Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature

David LaGuardia is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College

• Introduction; Chapter 1 Masculinity as an Intertextual Concept in Legal, Pastoral, and Clerical Documents of the Late Middle Ages; Chapter 2 Masculinities in the Intertext; Chapter 3 Intertextual Masculinity in Rabelais’s Tiers Livre; Chapter 4 Toward Unstable Masculinity in Brantôme’s Recueil des dames; Chapter 101 Conclusion;

'David La Guardia's study of masculinity in medieval and early modern French texts argues that masculinity is an intertextual practice, that men write and read for other men, passing on exemplary stories that constitute a kind of "guidebook" for normative masculinity. Examining Rabelais, the Cent nouvelles, and Brantôme, among others, La Guardia draws on extensive erudition to make an argument whose implications go beyond the scope of the study itself. Intertextual Masculinity makes substantial and original contributions to the understanding of normative masculine gender in early modernity and beautifully illustrates the degree to which gendering is a rhetorical practice of intertextuality, then as now.' Carla Freccero, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA ’Intertextual Masculinities is a bold and convincing reassessment of these consistently fascinating texts in the light of modern gender and queer theory and classical and medieval models. LaGuardia’s background in late medieval studies provides a rich and erudite map that anchors sixteenth-century literary practice in its vernacular past - a particularly rewarding endeavour that reasserts the connections between medieval and early modern that are often ignored or broken... a provocative and challenging book that raises very pertinent and insistent questions about the study of gender, both then and now.’ French Studies