Wrestling in the Moonlight: The Politics of Masculinity in the Middle English Popular Romance Gamelyn

Abstract

This essay investigates the political dimensions of the male body’s portrayal in the Middle English popular romance Gamelyn, a tale with close links to the Robin Hood ballads. In this tale, the homosocial and even homoerotic aspects of a semi-nude wrestling match are employed to engender a utopian space of a supposedly classless masculinity seeking to erase the narrative’s intense ideological contradictions. Depicting a social sphere at the lowest end of the chivalric classes wherein the distinction between masters and servants is constantly under threat and the efficacy of masculine violence in the shaping of a human destiny becomes deeply questionable, Gamelyn first raises and then discards the utopian specter of a paradoxically nonaggressive aggression literally denuded of all social distinctions. The reason why that specter must, ultimately, be discarded is that, in the final analysis, an anticourtly masculinity reduced to pure physicality proves incapable of providing a viable alternative to the dominant elite forms of constructing masculinity. Gamelyn hence testifies to the extent to which medieval masculinities are always determined by power relations.