Volume 37, Number 18 · November 22, 1990
Sex and Power in the Middle Ages
By Maurice Keen
Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
by James A. Brundage
University of Chicago Press, 674 pp., $22.50 (paper)
The Medieval Idea of Marriage
by Christopher N.L. Brooke
Oxford University Press, 325 pp., $29.95
Joan of Arc and Richard III: Sex, Saints, and Government in the Middle Ages
by Charles T. Wood
Oxford University Press, 269 pp., $34.50
The story is told of a young Oxford don, newly commissioned in the infantry at the outbreak of war in 1939, returning to his college after his first dinner with the regular officers of his regimental mess. He was asked what they were like. 'Charming people,' he replied, 'but quite extraordinary. They don't seem to be interested at all in politics. They're interested in sex.' A military man, musing on the three books under review on his way home from the Staff College (or the Pentagon), might be justified for thinking that, fifty years later, the shoe was now on the other foot.
Review, 4135 words
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