Amanda McVitty's Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England: Gender, Law and Political Culture is a very important book. In her hands, what might seem at first a narrow subject—the gendered aspects of treason prosecution in England between 1380 and 1420—becomes a major reconsideration of the foundations of English political and legal structures and the nature of political subjecthood. McVitty's insistence on the inherent masculine gendering of the concept of treason in this crucial period reveals the extent to which the very underpinnings of politics, law, and the state assumed the maleness of the political subject, a deep structure embedded in the formation of the modern Western polity.

McVitty's argument unfolds over the course of six chapters that consider hot moments over the tumultuous four decades between 1380 and 1420. In the first chapter, “True Men and Traitors at the Court of Richard II, 1386–8,” McVitty considers the treason accusations and trials of this first major crisis of King Richard's personal rule. As she notes, the foundational 1352 treason statute—still today sometimes referenced in political rhetoric—had left much ill-defined and unclear. As opposition to Richard's employment of favorites in preference to his royal uncles came to a head, treason accusations were lobbed from both sides, deploying both conceptualizations of personal betrayal drawn from chivalric culture and ideas of loyalty to the public good; under both of these lay an understanding of political relationships as gendered. Masculine bonds of loyalty and service, of truth, of homosociality, were discursively arrayed against falsity, corruption, and betrayal; attacks on the body politic (envisaged always as male) were healed symbolically through the literal dismemberment of execution rituals carried out on traitors’ male physical bodies. Chapter 2, “Tyranny, Revenge and Manly Honour, 1397–8,” considers how a second major challenge to Richard II's rule generated further developments in ideas of treason, authority, and sovereignty. A statute of 1397 identified the male body of the king with the public authority of the state, but opposition voices employing chivalric notions of honor and devotion to the public good could be harnessed to argue for a separation between the office of kingship and the person of the king.

This line of argument would be famously employed by Richard II's cousin Henry in his deposition in 1399. The third chapter, “The Lancastrian Succession and the Masculine Body Politic,” follows Henry IV's work to consolidate his problematic usurpation of the throne through expansion of definitions of treason both as attacks on the community of the realm and the nation, at the same time as the new king attempted to define both his own person and his lineage as the literal body politic. As McVitty explores in this chapter, in both of these conceptualizations, treason was imagined as an “exclusively masculine crime” shaped by “cultural values of homosocial loyalty, chivalric honour and masculine trueness” (102); women were never prosecuted for high treason, even when evidence clearly demonstrated involvement in treasonous plots, as treason was so thoroughly identified with false manhood. Chapter 4, “From Public Speech to Treasonous Deed,” focuses on political speech as the basis for treason prosecutions in Henry IV's England, establishing important precedents. The fifth chapter, “Civic Manhood and Political Dissent,” explores the intersection of heresy and opposition to the early Lancastrian regime, particularly as lodged in in civic and legal circles, as distinct from more traditional political players among the aristocracy and at the royal court. Though different forms of masculinity predominated amongst lawyers, merchants, artisans, and civil servants than the chivalric codes of the nobility and landed gentry, nonetheless the emphasis on manliness as the center of political subjecthood remained. Chapter 6, “Chivalry, Homosociality, and the English Nation,” comes back to the landed classes who would remain at the center of power for centuries to come. As McVitty's examination of episodes of aristocratic treason in the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V shows, though treason continued to be seen as ruptures of the homosocial relationships of chivalric honor amongst elites, more and more the traitor was defined as one who betrayed public authority, the nation, the English people. More broadly, “changes in treason law were . . . helping to effect a more general re-alignment of the constitutional relationship between the king and the masculine body politic, and transforming the way gendered political subjecthood as a true man was envisaged and performed” (19).

This book will become the standard work not only on late medieval English treason law but also on gender and the state. McVitty's analysis brings together divergent areas scholarships and approaches from political, cultural, legal, and gender history. Recent emphases on masculinity, kingship, and governance; on vernacularity and political culture; on truth and trustworthiness in political, social, and legal rhetoric; and on legal records, discourses, and processes contribute to McVitty's analyses, which move nimbly from nuanced and subtle close readings of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century records to bold rethinking of the nature of late medieval politics and society. Over the course of the legal, political, and physical altercations in the troubled reigns of the eventually deposed Richard II and the usurping Henry IV and Henry V, treason came to be defined less as the betrayal of the person of the king and more as a crime against public authority and the state. Deeply woven into the fabric of treason law and of politics more broadly was the conceptualization of the political actor as gendered male.