Description:
Exploring the different configurations of David in biblical and Talmudic commentaries, in Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular literatures across Europe, in liturgy, and in the visual arts, Ruth Mazo Karras offers a rich case study of how ideas and ideals of masculinity could bend to support a variety of purposes within and across medieval cultures.
Review Quotes: "Thou Art The Man is an immensely readable book, both for the novice and expert alike, that leads us to reevaluate and deepen all our assumptions of David's literary, theological, and artistic representation in the Middle Ages. This is a foundational book that will serve as the groundwork for not only further studies on David but also in that it urges us to think further about the masculinity of Jesus and the paradigms used to articulate a binary gender identity in the Middle Ages. Further research should work to shatter many of the cis-gender expectations of medieval gender studies and use this work to build new horizons for the complex dynamics of gender variance in the religious communities of the European Middle Ages."-- "Church History"