Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe

Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, published a review by the historian Joan Cadden of Kenyon College, in which she described the book as a monument to Boswell's "prodigious accomplishments", providing an opportunity to celebrate his life and mourn his death.[nb 1] Although largely positive of it, she thought that Boswell's choice of the term "same-sex union" was unsuccessful, because in its usage it became a "transparent euphemism" for "homosexual marriage", the very term that Boswell sought to avoid. She also thought he was unwilling to deal with the views of theorists of social construction, as evidenced by his description of the North American berdache as "homosexuals". Ultimately she thought that the book greatly added to the continuing debate on the issue.[10]

The sociologist Lutz Kaelber of Indiana University, Bloomington, reviewed Boswell's text for the Contemporary Sociology journal.[11] He considered it a "dazzling study" and thought that Boswell had overcome "some very formidable obstacles" in assembling his information.[12] He noted that Boswell's main argument relies on his controversial translation of Greek terms which have already been criticised in the scholarly community. Speculating that Boswell's arguments will spark debate for decades to come, Kaelber suggested that even if his ideas were rejected by future scholarship, the book would still be very important for showing how "social arrangements and processes can shape and sometimes bend normative perceptions of the boundaries between friendship, affection, and love." Concluding his review, he praised the book as "an admirable, challenging, seminal work", although he lamented that it did not make use of sociology.[11]

The classicist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn, himself openly gay, published a scathing and detailed review of Boswell's book in the scholarly journal Arion.[13] According to Mendelsohn, judged as a work of philology Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe is a "bad book", and "its arguments are weak, its methods unsound, its conclusions highly questionable".[14] Mendelsohn argued that Boswell failed to establish his two basic contentions: that adelphopoiesis (literally "creation of brothers") was a ceremony akin to marriage rather than a celebration of a ritualized friendship, probably intended for the reconciliation of heads of households, as argued by previous scholars who had considered the matter (such as Giovanni Tamassia and Paul Koschaker), and that homosexual lovers were commonly characterized in the classical and early medieval worlds as "brothers".[13] Moreover, Mendelsohn impugned Boswell's decision to pitch his work at a general audience incapable of critically evaluating the philological and documentary evidence adduced, arguing that the work as a whole rested on "a rhetorical strategy whose disingenuousness verges on fraud."[15]

The sexologists Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog reviewed Same-Sex Unions for The Journal of Sex Research, noting that Boswell was clearly aware of the social repercussions of his work for contemporary lesbian and gay people.[16] They believed that its direct effect on American political and social thought would be its greatest influence, far beyond that which it had within medieval scholarship. Although stating that they were not convinced by all of Boswell's arguments, and were unqualified to judge many others, they thought that the book constituted a "major work of historiography" by bringing many neglected primary sources to a wider audience.[17]

In the International Gay and Lesbian Review, Elisabeth J. Davenport positively reviewed Boswell's book, remarking that it "appears to leave no imaginable ground upon which his accusers can challenge him." Noting that the book had been criticised before it had even been published by those opposed to its findings, she states her belief that while the case he presents is not infallible, the evidence "leans in his favour". Praising his use of footnotes, she considered it meticulously researched, and ultimately notes that it "adds both liveliness and dignity to the debate" regarding same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe, as such providing a "fitting memorial" for Boswell.[18]

The historian Robin Darling Young disputed Boswell's thesis as well.[19] Brent Shaw has also criticized Boswell's methodology and conclusions.[20] "Boswell's tendency to misconstrue evidence extends beyond simple matters of definition, however, to the very social institutions that are central to his analysis."[21] In Shaw's view, Boswell's analysis compares unfavorably to that of Gabriel Herman who studied "ritualized kinship" in the 1987 Ritualized Friendship and the Greek City.[20] "The kinds of words used to express the new relationship of 'brothers' (words that are also found in Boswell's ecclesiastical rituals) were employed precisely because the men often entered into these relationships not out of love, but out of fear and suspicion. Hence the effusive emphasis on safety and trust."[21]

Judge John T. Noonan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reviewed the book for The Catholic Historical Review alongside John W. Baldwin's The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France Around 1200.[22] Briefly dismissing Boswell's work as unsuccessful at placing his interpretations within the "customs, language, and theology" of the time, he urges the reader to read Shaw's review in The New Republic.[23]

Traditio, the publication of the Jesuit Fordham University in New York, produced a special issues dedicated to responding to Boswell's claims.

By July 1994, the book had gone through four printings and sold 31,000 copies, something far in excess of most works on medieval history.[24]

General media reviewing the book in 1994–95 included The New Yorker, The Economist, People Weekly, The Spectator, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New Republic, the New Statesman & Society, The New York Times, and Newsweek.[1]

The book was also widely reviewed within Christian media in the United States. Writing in The Christian Century magazine, the historical theologian Philip Lyndon Reynolds expressed "profound problems" with Boswell's positions, which he claims rest largely on "ambiguity and equivocation" and "conceptual slipperiness".[25] He is particularly critical of Boswell's use of "same-sex unions" as a translation of terms like adelphopoiesis, believing that this was an "ill-chosen and dangerously slippery term"[26] because it has been widely interpreted in the media as an innuendo for "gay marriage" and therefore lacks neutrality. He also rejects Boswell's argument that the same-sex ceremonies were found in Western Christianity as well as Eastern Christianity, stating that the "heterogeneous bits of evidence" assembled to argue for this position were insufficient.[27] Reynolds wrote:

Buried in this very muddled book is an interesting and plausible thesis, which goes like this: On the one hand, premodern Christian culture knew nothing of gay marriage, had no concept of the homosexual person and condemned homosexual acts. On the other hand, institutionalized or otherwise socially recognized same-sex relationships, such as the brotherhoods studied here, provided scope for the expression of what we would now regard as homosexual inclinations – much more scope than was possible, for example, in the cultures of the late Middle Ages and the Reformation. They may even have occasionally provided cover for homosexual acts. (If this is what Boswell had been judged to be saying, however, the book would not have captured the media's attention.)[28]

On her Christian apologetics website, the American Roman Catholic journalist Marian Therese Horvat pejoratively accused Boswell of being a historical revisionist, claiming that his book was "obviously shaped by his personal lifestyle and convictions", having been written to "further the gay rights agenda". Maintaining that all of the church blessings between two men described in the book were ceremonies of "spiritual brotherhood" and not of "same-sex unions", she highlighted the law codes that prohibited same-sex sexual activity during this period, information she claims Boswell ignored. Labelling Same-Sex Unions as "bad history", she attacked it as a threat to "the very soul of Christian Civilization."[29]