Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
by John Boswell
- New
- Paperback
- Condition
- New
- ISBN 10
- 022634522X
- ISBN 13
- 9780226345222
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Southport, Merseyside, United Kingdom
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About This Item
Paperback / softback. New. 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 thirty-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. Now in this thirty-fifth anniversary edition with a new foreword by leading queer and religious studies scholar Mark D. Jordan, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is still fiercely relevant. This landmark book helped form the disciplines of gay and gender studies, and it continues to illuminate the origins and operations of intolerance as a social force.
Synopsis
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is a study by Medieval Studies Professor John Boswell. It examines the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the early Christian West, and makes the case that homosexual behavior was relatively accepted until quite recently. Stonewall Book Award (1981) , National Book Critics' Circle Award Nominee (1980)
Reviews
On Apr 23 2014, a reader said:
In 1980, the AIDS virus was being diagnosed and a holocaust in small was getting under way; gay visibility was increasing and with it homophobia was getting a fresh lease on life. Into the left field of this situation John Boswell, a little-known Yale scholar of European history, dropped, if not a bomb, than certainly something of a hand grenade: his study CHRISTIANITY, SOCIAL TOLERANCE AND HOMOSEXUALITY: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. It was a work of obvious erudition, drawing on a dozen languages and literatures; it was published with full scholarly dressing by a university press (Yale); it cited and discussed such household names as Aelred of Rievaulx, Valerius Maximus, Baudri of Bourgeuil and Abu’l-Qasim az-Zahrawi; its bibliography barely escaped being “uselessly massive”; and it announced its specific payload right in the title. In it, Boswell took the popular perceptions of Christianity’s attitude towards homosexuality (in a word: BAD) and opened up long historic avenues of complexity: the inheritance of classical stances on the subject; the difficulties and ambiguities of moving from the classical languages to expressing Biblical assumptions and attitudes (an entire appendix is devoted to “Lexicography and Saint Paul”); the effects of the rise and ebb of urbanization; the handing-on and snowballing of various chance and influenced translations. The final result was the upending of a lot of the old simplicities: word-meanings shifted, pockets of acceptance surfaced, old certainties were shown to be resting on swampy ground. Boswell’s grasp of the historical context and the languages was such that probably only other scholars would be able to dispute his arguments, but the book left the scholarly sales circles and got tackled by a lot of non-specialist readers, and its tone of calm helped to make the old hysterias and hostilities look vulgar and unsustainable. “What will strike some readers as a partisan point of view is chiefly the absence of the negative attitudes on the subjects ubiquitous in the Modern West; after a long loud noise, a sudden silence may seem deafening.” The real silences, of course, were in the old majority-rule histories, what Matthew Arnold called “the huge Mississippi of falsehood,” in which gay people figured stereotypically or not at all, as with all minorities—just those silences that the postwar revisionist histories have begun to break open. Boswell, by his own claim, was doing just a first scratching of the surface of the topic; but after thirty years no book has bettered his discussion. With insight, intelligence and, every so often, a nose- tweaking sense of impudence, he has brought these people out of their forgotten and unhonored graves and given them voice. A phrase from the AIDS years: “Silence is death.”
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Details
- Bookseller
- The Saint Bookstore (GB)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- A9780226345222
- Title
- Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
- Author
- John Boswell
- Format/Binding
- Paperback / softback
- Book Condition
- New
- Quantity Available
- 10
- Binding
- Paperback
- ISBN 10
- 022634522X
- ISBN 13
- 9780226345222
- Publisher
- University Of Chicago Press
- This edition first published
- 2015
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