The following is the first of a three-part series.
John Boswell in Historical, Social, and Political Context
John Boswell (1947-94) was a Yale philologist who published two major studies betweeen 1980 and 1994 which, considered together, constitute an extended and significant study in the history of so-called “Eurochristian” sexuality.[1] Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) is a broad survey of attitudes and perspectives towards same-sex sexual and romantic relationships over nearly a millennium: from pre-Christian ancient Greek and Roman societies (approx. 500 BCE-300 CE) to Christian Late Antiquity (approx. 300 CE-600CE), and finally to the early and late Middle Ages the Early Middle Ages (10th-14th Centuries). With the caveat that levels of acceptance of same-sex relationships, eroticism, and queer persons have always been overdetermined and have varied greatly across time and context, Boswell also reaches the conclusion that European societies in the early Middle Ages were quite tolerant of homosexuality and included some well-developed gay subcultures.
According to his thesis, complex social and cultural developments led to gradual tightening of sexual mores in Europe which began in the twelfth century and led to an intense almost uniformly homophobic cultural climate in Europe by the end of the fourteenth century. The implication of Boswell’s historical account is a substantial challenge to traditional arguments around “historic teaching” of the Church in matters of homosexuality. He uses empirical historical counterexample to call into question claims that homosexuality has always been regarded as unambiguously sinful in the Christian tradition.
Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (1994) was released more than a decade later and focused much more specifically on the institution of marriage in Europe during the same timeframes, from Antiquity to the High Middle Ages. Boswell examines various pre-modern institutions in Same-Sex Unions, including the ancient Roman institution of adoption of adult citizens and the later Christian institution of adelphopoiesis or “brother making” found in Byzantium and the Orthodox tradition as well as in the Latin tradition. His claim is that these provided an institutional context which same-sex couples could and did utilize to secure some of the protections and stability that the institution of marriage offered heterosexual partners.
In the case of the adelphopoiesis or “brother-making” ritual, Boswell draws multiple parallels between its rituals and the marriage rites from the same cultural and historical contexts.[2] While these rituals could have also certainly provided legal advantages and protections for same-sex pairs without a sexual or amorous relationship to one another, Boswell claims that there were times in history where the Church indeed blessed these unions and finds evidence that these rituals and relationships could in some instances be understood as something akin to a “same-sex marriage”.Boswell’s thesis is that adelphopoiesis was an institution of Church-sanctioned life-long unions of love, devotion, loyalty between persons of the same sex. While the ritual was typically a “brother-making” ritual, there are also historical records of similar but more infrequent “sister-making” rituals.[3]
At the time, Boswell’s projects met with explosive controversy. It not only received scathing critiques from Christians who understood homosexuality as anathema to their faith, but also from the LGBTQ+ community who saw in his work an apologetic for oppressive Christian institutions. A concerning proportion of the critical response to Boswell’s don’t so much engage his arguments, but instead engage in ad hominum attacks on his person—sensationalizing his status as a young, openly gay, practicing Catholic, Yale philologist. Boswell’s works also stimulated heated methodological debates amongst historians, philologists, and theologians. Some accused him of engaging in an irresponsible form of “advocacy scholarship” which distorted the historical record in pursuit of a set of contemporary socio-political ends. Others critiqued him as employing an essentialist understanding of human sexuality, as opposed to a social constructionist approach.
Any history of sexuality must confront the problem of an overall reticence around matters of emotional, physical, and erotic intimacy in the historical record. Boswell establishes how the language around these issues is characteristically elusive, indirect, colloquial, and seldom written down. Most people in most places and times have not considered issues of sex and love as subjects well-suited to unambiguous, formal, written discourse. To ascertain the “true feelings” of deceased persons from different cultural contexts who had entered into Roman adult “adoptions”, or of persons who had entered into a ritual relationship of adelphopoiesis, or even of persons who entered into Christian heterosexual marriages proves to be a nearly impossible task.
Boswell develops a strategy in the face of this topical ambiguity and the relative sparseness of the historical record. He combines readings of concrete legal texts, histories, philosophical and theological treatises with surveys of the poetry, art, and literature from a given historical period. In this way he is able to make tentative conjectures around attitudes and mores around sexual, intimate or love relationships within a given culture. These conjectures must however always be limited and at least partially speculative. The reticence of the historical record, which can itself perhaps be attributed to the elusive nature of desire itself, helps to illustrate the problem of desire and sexuality as objects of philosophical discourse, which seem to elude the act of naming.
Boswell’s scholarly career was cut short by his untimely death in 1994 from complications of HIV/AIDS. His insights and contributions are notably absent from most 21st century mainstream Christian and theological discourses on LGBTQIA+ issues, which tend to come to an impasse in part due to the passive and unspoken assumptions around words, concepts, and desire. A closer look at the aforementioned debates around Boswell’s histories of Eurochristian sexuality will illuminate the terms of some of these assumptions, and demonstrate how his approach to sexual categories and the question of universals has enduring and potentially transformative significance for contemporary cultural debates around LGBTQ+ issues.
The oblique reference to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality in the title of this paper is wholly intentional. It is well documented that Foucault and Boswell maintained a collegial relationship and influenced one another’s works.[4] A classic Foucaldian strategy of ideological displacement by way of historical counter-example, is very much employed by Boswell. While this strategy has great transformative potential for cultural debates around sexuality and Queer issues, it also has its limitations—it remains a strategy of “absent bodies” and cannot alone sufficiently address the more central philosophical problem of naming desire. While such a problem cannot be blithely “solved”, approaching its limits by a radical reintroduction of and reckoning with questions of embodied desire. This can provide a path beyond the banalities and ressentiments of cultural, theological, and sexual politics which continue to circulate in 21st century socio-political life.
“Advocacy Scholarship” and the Paradoxical Confirmation of Boswell’s Relevance
Many of Boswell’s initial critics charged him with engaging in what they term “advocacy scholarship”, used pejoratively to indicate scholarship that distorts the historical record to fit a set of socio-political ends. While the term advocacy scholarship has fallen out of common usage, “wokeness” could be understood as its functional equivalent in the 21st century. When a scholar or thinker is accused of “wokeness”, it is often intended to indicate something thin, poorly substantiated, inauthentic, or partisan in their research or findings. While the desire to uphold standards of academic rigor and methodological transparency is often a relevant concern, it is important to understand where such accusations come from and to whom they are addressed.
In many cases, and this was particularly visible in the Boswell case, the assumption is that certain mainstream perspectives are considered to be neutral and objective simply by virtue of being the majority position. What Boswell demonstrates is that the absence of discourse around same-sex affective and erotic relationships is itself the product of “advocacy”, of an anti-gay socio-political agenda. The salient difference is that the anti-gay position has historically enjoyed significantly more “advocates” who were willing to suppress and alter the historical record to make it conform to their political perspectives, their theological positions, or their ideas of social propriety.
Rather than being a partisan manifesto, Boswell’s projects are important and early attempt to correct suppressions and oversights in the historical record which took place in a political and social context which repressed all discussion of homosexuality or of any manner of sexual or gender non-conformity. The controversies which initially played out in the reception of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and Same-Sex Unions are worthy of a truncated rehearsal, as the critiques themselves demonstrate the necessity of Boswell’s historical contributions.
Personal insults and invective were typical of both the academic and popular reception of Boswell’s scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. Daniel Mendelsohn’s oft cited essay makes some accusation of methodological dishonesty[5] and speculates that Boswell’s entire project was rooted in a personal desire for fame or celebrity. Mendelsohn compares Boswell directly with Oscar Wilde in a long-form analogy, weaving something of a morality tale of the dangers and temptations of fame and making use of homophobic tropes in which gay men are portrayed as dishonest and hungry for attention. The review of Same-Sex Unions in Christianity Today included the following observations:
Unfortunately, the radical wing of the feminist movement has made the destruction of male society a specific policy goal. In this context, the linkage of male friendship with homosexuality is tragic, because it deprives men of the rationale they need to resist the feminist onslaught. By seeking to further this identification, Boswell is contributing to the destruction of Western culture because he cannot appreciate same-sex friendship, which he rightly regards as potentially very deep and very significant for society as a whole, in nonsexual terms. Turning friendship into marriage is just as mistaken as turning marriage into friendship; categories are confused, and both suffer as a result.[6]
These comments mix elements of blatant homophobia and misogyny while thoroughly missing one of Boswell’s central arguments, that marriage, friendship, and romance have never been universally stable and unambiguous categories. Further, Boswell’s projects were more than once interpreted as being motivated by “prurience”, sexual desire, or a form of sexual voyeurism. Richard Neuhaus makes this very accusation in his review of Same-Sex Unions in First Things.[7] Even more shocking is George Steiner’s accusation of prurience in his review of The Kindness of Strangers, Boswell’s historical survey of child abandonment, a study unrelated to his scholarship on homosexuality. After praising Boswell’s scholarship, Steiner closes his review with the following comments,
Why, then, as one puts down “The Kindness of Strangers,” is there a malaise? Much of the material is scabrous and lurid…but could it be otherwise? The problem may lie deeper. Choosing my words with extreme care, and with obvious respect for Boswell’s achievement, I can suggest only that there attaches to this book a sheen of prurience—a suave clear-sightedness that verges on that of the voyeur. These are intimations difficult to define. They spring from tonality, from coloration, from acrobatics of surface logic. It may well and legitimately have been Professor Boswell’s intent to leave his readers discomforted, but the discomfort the reader actually feels may not be altogether the one the author aimed at. [8]
Particularly in Steiner’s case, one might ask how he even came to the idea to associate a historical study on the abandonment of children in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages with a motivation of sexual interest on the part of the author. Given that Boswell was “out” as a gay man, it is reasonable to conclude that Steiner was making use of the popular and inaccurate homophobic trope, in which homosexuality is conflated with pedophilia. These particular reviews cannot be accurately described as anything other than homophobic personal attacks. Such interpretations of Boswell’s work would have been considered not only absurd but also libelous if they had been directed at a scholar who was not openly gay.
Boswell sought to trace the historical development of the deep-seated taboo around homosexuality as characteristic feature of Euro-Christian culture in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. The purportedly scholarly reviews from Mendelsohn, Neuhaus, and Steiner do not represent critical responses to Boswell’s project. It is instead no hyperbole to describe them instances of homophobic outrage: that is, they make use of common and virulent homophobic tropes to express outrage that Boswell dare address issues of queer sexuality in the historical record.
The reviews themselves beg the question: what is the source of such violent reactions to the subject matter? Boswell’s two projects involve an attempt to produce something like a genealogy of the Eurochristian cultural climate of homophobia. He is able to successfully demonstrate (and he is certainly not the first to do so), that such reflexive homophobia is not a human universal. It is not equally present in all cultures. Further, in attributing the origins of Eurochristian homophobia to the religiously based persecutions of “sodomites” that began in earnest in Europe around the twelfth century, Boswell demonstrates that homophobia has not always been a necessary corollary of Christian faith. At the same time, he recognizes that homophobia has been particularly strong in the Eurochristian West and has been accompanied by a theological justification.
What is of interest then, is that gradual secularization in Eurochristian society did not directly result in a change in sexual mores and attitudes. Deep-seated taboos around queer sexualities are not exclusive to the religiously pious[9] and they became no less pronounced in later secular discourses, in which a theological argument condemning homosexuality had ceased to be relevant. These taboos indeed remained present in the medical, psychological, anthropological, and historical discourses of the 19th and 20th centuries and Boswell is successful in documenting multiple impressive feats of obfuscation around homosexuality in the anthropological and historical scholarship the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[10]
Boswell is sometimes falsely attributed with single-handedly “discovering” or re-discovering the adelphopoeisis ritual. In fact, the ritual as it survived in Albania, Italy, Greece, and other areas of eastern Europe was well documented by cultural anthropologists during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Boswell references anthropologists of the late 19th century such as Giovanni Tamassia, Stanislaus Ciszewski as well as English anthropologist Mary Durham, the French historian Evelyne Patlagean, and Leopold Kretzenbacher of the early and mid-20th centuries, all of whom observed and documented the ritual and gave it names such as “artificial kinship”,
Wahlbruderschaft, “artificial brotherhood”, or “blood brotherhood.”[11] While some of these anthropologists did entertain the possibility of an affective, erotic or sexual element to such relationships, some others firmly denied the possibility. By far the most common strategy was to tacitly avoid any question of the range of emotional or symbolic meanings of such a union. A name such as “artificial kinship” or “artificial brotherhood” serves well to obscure or avoid such questions. Boswell notes that this tacit avoidance could have been an act of self-preservation, as many of these historians and anthropologists came from countries in which homosexuality was at the time punishable by death. Understandably, these topics are taboo in such a context.
Boswell also argues that these interpretations could also be the product of a kind of confirmation bias. Not only was homosexuality extremely taboo in most European cultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it was also considered to be exceedingly rare. Indeed, the popular belief persists to this day that homosexuality and homosexual feelings are somehow a product of industrial and post-industrial cultures and that they are largely absent from more “natural” pre-industrial or “indigenous” cultures. There were then significant political, ideological, and practical factors which would have motivated anthropologists to either overlook or repress evidence of same-sex erotic or affective relationships. Boswell elaborates:
During the first half of the twentieth century, when most of the anthropological work was done on artificial brotherhoods, such severe prejudice attached to the subject of homosexuality in the cultures producing these studies that any researchers would have dared impute an erotic component to the phenomenon unless the evidence was absolutely irresistible. Evidence about emotional states are, however, almost never irresistible. Indeed, it is rarely unambiguous.
It would be nearly impossible, for example, to determine whether most nineteenth-century married couples in Africa or even in Europe were “in love” with each other, but the want of the needed data would not be taken, in this case, to indicate the absence of such feelings, simply as a difficulty of research. By contrast, prior to the last decade the absence of any clear evidence of homosexual feelings would have been taken, without challenge, as sufficient evidence that the artificial relationships involved no “abnormal sentiments.[12]
All of this goes to show that it would be false to understand mainstream historical discourses on matters of human sexuality as representing some “neutral” position. The accusation of “advocacy scholarship” suggests that Boswell’s research was an attempt to manipulate a previously neutral or objective discourse with his own socio-political agenda. Boswell’s scholarship is much better understood as the beginnings of a correction of generations of obscurantist scholarship motivated by deep seated cultural taboos and personal prejudices. Some of Boswell’s individual conclusions are contestable and some have been disproven[13], but this is to be expected of any work of historical or philological scholarship.
Indeed, the fact that other scholars have seen Boswell’s material as fit to further interrogate and contest is in fact a sign of its relevance. Boswell himself indicates in his introduction to Same-Sex Unions that his is not a final or complete history of homosexuality, but that his intention was to set out a set of “historical pathmarks” in a hitherto under-researched area.[14] The outraged response to the very existence of Boswell’s inquiries into queer history of the Eurochristian world paradoxically confirmed the necessity of such an inquiry, which sought to account for the intense and prevailing nature of homophobia in the Eurochristian West.Essentialism and social constructivism: 20th century debates in social theory and gender studies
The essentialist and social constructionist debates that surrounded Boswell’s projects prove to be of more practical and philosophical relevance than the standard culture war polemics addressed in the last section. In the decades where Boswell was active in scholarship, social constructionist theories of sexuality were on the cutting edge of social theory. They directly challenged prevailing 20th century approaches in psychology, medicine, theology and indeed in the popular consciousness, in which it was assumed that human sexuality consists of a certain “fixed essence”.
Influential essentialist discourses on human sexuality during the 20th century include a) biological essentialism, b) psychological essentialism, and c) theological essentialism. Though differing significantly in some of their approaches and conclusions, each of these discourses are founded upon a claim to a universal, natural, or healthy form of human sexuality which applies to all persons. In medicine or biology, the central salient feature of sexuality is taken to be the biological imperative to produce offspring. Discourses in evolutionary psychology routinely offer reductive explanations of all sexual phenomena as simple outworkings of the drive to reproduce. The subjective, social and emotional question of desire, which is all-too-frequently at odds with any straightforward reproductive imperative, is offered no place in such a discourse.
Most 20th century approaches in psychology and psychiatry took life-long monogamous male-female pair-bonding as the paragon of “healthy” human sexuality. The heterosexual nuclear family was the touchpoint of this psychological essentialism and any deviation from this norm was understood as a form of perversion or psychopathology. Indeed, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) listed homosexuality as a mental disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1973. Today, it is a matter of consensus in Eurochristian societies that “conversion therapy” is a cruel, fringe, and increasingly illegal practice. Today, conversion therapy is rare, usually organized by Christian groups, and seeks to “correct” the sexual orientation of non-heterosexual persons.
What is largely overlooked is the fact that this was the mainstream approach of secular psychiatrists and psychologists until the mid-1970s, who understood homosexuality to be a mental disorder to be corrected. Here we find an unexpected and disconcerting convergence of psychological and theological essentialisms regarding human sexuality, which might suggest a certain harmony or mutual influence which we may be reluctant to admit. While these essentialist approaches to human sexuality do not agree with one another in their exact content, they do share a univocal approach to human sexuality—the belief that it has only one possible meaning, one possible proper expression.
The most obvious arguments for theological essentialism are of the sola scriptura variety—that is, claims that biblical texts forbid homosexual activity.[15] However, Christian arguments against Queer sexualities and non-traditional gender expression frequently go beyond the perceived scriptural interdiction to include appeals that mirror biological or psychological essentialism. The most recent official Catholic Church position on issues of sexuality, procreation, and contraception can be found in the Humanae Vitae. In this Vatican II text, sexual activity is understood to be permissible in the context of marriage alone and then only for the purposes of procreation.
Here the principles of biological and psychological essentialism are coupled: marriage between a man and a woman is considered a Sacrament in the Latin Church.[16] The marriage relationship is, as such, understood to have an essentially redemptive or salvific significance, analogous to the discourses of “health” found in psychological essentialism. Beyond the argument of scriptural interdiction, there is also a common appeal to the consistency and authority of the historic teachings of the Church on matters of sexuality. Through the historical work in Same Sex Unions and Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Boswell calls this argument around the Church’s historic witness into serious question. While it is true that Christian and Jewish teachings frequently privilege and center procreative sexual relations in the context of a male-female marriage relationship, this emphasis is not without its ambiguities. The Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish culture was also distinctive in its strong emphasis on heterosexual and monogamous life-long marriage.
There are Levitical prohibitions against homosexual acts, contraception, and a particular emphasis on child-rearing. Still, a look at the narratives and histories of the Hebrew Bible demonstrates that not even the heroes of the faith and tradition (e.g., David, Esther, Ruth and Boaz, Abraham and Sarah, etc.) were particularly good exemplars of these religious ideals. The Epistles clearly privilege and center monogamous and heterosexual marriage[17], but they say little about procreation. Indeed Paul seems to locate the highest moral virtue in a non-procreative state of celibacy, which was his own practice.[18] Jesus of the Gospels, while vocal about divorce and adultery and while demonstrating a warm and positive orientation towards children, is also largely silent on issues of procreation.
Boswell suggests that the Alexandrian Rule of the third century AD, which forms one of the earliest Christian arguments that fundamentally link sex and procreation in a moral teaching, was not originally developed as a sacred dogma, but rather as an archaic kind of public health policy. Clement of Alexandria promoted this sexual ethic, upon which Humane Vitae so relies, as a form of contraception and poverty alleviation.[19] Unplanned pregnancies and child abandonment were the source of great human suffering in Late Antiquity, a topic which Boswell documented in his 1988 work The Kindness of Strangers.
Boswell argues that early Christian sexual ethics were much more a response to these realities than they were the expression of theological essentialism around heterosexual pair bonding. Boswell holds that the sacralization and romanticization of heterosexual marriage is an ideological attitude which would have been quite foreign to the early Church. It is in this way that the unambiguous theological essentialism of mainstream Church teachings on human sexuality fail to stand up to serious scrutiny of the sacred texts and traditions.
Kieryn Wurts is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Bonn, Germany.
[1] Insert Eurochristian footnote.
[2] See Boswell, John, Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, New York, 1994, pg. 217.
[3] Ibid, pg. 274-5
[4] . See the following interviews for Boswell’s discussion of Foucault’s work and Foucault’s discussion of Boswell: Lawerence Mass, “Sexual Categories, Sexual Universals: An Interview with John Boswell,” Christopher Street Issue 151 (1990) pg. 23-40. https://archive.org/details/sim_christopher-street_1990-09_12_151/page/28/mode/2up : James O’Higgens, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: An Interview With Michel Foucault Salmagundi No. 58/59 (1982/1983).
[5]Daniel Mendelsohn, “The Man Behind the Curtain,”review of Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, by John Boswell, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Vol. 3. No. 2/3 (1995), pg. 241-273. Mendelsohn is a trained classicist, and some claims about Boswell’s misattribution of aspects of marriage rituals in the original manuscripts on adelphopoiesis have not been taken up by other scholars who have reviewed Boswell, even as these seem to be credible and worthy of further study.
[6] Gerald Bray, “Friends or Lovers,” review of Same-Sex Unions by John Boswell, Christianity Today Vol. 38 No. 14, (1994) pg. 46-7.
[7] Richard J. Neuhaus,”In the Case of John Boswell”, in: First Things, Issue 41, March 1994, p. 56.
[8] George Steiner, “Poor Little Lambs,” review of The Kindness of Strangers by John Boswell, The New Yorker, J. 64 Nr. 51, (1989), pg 105.
[9] This much is apparent even in the homophobic critiques of Boswell that surveyed here—only one came from a self-consciously Christian perspective, the others were resolutely secular, published in the context of academic book reviews, and one was even produced by another openly gay scholar.
[10] See particularly Chapter 8 of John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, New York, 1994.
[11] Ibid., pg. 267-273.
[12] Ibid., pg. 273-4.
[13]has Classicists and medievalists like Claudia Rapp have since undertaken their own studies the institution of adelphopoiesis and have concluded that it certainly has not been an unambiguous parallel to heterosexual marriage in all or even most times and places. See Rapp, Claudia, Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantinium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual, Oxford, 2016.
[14] Cite from Same Sex Unions.
[15] See Lev. 18:22, Lev. 20:13 and Romans 1:26-27.
[16] See Humane Vitae. Encyclical Letter of the Pope Paul VI, July 1968. DOI = https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html
[17] See for example Eph. 5:22-27.
[18]See 1 Cor. 7:1-11
[19] See John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago and London, 1980, p. 161-2.
