Thou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages

"How do we approach the study of masculinity in the past?" Ruth Mazo Karras asks. Medieval documents that have come down to us tell a great deal about the things that men did, but not enough about what they did specifically as men, or what these practices meant to them in terms of masculinity. Yet no less than in our own time, masculinity was a complicated construct in the Middle Ages.

In Thou Art the Man, Karras focuses on one figure, King David, who was important in both Christian and Jewi...