The words of the forty-fourth president of the United States, referring to the members of the US Senate, would have been instantly recognized and admired by twelfth-century writers of political narrative, as an instance of facetia, the demonstration of an urbane wit intended to oil the cogs of a tightly wound, fast-moving, court society. Over the last three decades, there has been an increasing accumulation of scholarly discussion on the nature, function, and historical significance of this social world and the place of gender within it. Much of it has been written, explicitly or implicitly, in response to Norbert Elias' classic, The Civilizing Process, which was published in 1939 but much more widely consulted after its English translation decades later. There Elias argued that it was the courts of early modern European monarchs that first came to act as powerful mechanisms for regularized competition and political cohesion by taming the fiercely independent and volatile instincts and activities of warrior elites.

A grand claim with a specific chronology, like the rise of the ‘middling sort’, or the discovery of the individual, or the emergence of emotional commitment within the family, Elias' thesis threw down a gauntlet of modernization theory irresistible to medievalists. C. Stephen Jaeger was one of the first to claim courtliness for the medieval period, by tracing its origins back to tenth-century Germany and the Ottonian ‘courtier bishop’.

These associated articles offer exploratory investigations into constructions of masculinity at the courts of the Anglo-Norman kings as contributions to the larger study of gender in the Anglo-Norman realm. Using contemporary chronicle accounts, each examines representations of men and masculine behaviour at the royal court during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Recent historiography has seen this period as critical in the emergence of courtly behaviour and ideas. Much of this has been in response to Norbert Elias' great book, The Civilizing Process, which saw the courts of early modern European monarchs as focal points for the diffusion of civilized behavioural norms that helped stabilize the state as a whole. It was C. Stephen Jaeger, however, who first investigated how Elias' thesis related to the Middle Ages and ultimately challenged the Elias narrative. For Jaeger the great moment and mechanism of social change was to be found not in the early modern period but in late tenth-century Ottonian Germany. It was here in the figure of the courtier bishop that Jaeger traced how a new social code, devised from classical models, allowed the court to be identified as a civilizing institution that helped promote political cohesion. Despite their chronological differences both Elias and Jaeger are concerned with larger historical narratives and debates concerning the role of the court within the transformation of the state and the nation.