In the Middle Ages, as today, there were a number of different ways in which one could be a man. Some medieval men, in Iceland as elsewhere in Europe, performed their gender as clergymen. Scholarship on clerical gender identity has, however, ‘lagged behind other studies of medieval gender’, as Jennifer D. Thibodeaux has noted. The relatively small amount of work so far done on Old Norse masculinities has, with only a few exceptions, focused on genres other than the biskupasögur (bishops’ sagas) and has consequently neglected specifically clerical masculinities. As Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir has recently remarked, ‘The topic of masculinity in the bishops’ sagas has been studied somewhat, but the corpus as a whole offers new readings for future scholars’.

Old Norse-Icelandic literary studies in general have neglected the fourteenth century in comparison with earlier periods, though that situation has been changing in recent years: Erika Sigurdson's characterization of the study of fourteenth-century Icelandic literature as a ‘nascent field’ stands despite the contribution of her recent monograph to the field's development. In the study of Old Norse masculinities, therefore, both the bishops’ sagas and the fourteenth century have been relatively neglected in comparison with other genres and earlier periods. This essay addresses both areas of neglect by examining masculinity in Lárentíus saga biskups, a life of Bishop Laurentius Kálfsson of Hólar, who was born in 1267, was consecrated bishop of the northern Icelandic see in 1324, and died there in 1331.

Two vellum manuscripts of Lárentíus saga, survive: AM 406 a I 4to, from c. 1530 (known as A), and an abbreviated version in AM 180 b fol., from c. 1500 (the B text). The end is missing in both manuscripts, but some other lacunae can be filled from the paper manuscript AM 404 4to (referred to as Þ). The prologue to the saga states that its author was in Laurentius's service and that he drew both on the bishop's own words and on Icelandic annals.