Brozyna on Gender and Sexuality
Brozyna, Martha A. ed. Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages: A Medieval Source Documents Reader. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2005.
According to Martha Brozyna, gender is a cultural construct based on perceived differences between the sexes (1). It defines roles for the sexes, attitudes and sexuality. Gender and sexuality in the middle ages cannot be understood by the modern reader without an understanding of the institutions, customs, events and documents that created these constructs. Brozyna’s cross-disciplinary compilation of documents, literature, laws and ideas are intended to help a modern student to suspend their current context and look at medieval studies from a historical context. She divides her book into nine sections: the Bible; Christian thought; chronicles; law; biology, medicine, and science; literature; witchcraft and heresy; Judaism; and Islam. Her audience is students who are just being introduced to medieval studies. The book acts like a survey course in all aspects of medieval culture that influence gender and sexuality. She looks at a wide array of material, from the Qur’an to “Ballade for Fat Margot,” a poem about a prostitute and her brothel owner.
The majority of the book is an anthology of medieval cultural sources. There is very little analysis done by Brozyna at all, though she does include brief paragraphs before each source to explain the historical significance, discuss the author or mention themes of the work. Her writing is plain and easy to read, and most if not all of her sources have been modernized for easy reading as well. She introduces each text with as little analysis as possible, and appears to be attempting to keep any outside influence from her book. There is very little to summarize besides her excellent variety of texts and her lack of commentary on any text.
Since Brozyna’s goal was to introduce the uninitiated reader to medieval gender constructs and sexuality, she has achieved her goal. The wide variety of texts in the book gives readers a multi-faceted view of gender in the middle ages that would be hard to find in another source. She lets her readers make their own conclusions about the meaning of the texts by giving very little of her own voice to the book. To be perfectly fair, Brozyna has left very little out of her anthology except perhaps her own opinions. Her book could have been greatly improved had Brozyna been willing to comment on the different issues brought up. Her assumption seems to be that her audience is high school students who are assigned the book as preliminary reading material to medieval studies. In this case, it is perfectly acceptable for her to decline statements on the texts in favor of the teacher leading discussions on her work. The book would have improved had she been willing to address her work to college students who would have been able to analyze her book and her writings on their own and make their own conclusions. By trying to keep her bias out of the texts she removes the usefulness of Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages for students looking for insight and analyses of the texts she includes.
The best part about Brozyna’s book is that there are probably not very many books with such a wide variety of texts included. Her book would be very useful to any class based on medieval studies with a concentration on gender and sexuality. It was especially useful that Brozyna does not consider gender to be a focus on women. Her book looks at the roles of both men and women in medieval life as well as feminine and masculine sexual traits. The texts she includes are fascinating in their insight into a medieval mindset, but they would afford little aid if one was writing a research paper. That is her weakest point. If Brozyna would have been willing to include either her own analysis of the texts or other medievalist’s writings on the texts her book would be a wonderful research tool in the hands of any student interested in the subject. Unfortunately in her quest for unbiased reading she continues to allow students to read with a modern perspective, despite her goal to open minds to medieval cultural constructs.
