Separating the Men from the Goats

Medieval society was a society of collectivities in which identity came from membership in particular groups. ¹ Many of these groups—knights, monks, apprentices, guildspeople—underwent particular initiation ceremonies that marked their selection or separation from the rest of society. ² In knighthood, for example, the ritual of dubbing admitted one into a military elite. For men of the aristocracy, it also marked a coming of age, the attainment of manhood. The entrance into a university, into the elite intellectual world, also marked the acceptance into a masculine subculture. The ritual process of initiation into that subculture reveals a great deal about medieval ideas of what it meant to be a man—as distinguished from a boy, from a woman and also from a beast.