The most comprehensive volume on the intersections between Gender and Affect Global and Interdisciplinary A key volume in this emerging area

"Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture" proposes a definition of gender like the Aristotelian virtue of moderation, which requires the presence of excess and lack in order to exist. What Todd W. Reeser terms "moderate masculinity" requires two non-moderate others - one incarnating excess and one embodying lack - for its definition. This type of alterity takes a number of different forms - including women/effeminacy, the new world native, the nobility, the hermaphrodite, and the sodomite. The book begins with a reading of this brand of masculinity in Aristotle and then proceeds to textual analyses of canonical and non-canonical writers of the Renaissance, such as Rabelais, Montaigne, Erasmus, Lery, and Artus.

The works of Francois Rabelais--"Gargantua," "Pantagruel," the "Tiers livre," and the "Quart livre"--embody the Renaissance spirit of discovery and are crucial to the development of early modern prose and to the birth of the novel. Rabelais's exuberant satire deals not only with the major cultural and intellectual issues of his time but also with issues of interest to students today.

This volume suggests the materials that can be used in teaching Rabelais: editions, translations, criticism, Web sites, music, artwork, and films. The volume's essays present strategies for the classroom, discussing the classical and biblical allusions; the context of humanism and evangelical reform; various themes (giants, monsters, war); both feminism and masculinity as vexing subjects; Rabelais's erudition; and the challenges of teaching his inventive language, his ambiguity, and his scatology.

When we talk of platonic love or relationships today, we mean something very different from what Plato meant. For this, we have fifteenth and sixteenth-century European humanists to thank. As these scholars-most of them Catholic-read, digested, and translated Plato, they found themselves faced with a fundamental problem: how to be faithful to the text yet not propagate pederasty or homosexuality. In Setting Plato Straight, Todd W. Reeser undertakes the first sustained and comprehensive study of Renaissance textual responses to Platonic same-sex sexuality. Reeser mines an expansive collection of translations, commentaries, and literary sources to study how Renaissance translators transformed ancient eros into non-erotic, non-homosexual relations. He analyzes the interpretive lenses translators employed and the ways in which they read and reread Plato's texts. In spite of this cleansing, Reeser finds surviving traces of Platonic same-sex sexuality that imply a complicated, recurring process of course-correction-of setting Plato straight.