Frantzen grew up in rural Iowa and earned a degree in English from Loras College[2] and a PhD from the University of Virginia with a dissertation on the literature of penance in the Anglo-Saxon period.
[7][8] His first book was on the subject-matter of his dissertation, The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (1983);[9][10] he returned to the Anglo-Saxon penitential literature in Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from 'Beowulf' to 'Angels in America' (1998), in which, himself a gay man,[1] he argues that contrary to John Boswell's argument, same-sex relations were not tolerated more by the Church before the Norman Conquest, but rather the relationships were not "closeted"; he takes what he calls a "legitimist" rather than a "liberationist" view of the textual evidence.
[14] The former, in which Frantzen argues that Anglo-Saxon studies are increasingly regarded as hidebound because of the insular approach within the field, attracted much notice.
"[15] In 1994 Frantzen was the keynote speaker at a conference at the University of California, Berkeley that was published as Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (1997).
[17][18] After his retirement, Frantzen wrote a blog post dated September 2015 titled "How to Fight Your Way Out of the Feminist Fog" in which he aligned himself with the men's rights movement against what he argued were the anti-man demands of feminists; this provoked disapproving responses from certain medievalists after it was publicized in early 2016.