Product Description

John Boswell's National Book Award-winning study of the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the early Christian West was a groundbreaking work that challenged preconceptions about the Church's past relationship to its gay members - among them priests, bishops, and even saints - when it was first published twenty-five years ago. The historical breadth of Boswell's research (from the Greeks to Aquinas) and the variety of sources consulted make this one of the most extensive treatments of any single aspect of Western social history. "Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality", still fiercely relevant today, helped form the disciplines of gay and gender studies, and it continues to illuminate the origins and operations of intolerance as a social force.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25621 in Books
• Published on: 1981-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 442 pages

Review
"Truly groundbreaking work. Boswell reveals unexplored phenomena with an unfailing erudition." - Michel Foucault "What makes this work so exciting is not simply its content - fascinating though that is - but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." - Jean Strouse, Newsweek"

About the Author
John Boswell (1947-94) was the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale University and the author of The Royal Treasure, The Kindness of Strangers, and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.

Customer Reviews

A brilliant exegesis which will fascinate or repel
Boswell's book puts the reader through torture in the first third, as he establishes the basis for his arguments, drawing from texts as diverse as Persian and Arabic in a profoundly difficult exegesis. Despite the fact that many of his core texts are untranslated, the torture and the wait are worthwhile. The book develops into a vast and humane introduction to great swathes of social history. As Boswell points out, this is merely groundwork for future generations to follow up, but as a study in the brilliance of human thought, a loving response to the needs of gay Christians and as a fascinating plunge into history, this book will draw the strongest response from the reader who gets to the end. The people most able to do this will be those with a current interest, whether positive or negative, in the subject.

A must read but with a few cautions
Boswell's books are like a breath of fresh air. To get the most out of them you need to read it as a history book (which is what it is). What in my view he does prove vey convincingly is that the Church has not consistently been anti-gay; there have been wildly varying degrees of tolerance and persecution which have usually correlated with persecution of other groups as well, and at its height tolerance of homosexuality included gay people being open about their gayness and accepted even in ecclesiastic positions.

This much, I think, is proven.

On the negative side he appears to state that scripture had nothing to do with anti-gay sentiment. I think it is important to open up the interpretation of the key verses as he does but I tend to think that there is a constellation of values (celibacy, chastity and virginity for example) as well as a number of homonegative verses (even if a more thorough analysis does not lead logically to the exclusion of gays) did in fact contribute to the severe curtailment of homosexuality and bisexualiy which had been more broadly tolerated in the Greco-Roman world (ie as pederasty).

The one proviso here is that these early reference seem to have in their view age structured homosexuality (references include giving up boys for sodomy, do not corrupt young boys etc and Paul's division of homosexuality into malakos and arsenekoites also implies a dividion of labour not seen in egalitarian - ie modern - homosexuality.

The extensive analysis of scripture does show that it has not consistently been understood as being homonegative in church history, though in my view it probably did play this role in the early christian communities, especially as hey were living under an apocalyptic expectation of the end of the world. Its just that thereafter Church history displays a wide variety of differing attitudes.

It shows that acceptance of gay people within the church is not a new phenomenon and that this has been a constant and often positive theme throughout the history of the church.

A scholarly plea
I have been the teaching assistant for a course entitled 'Theology of the Welcoming Church'; we have had wonderful diverse groups of students, from traditional/conservative to liberal in background, multi-denominational in affiliation. It always promises to be a good course and provide dialogue for better understanding even if it does not resolve the issue for all in one way or the other. Just for the record -- I am trying to stay as objectively neutral as I can be; I have my biases too, but given that I don't have the answers either (how do I reconcile scripture and tradition with the experience of people I know?) I guess mostly what you'll read here are my fumblings in the dark.

Boswell's book 'Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality' is an early scholastic contribution to the history of how homosexuality has been treated by the Christian church establishment from the beginning of the Christian era to about the fourteenth century. It won the American Book Award for History in 1981. Boswell (now deceased) was a professor at Yale; I have a friend on faculty at the IU Music School who went to high school with him.

Perhaps Boswell's argument can be summed up fairly easily in that, through examples in contemporary literature and records (legal, theological, literary, etc.), homosexuality was not recognised in the same way that it is today, and therefore that it also was not condemned in the way that it is today by much of the church. Friendships and close relationships often developed into sexual ones; these were not considered unusual. There was a variation from culture to culture, but the widespread condemnation of homosexuality didn't begin until thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when tolerance (not only of this, but of religious opinions in general) ceased to be the rule, as the church (a dominant military, political, and social force as well) attempted to consolidate power.

Boswell's research is extensive and impressive, but his interpretations have remained hotly debated for the 20 years since this book was first published. One scholar-friend of mine who knew Boswell said that his psychological motivation for writing the book (this is a theme that was not designed to win favour in academia at that point in time) was to confront the Catholic church, in which he as a gay man did not feel welcome. And, there is probably some truth to that. Knowing that framework, it is interesting to re-read passages to see where objective scholarship slips into subtle reframing.

Nonetheless, this book provides an excellent historical framework, and cannot be ignored in the current debate. I encountered this book first many years ago when my church was undergoing a discernment process, and it was useful in many ways. Boswell claimed to know of isolated communities and continuing strands where such tolerance continued to the present. He promised on a few occasions (at least semi-publicly) that he would reveal these in the next volume, Same Sex Unions, produced many years later, and an even more controversial text.