati, married clerks, a social status with no established habitus attached to it.

Davis furthermore argues that anxiety about new work roles left its trace and imprint on narrative conventions, breaking them open, blurring genre boundaries, and opening discursive spaces for irony and satire, revisions, and multiple narrative betwixt-and-betweens. Her textual explorations are anchored visually and metaphorically in her reading of a misericord from St. Nicholas's Chapel in King's Lynn, which depicts a master carver at work in his workshop with three apprentices, the artisan identified by his carved initials W. V. In Davis's view, the communal relationship between male apprentices and master seems antagonistic, yet the fact of the existence of such self-representation simultaneously asserts a new self-confidence and self-reflection tempered by a sense of irony and perhaps insecurity—after all, the site of such self-authored representation is a misericord.

In order to build a persuasive link between the medieval texts and authorial persona, if not lived identity and subjectivity, Davis settles on the heuristically applied term “life writing,” favoring it over the lesser employed “autobiography” and the rejected concepts of “perigraphy” (per James Olney) and “pseudo-autobiography” (per Lawrence de Looze), which seem to deny textual access to a lived stratum of subjectivity. She takes issue with positions in critical men's studies that posit a preindividualistic, presubjective Middle Ages, arguing instead for the medieval existence of self-reflective male subjectivity, which emerges in the uneasy friction between work and desire, between labor and the home, ever unstable and existing precariously in a dialectic of conformity and resistance, produced by and through anxiety, and yet distinctly medieval, specifically post–Black Death English “medieval,” rather than early modern.

In her analysis of Piers Plowman, William Langland thus is described as earnestly developing a masculinist ethics focused on the husband and worker as an agent who restores communal order yet is tormented by the guilt of marital sexuality. Thomas Usk's analyzed texts, the Testament of Love and Appellum, are read as ambivalent representations of masculinity and companionate marriage that interrogate social conventions and definitions of the male clerical self. According to Davis's interpretation, the Confessio Amantis articulates the shiftlessness and instability of new masculinities in the absence of legible and uncontested male authority figures. Chaucer's “Canon's Yeoman” takes on the subversive and potentially destructive potential inherent in the role of live-in youthful male apprentice, a migrant with little social investment yet much needed capacities in the emerging urban household economy. Thomas Hoccleve's life writings reveal anxiety about masculinity, labor, and sexuality contained in poetic exhortations to a chaste life and status-appropriate dress, a topos usually reserved for regulating femininity.

Davis writes in a clear, carefully measured style, thoughtfully aligning texts and theses, coolly assembling a metatext that in the end feels like the retrieval of a medieval male lament, a dirge on the loss of masculine vitality, perfectly in line with Sigmund Freud's proposition that civilization's hold on individuals is fraught with ever-mounting discontent. In this new theoretical round of complicating gender conventions by exploring the heuristic potential of critical men's studies, another medieval sculptural metaphor comes to mind as I read Davis's book as an example of life writing: the female, feminist, or postfeminist author (I am not quite sure which) as pieta, writing men's grief and anxiety, compassionate rather than unsettled while doing so. Apart from its implications for the generation of knowledge about the workings of masculine power as solidified in bureaucratic structures, this position raises an important methodological question, however: if we rehabilitate medieval masculine subjectivity, as suggested by Davis, with an exclusive focus on anxiety, ambivalence, irony, and the unsettling sense of loss (of fathers, of direction, of role models) in the face of growing urbanization and the rise of the married administrative class, do we then not in a backhanded fashion realign once again the terminus a quo of masculine subjectivity, situating its prenatal nonexistence somewhere in a preurban, early medieval masculine past? I am here also making a case for those contemporaries, whatever their gender and status, at the margins or outside London's clerical caste of authors. How could the clerics, via life writing, represent “proof” for the interiority of individuals and groups not like themselves? In other words, the choice to argue for the existence of medieval male subjectivity and to attach the development of such an argument to positivist “facts” such as the impact of the Black Death on English labor markets, the uneasy rise of the clerical class, and its fossilization in possibly autobiographically informed texts seems a category error on more than one account.