Why, David LaGuardia asks, was the cuckold so central to late medieval and Renaissance French literature? Beginning with this question, LaGuardia's intricate analysis shows how the cuckold was but one, albeit crucial, figure in a vast early modern intertext that worked continuously towards establishing a normative, yet ultimately unfixed, masculinity. Central to LaGuardia's thesis is that masculinity, while both historically contingent and produced through processes of performance and interpellation, is a product of textual, and thus material, practice: “among all of its material manifestations . . . masculinity for a wide range of literate men existed most authentically in a specific mode of reading, writing, and speaking” (120). That is to say, masculinity comes into being in the rhetorical practice of telling, writing, and reading stories about adultery and cuckoldery, by men and for men.

That textual practice is far-reaching, inscribed as much in late medieval clerical texts about marriage (chapter 1), as it is in comedic and literary texts such as the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, Rabelais's Tiers livre, and Brantôme's Dames galantes (chapters 2–4). At their core, these texts share a gendered practice: the telling of stories (legal or fictional) by men for men, that implicitly works to define appropriate behavior for men, based on the regulation of sexuality within marriage. The preoccupation with marriage in all of these texts reveals masculinity to be fundamentally a relational concept. Within the narrative framework, masculinity takes shape within the contours of marriage, between the figures of the (betrayed) husband and wife, but also between men, notably the cuckold and the usurping lover; outside the narrative it inevitably takes shape between storyteller and his (male) audience.

Masculinity proves to be a spatial and visual concept. Taking shape in relation to specific spaces, particularly the domestic space, masculinity is also determined by its visual projection and confirmation, what La Guardia calls “scopic desire.” It is manifest in “the pleasure experienced by the normative masculine subject when he sees what he wants to see . . . the projection of his own gender being into the domestic space” (8). It is also determined by the surveillance of women's bodies. In other words, to occupy a masculine subject position, men have to display control of gendered bodies — especially women's bodies — and talk and write about that display and their own relation to it; and that talking and writing must be, in turn, received and recognized by other men.

What emerges from this practice of producing and consuming stories is a highly dynamic concept of masculinity, one that remains nevertheless a unified entity. For LaGuardia, masculinity is chiefly the occupying of certain subject positions within a network of relations among men and women that is constantly shifting and diversifying in an ever growing body of texts; in this sense, as La Guardia himself notes, one might more properly speak of early modern masculinities in the plural, rather than in the singular sense. Those masculinities have the potential to become infinitely multiple with the proliferation of texts, and LaGuardia's conclusion points to some provocative questions about the effects that the advent of print might have had on concepts of masculinity.

Since LaGuardia draws on an extensive body of theory for his analysis, it is not surprising that his discussion resonates with contemporary understandings of masculinity that have emerged at the intersection of gender and queer theory. Intertextual Masculinity thus adds to an ongoing analysis of gender as a relational and plural concept, a plurality that is not simply the product of postmodernity, but that has defined masculinity (and, implicitly, all gender) at least as far back as the late Middle Ages. The book also inevitably invites questions about the textual relation between genders: if, for instance, the cuckold is an integral figure to the construction of masculinity, what happens when a woman appears to tell a story of adultery and cuckoldery (as is the case for Marguerite de Navarre, whom LaGuardia mentions briefly, among others)? Although that question remains to be answered by other scholars, LaGuardia's rich analysis paves the way for future studies of how gender, all gender, is produced rhetorically, materially, and intertextually, in the early modern period as well as today.