Do You Take This Man . . . (review of Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, by John Boswell)

JOHN BOSWELL’S Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, embraced as revelation by gay activists and heralded in the press, is both a virtuoso display of learned ingenuity and the same old mixture much as before. Readers familiar with Mr. Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) will find here, if anything, an even more dazzling tableau of linguistic versatility, apparently exhaustive investigation, flashing insight, and relentless inventiveness. Few scholars will be capable of keeping step with him throughout, as he ranges from classical Greece to twentieth-century Albania— all in the service of proving that, in their early history, Christian churches sanctified homosexual “marriages.”

Yet as in the earlier book, Mr. Boswell’s extraordinary skills and industry are deployed with such tendentiousness, exaggeration, special pleading, and occasional banality that the work deserves, at very best, the distinctive verdict of the Scottish courts: not proven.

DW

About the Author

David Wright

JOHN BOSWELL’S Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, embraced as revelation by gay activists and heralded in the press, is both a virtuoso display of learned ingenuity and the same old mixture much as before. Readers familiar with Mr. Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) will find here, if anything, an even more dazzling tableau of linguistic versatility, apparently exhaustive investigation, flashing insight, and relentless inventiveness. Few scholars will be capable of keeping step with him throughout, as he ranges from classical Greece to twentieth-century Albania— all in the service of proving that, in their early history, Christian churches sanctified homosexual “marriages.”

Yet as in the earlier book, Mr. Boswell’s extraordinary skills and industry are deployed with such tendentiousness, exaggeration, special pleading, and occasional banality that the work deserves, at very best, the distinctive verdict of the Scottish courts: not proven.