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Paperback
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
"Truly groundbreaking work. Boswell reveals unexplored phenomena with an unfailing erudition."—Michel Foucault
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.
"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
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| 3.5 Stars for a Good, But Not Excellent Start Into the Issue |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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I read the 1981 edition of the 1980 book. With 448 pages the book appears to be exhaustive. However, subtract the bibliography etc. and the 67 p appendixes of quoted and/or translated historic documents and we are left with 338 pages. These in turn have to get halved, because of the extensive footnotes, leaving some 170 regular text pages - a rather thin book, actually.
As was the science book standard at the time, the author shows off his education with copious use of Latin, Old Greek and occasional modern foreign languages in the footnotes, not always translating them, in the case of Old Greek not even transscribing it into the Latin alphabet. Considering that some pages may consist of just seven regular text lines and 43 lines in small print of footnotes, this adds to an obstacle reading.
Describing the relationship of the (Catholic) Church to what much later has been termed homosexuality - including a comparison to the previous Greek, Roman and to the contemporary Muslim Iberia -, John Boswell comes to the conclusion that (usually male) homosexuality wasn't continuously banned by the Church before the first general council on the issue in 1179. Critics have argued that Boswell may have overemphasized and downplayed one and the other historic notion of homosexuality correspondingly. For my reading purpose that is irrelevant, as I was seeking facts based on documents and nobody to my knowledge ever challenged those. He puts the start of organized downpression of homosexuality in the context of an expansion of government supervision, pogroms against Jews and the crusades.
Boswell offers different interpretations of the homophobic Bible lines, averring that some of them don't even deal with homosexuality at all. He is more elaborately with the Sodom story than the other ones, which I find a bit disappointing. The standard rethoric of homophobic religious fundamentalists is the claim of eisegesis (the interpretation of a holy text by reading into it one's own ideas) for anyone who doesn't agree with them (i.e. their own form of eisegesis). I don't know about most of the other (supposedly or real) homophobic sections of the Bible (that's what I intended to find out more thoroughly), but I do know about the Sodom story. For me, taking sides on homosexuality is completely irrelevant, when it comes to this story. It is a central story. Boswell's mind is focused on his point that it is NOT on something (homosexuality). My focus is, what it IS about. Greed. Caused by the constructed belief of separation (from one another = egoism). Manifesting itself in inhospitality and leading to ever more pitilessness and ruthlessness of the in-group against the out-group (concerning country and countries union borders). Which is the most severe problem, this global system we live in is currently facing (and has been facing ever sin-ce colonialism). To mask the central holy text passages on that with something completely different has much more severe consequences than "merely" downpressing any given constructed minority. It means to take away a teaching of enjoining us from engaging in that sinful greed mechanism. This has nothing to do with "eisegesis": Holy texts, such as the Bible, teach that lesson over and over again. The Sodom story is the most intense one and certain people, already fallen for the sin of greed, had and have an interest to avert attention from its message. At least Boswell succeeds in referencing some examples of early Christian teachers who still communicated the original message. So, please: Argue about whatever interpretations about whatever Bible sections on the pro and con about homosexuality, but leave the Sodom story out of it. I find it daring to suggest a case of eisegesis, when in reverse it cannot coherently explained which words of the story are supposed to refer to homosexuality. I am amazed that Boswell doesn't mention that (the raped) angels aren't even gendered to begin with.
The book succeeds in listing many (but not all) the prohibitions and regulations which used to come together with those of banning homosexuality. All of which have become ridiculous and/or completely ignored today, begging for the question, why the homophobic one has been able to sustain itself. These include not touching one's own penis during urination, not watching animals during copulation, not dyeing fabrics, not shaving and not bathing regularly. Loving one's wife too much would be shameful and the failure to divorce a barren wife as unnatural as sinful masturbation. Or the disgust of one church leader (Clement) at the thought of a woman taking an active role in heterosexuality, i.e. enjoying the procedure. Curiously, Boswell doesn't list the punishments, e.g. cruel execution of wet dreaming youths and the VICTIMS of rape, which would have excelled the point even more.
On the other hand, Boswell elaborates on wrong (and most funny) scientific ideas of the time about animals, deriving even more wrong conclusions about homosexual humans from that. At the time, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (Stonewall Inn Editions) hadn't been written yet, a book even thicker than this one on some 450 species with known homosexual behavior. Also, Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People will be of interest.
Some time ago I had read in different sources that the early and Christianity pre-ceding passages of holy texts had been faked and/or mistranslated, also in the homosexual context. I hoped to get elaborations on that in this book. I hoped in vain. (Please leave a comment, if you know more about that and/or a source.)
Of interest may be Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, Colonialism and Homosexuality, and Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities. For more on the persecution of homosexuals in Christian Europe, read Homosexuality and Civilization. Shortly before John Boswell passed on on Christmas in 1994, he published Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe on the blessing of homosexual couples by the early Orthodox Church.
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| Whatever.. |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Whatever side of the fence you sit, or, indeed, whether on the fence, one thing is certain -- you'll either love or hate this work. It is a thesis. It is a mind-opening presentation of facts and ideas. It is worth reading and begs owning. Whether for or again', you'll only regret not picking it up. Whatever..
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| Required Reading But Not The Final Word |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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This impressive book, winner of the National Book Award, is an incisive, passionate piece of advocacy scholarship concerning the development of anti-homosexual attitudes in the pre-modern era. It's required reading mostly because of the arguments that it lays out (many of which are regrettably stretched too thin), the sources that deploys and explicates, and the fact that it was the book that really got the ball rolling on further discussion of these issues.
Boswell's main thesis is that intolerance of homosexuality began in earnest only in the 12th Century, and that homosexuality was both common and tolerated by Christianity and the Christian states prior to that time. Boswell was a convert to Roman Catholicism, and appears to have struggled mightily as a scholar to disconnect the anti-homosexual teachings of the (current) church of his day from what he perceived to have been different attitudes in the pre-medieval church -- essentially in an attempt to drive a wedge between "early" Christianity, on the one hand, and intolerance of homosexuality, on the other. The thesis suggests that such intolerance only came later, and therefore was not intrinsic or important in the earlier periods of the church (and therefore was something that could also be discarded by the church of today as something it did not view as essential in an earlier time).
Unfortunately, Boswell, in his zeal to demonstrate his ideas, regrettably either downplays most of the contra evidence, or interprets it in what can mostly be described as rather tendentious, strained and unconvincing ways. If one is looking at history more or less objectively, without a preconceived attempt to "rehabilitate" the reputation of the early church vis-a-vis homosexuality, it's very hard to accept Boswell's thesis. History records that the early Christian Fathers like Tertullian and Clement railed quite a bit against homosexuality, common as it was in the Hellenistic world of late antiquity. After the adoption by the Empire of Christianity, history again records that statutes punishing homosexuality with death or castration almost immediately began to appear in Roman legal codes, and began to be enforced. St John Chrysostom preached some of the most virulently anti-homosexual sermons in the history of Christianity already in the late 4th Century, and the Emperor Justinian instituted extremely harsh penalties against homosexuals. The historical record, viewed objectively, is reasonably clear: institutional Christianity was hostile to homosexual activity from a very early point.
Of course, this doesn't mean that Christianity, as a belief system, must be anti-homosexual. But for Boswell, that kind of thinking was not good enough because he was interested not in rehabilitating Christianity as a belief system, but in rehabilitating institutional Christianity (particularly the Catholic Church that he so loved) from its anti-homosexual history. Unfortunately, to do so, much history has to be ignored, downplayed or interpreted in very strained ways. And ultimately, this is the undoing of Boswell's thesis. When reading this book -- which glitters with erudition and scholarship -- one can't help rooting for Boswell. You *want* his thesis to be right .... but ultimately, it just doesn't convince. An objective view of history -- while remaining aloof from the question of whether anti-homosexuality is intrinsic to Christianity as a matter of faith (that's an issue for the theologians) -- clearly demonstrates that institutional Christianity has been profoundly anti-homosexual from the time it became "institutional".
Nevertheless, the book is required reading for anyone interested in these topics, mainly because it highlights the issues, frames the debate and (undoubtedly) reflects the work of a brilliant mind.
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| I enjoy this.. |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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I enjoy this..It's very good and phenomenal in that it's the first work of it's kind really. It covers the Greeks to Aquinas. John Boswell is a cutie. This has a wonderfully attractive cover, as well as the original one which is no longer shown of a second-century mosaic. This covers the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century. It is extensive with many footnotes..I like it, that's all..It won awards..Go buy this..
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| Rhetorical tour de force, lacking in substantiation. |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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Boswell's work is an impressive volume which has all the appearance of a powerful academic treatise, offering a revolutionary new interpretation of the attitudes and practices of the early Christian peroid vis-a-vis homosexuality. Unfortunately, the central thesis Boswell offers, that the virulently homophobic standpoint of the modern Church only makes its entry sometime after the 12th century CE, rests on little more than whimsical interpretation of the evidence and inexcusable omission of contrary data.
Boswell fails to consider the congruence of all available evidence from the periods in question, his coverage of the attitudes of the foundational period of the Christian church is at best sporadic, and is guilty of nothing less than cherry-picking confirmatory evidence to bolster his argument. In an effort to reconcile his own Catholicism with the crimes of the Church, he instead sacrificed scholastic aptitude and intellectual honesty upon a compatibilist altar. More accurate and balanced treatments of the history of homosexuality in this period are to be found, e.g., Crompton (2003). Also see criticisms of Boswell's work, e.g., Johansson et al. (1981, 1985, 2003).
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