Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality : Gay People in Western Europe
from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
by John
Boswell
John Boswell's highly acclaimed study of the
history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the Christian West
challenges received opinion and our own preconceptions about the
Church's past relationship to its gay members, among whom were
priests, bishops and even canonized saints. The historical breadth
of Boswell's research (from the Greeks to Aquinas) and the variety
of sources consulted (legal, literary, theological, artistic, and
scientific) make this one of the most extensive treatments of any
single aspect of Western social history. The product of ten years
of research and analysis of records in a dozen languages, this
book opens up a new area of historical inquiry and helps elucidate
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
"Truly groundbreaking work. Boswell reveals
unexplored phenomena with an unfailing erudition." --Michel
Foucault
"[Boswell] has mastered one of the rarest
skills: the ability to write about sex with genuine wit.
Improbable as it might seem, this work of unrelenting scholarship
and high intellectual drama is also thoroughly entertaining."
--Paul Robinson, New York Times Book Review
John Boswell (1947-1994) was the A. Whitney
Griswold Professor of History at Yale University and the author of
The
Royal Treasure, The
Kindness of Strangers, and Same-Sex
Unions in Premodern Europe.
The
Kindness of Strangers : The Abandonment of Children in Western
Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance by John
Boswell
In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell
argues persuasively that child abandonment was a common and
morally acceptable practice from antiquity until the Renaissance.
Using a wide variety of sources, including drama and
mythological-literary texts as well as demographics, Boswell
examines the evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted
children, "exposing" them in public places, donating
them to the church, or delivering them in later centuries to
foundling hospitals. The Kindness of Strangers presents a
startling history of the abandoned child that helps to illustrate
the changing meaning of family.
"Highly original, learned, and skillfully
written. . . . A mine of fascinating and surprising information
about every aspect of the history of family limitation in ancient,
medieval, and Renaissance Europe."--Bernard Knox, New York
Review of Books
"A formidably learned, ingenious, at times
eloquent investigation. Professor Boswell is a young historian of
rare force and originality."--George Steiner, New Yorker
"Bold, original and, very likely,
controversial. . . . This is a pioneering work of large
importance, the first to map out and explore a tangled, mysterious
region of human experience."--Mary Martin McLaughlin, New
York Times Book Review
