From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe. By Ruth Mazo Karras. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. ii + 248. $45 (cloth); $17.50 (paper).

"Medieval Europe was a man's world," Ruth Mazo Karras writes, although not all men exercised power and influence in it. In this lucid and compact study, Karras examines the processes of becoming male in the court, the university, and the craftsman's workshop, three cultural worlds in which boys grew into "three kinds of manhood" (p. 17). She looks at each of these forms of masculinity as it appeared in the fourteenth century, the period in which she believes each was fully developed and, in her words, "more clearly defined and ritualized than before " (p. 159).

Allen J. Frantzen
Loyola University Chicago