Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality

Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century

John Boswell

Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Edition

Foreword by Mark D. Jordan

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1980, 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34522-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34536-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226345369.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boswell, John, 1947–1994, author.

Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality : gay people in western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century / John Boswell ; with a foreword by Mark D. Jordan. — Thirty-fifth anniversary edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-34522-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-34536-9 (ebook) 1. Homosexuality—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Homosexuality—Europe—History—To 1500. I. Title.

HQ76.3.E8B67 2015

241'.664094—dc23

2015017855

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my parents for their love and example,

and to Ralph for his help

Love is not a crime; if it were a crime to love, God would not have bound even the divine with love.

Carmina Burana

Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae

We can easily reduce our detractors to absurdity and show them their hostility is groundless. But what does this prove? That their hatred is real. When every slander has been rebutted, every misconception cleared up, every false opinion about us overcome, intolerance itself will remain finally irrefutable.

Moritz Goldstein, Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass

Contents

Illustrations

Abbreviations

Foreword

Preface

I Points of Departuure

1. Introduction

2. Definitions

3. Rome: The Foundation

II The Christian Tradition

4. The Scriptures

5. Christians and Social Change

6. Theological Traditions

III Shifting Fortunes

7. The Early Middle Ages

8. The Urban Revival

9. The Triumph of Ganymede: Gay Literature of the High Middle Ages

IV The Rise of Intolerance

10. Social Change: Making Enemies

11. Intellectual Change: Men, Beasts, and Nature

12. Conclusions

Appendix 1. Lexicography and Saint Paul

Appendix 2. Texts and Translations

Frequently Cited Works

Index of Greek Terms

General Index

Illustrations

1.   Paired statues of Harmodius and Aristogiton

2.   Hadrian

3.   Antinous

4.   Ganymede

5.   End of Apocalypse and Beginning of the Epistle of Barnabas

6.   Ganymede with eagle

7.   Ganymede capital

8.   Bearded acrobats

9.   Hyenas embracing

10.   Hyena devouring a corpse

11.   Weasels mating

12.   Hyenas embracing

13.   Christ and Saint John

   Abbreviations

AL                Anthologia Latina

AP                Anthologia Palatina (or Greek Anthology)

BM               British Museum

BN               Bibliothèque nationale

CSEL           Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

EI                 Encyclopedia of Islam

JB                 Jerusalem Bible

KJV              King James or Authorized Version

LC                Loeb Classical Library

LSJ              Greek-English Lexicon, ed. H. G. Liddell and Robert Scott, 9th ed., rev. H. Stuart Jones

LXX            Septuagint

Mansi         J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio

MGH           Monumenta Germaniae historica

NEB            New English Bible

NT              New Testament

OBMLV      Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, ed. F. J. Raby

OCD           Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2d ed.

OED           Oxford English Dictionary

OT              Old Testament

PG              Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Graeca

PL              Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina

Poetae        Poetae Latini medii aevi (in M G H

PW            Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft

Settimane   Settimane di studi del Centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo (Spolwto)

SS              Scriptores (in MGH)

SS.RR.MM. Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum (in MGH)

ZFDA         Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum

[ ] or

Pseudo-     Indicates spurious attribution

Foreword to the Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Edition

Books have their fate. That is half a line from Terentianus Maurus, an ancient writer on poetic meter. The whole line links the fate of books to the capacities of readers. Introducing the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton quotes Terentianus to anticipate the contradictory tastes of those who will consume his self-revelations. By itself, the half-line found other uses. It came to refer to the physical fortunes of books, to the circulation and survival even of individual copies. Mabillon adapts the phrase to libraries when he remembers the burning of two collections of medieval manuscripts. Walter Benjamin calls it to mind while unpacking his cherished collection of books, one by one.1

I cannot remember my reactions the first time I read Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (CSTH, as its fans call it). I do remember the copy I held. It was the original paperback edition, a satisfying octavo, with a cover of white and golden orange that featured an ancient mosaic of a nibbling hare. (The image comes from a dining room: the hare is food. Boswell’s readers learn that the animal had another meaning and participated in other feasts.) On my copy of that first paperback, I penciled marginal notes—emphases, disagreements, but especially check marks beside works that I needed to read. There were a lot of check marks. Some years later, I helped an older colleague pack up his library at retirement. It was a hot summer in Chicago. My reward for the sweaty work was his copy of the hardbound CSTH, complete with dust jacket. On the flyleaf, my colleague had long ago inscribed his name beside that of his partner. Also the date: Christmas 1980. Had he bought the copy as a gift for the two of them? Had one lover given it to the other as a book to be held in common?

Boswell’s book has been fated to play many roles. It remains a scholarly archive and an argument about Christianity in history. Its copies also record any number of loves.

* * *

For a monograph by an assistant professor with a score of other languages in many footnotes, CSTH had an astonishing success more or less from the beginning. It was reviewed by Newsweek. The editors of The New York Times Book Review chose it as one of the best books published in the country for 1980. The next year it took a National Book Award. Boswell’s publisher rushed to keep up with the unexpected orders.

What accounts for the success? It would be pleasant to think that the book succeeded just because it was superbly learned, grand in its aims, and stylishly written. Each of those features certainly contributed something. Yet other learned, ambitious, and stylish books by assistant professors barely sell five hundred copies—then or now. Boswell had the further advantage of a scandalous topic—more scandalous then. Still there had been other scholarly books on Christianity and homosexuality before Boswell. Twenty-five years earlier, the Anglican priest Derrick Sherwin Bailey published Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (1955). If Bailey’s book influenced official debates, it won no national awards. Boswell’s book appeared at exactly the right moment to cross over from academic conversations through religious and political debates to the general reader.

An adequate list of reasons for the astonishing success of CSTH would continue to other circumstances. No list can fully explain the book’s reception. There is something here of the unanalyzable conjunction of circumstances. There is also the many-voiced rhetoric of the book itself. In its reception, CSTH showed that it was not one book but several, many, each with a distinct fate.

* * *

Consider first the academic reception. While failing to convince many academic readers of the correctness of its reinterpretations of crucial texts, CSTH nonetheless authorized a new field of study.

The authorization depended on Boswell’s willingness to stake whatever cultural capital he had: his evident brilliance, a doctorate from Harvard, a faculty appointment at Yale, the reputation of his academic publisher. He also mobilized his talents as a writer. I often feel—no other verb will do—the deft irony in his choice of familiar scholarly phrases, images, and structures for his particular subject. Boswell dares his academic readers to find anything unusual in his prodigiously learned discussion of male hyenas embracing on the margin of a twelfth-century manuscript (see below, p. 143, and plate 9).

The gamble would not have succeeded unless Boswell had shown academic readers how much work they had left undone. CSTH sweeps through hundreds of primary texts, directing a reader to overlooked genres and neglected authors. More strikingly, it poses fundamental questions to the most canonical works. Consider the appendix on lexicography and Saint Paul (335–53). What could sound more reassuringly familiar to scholarly ears? Lexicography, Saint Paul, an appendix. Yet Boswell uses the pages to lay down an impertinent challenge. He asks, what evidence do contemporary readers have for determining the meanings of crucial words in biblical passages that have been used for centuries to condemn same-sex desire? A candid answer is that Christians find the meanings obvious only because they have determined them in advance. Moreover, their settled readings show what Boswell describes as the paramount influence of cultural attitudes on religious beliefs (338, note 7). What the Bible says about sexual morality is both obscure and contradictory. To clarify it, to simplify it, interpretations are imposed on the biblical texts at many points. When the scholars who produced the Revised Standard Version of 1 Corinthians 6:9 combined two elusive Greek words, malakoi and arsenokoitai, into the single English word homosexuality, they were not so much translating as rewriting. Boswell uses his appendix to illustrate the most egregious rewritings. Many scholars took his point. In an early review, Robert Grant recalls that reading CSTH led him to check translations of key sexual terms in one of the standard dictionaries for early Christian Greek. He was appalled at what he found.2 The zealous effort to correct Boswell’s scriptural mistakes—some real, many imagined—only testifies to the power of his apparently simple question. Thirty-five years ago, there was no need for such an ongoing effort because everyone somehow knew what Paul meant to condemn.

* * *

CSTH is not just an archive of texts. It is also an argument—or, rather, several arguments. Groups of readers drew different conclusions from it.

One of Boswell’s arguments is a revised historical narrative. It goes something like this: The early Christian churches did not oppose homosexuality as such. Christian scriptures were undecided on the issue and prominent authors were more concerned with other things. Hostility to gay people did rise as the Roman Empire dissolved, but not for specifically theological reasons.3 Indeed, some Christian European cultures tolerated fairly visible homosexual subcultures, even within the clergy. When hostility spiked again in the High Middle Ages, as part of a generalized persecution of minorities, condemnation of homosexuality was fortified by theological arguments and settled as doctrine for a centralizing church.

Controversies have seized on every part of Boswell’s narrative. I won’t attempt anything like a scorecard of disagreements and agreements. They keep changing as new books or articles appear. I suggest instead that having a strong historical narrative, especially one that disconcerts received views, is a great gift to scholarly posterity. It is also important to remember that Boswell’s historical narrative is only a step on the way to his second argument. Boswell knew that Christianity was sometimes blamed for causing the persecution of homosexuals. As he wrote, this claim was advanced both by advocates of gay liberation and by progressive Christian critics of established teachings. Boswell contradicts the claim in two ways. He argues that Christianity was not always hostile to homosexuality, and he finds the sources of anti-homosexual prejudice elsewhere (say, in social attitudes and political scapegoating). Boswell insists repeatedly that the persecution of same-sex desires rarely originates in Christian theology, however much theology is later wrapped around it as justification.

Many readers also found a third argument in CSTH, perhaps the most compelling. If there is no deep reason in Christian theology for condemning homosexuality, then there is no necessary contradiction between being Christian and being gay. Just here CSTH moves from history to what one reviewer calls Christian apologetics.4 Many readers applauded the move. Besides the National Book Award, CSTH received the Melcher Award, given annually by the Unitarian Universalist Association for the most significant contribution to religious liberalism. The prize committee had a precise sense of the book’s deepest effects—and, I suspect, of Boswell’s intimate purposes.

* * *

In CSTH, Boswell professes to write as an academic historian. He places himself within the field of history and appeals to its presumed standards of neutrality: It is . . . the province of the historian not to praise or blame but merely to record and explain. This book is not intended as support or criticism of any particular contemporary points of view—scientific or moral—regarding homosexuality (xxiii). Boswell makes a point of leaving to others any application of his work to current church debates about sex. He presents CSTH as a contribution to the social history of intolerance, not of religion and sexuality (4).

Boswell’s book was indeed received as a contribution to history and as a particular kind of social history. It was enlisted in controversies over historical method, especially the disagreement between so-called essentialists and constructionists. Boswell was accused of teaching (against Michel Foucault) that there had been a transhistorical essence of homosexuality that took different cultural forms while remaining deeply the same. Boswell cared enough about these historiographical debates or his own representation in them to contribute essays and interviews. But his position was always more nuanced than the dichotomy allowed. There was also the odd fact that his book’s only blurb was signed by Foucault. So much for easy dichotomies.

Boswell’s so-called essentialism may have something to do with his views of social history, but it has everything to do with his Christianity. Boswell professed a Christian faith that develops through history while also claiming to exceed history. I don’t mean to deny Boswell’s declarations that he writes as a historian. I do claim that he also writes through or beyond the purview of social history. Well before the publication of CSTH, before the book even had a fixed title, Boswell was offering his historical arguments to Christian groups ministering to gay and lesbian believers.5

Randolph Trumbach once noted that CSTH never did have much of an impact on either the moral theologians or the [Catholic] church hierarchy.6 It did have an enormous impact on Christian readers, lay and clergy, across denominational lines. They took the book as learned consolation. They also found else in it: a narrative of Christian history that included them as more than objects of violent contempt. The testimony of these readers can be found in Boswell’s correspondence.7

* * *

CSTH is a history book that became part of history. It still stands at the hotly contested intersection of sexuality and religion. The contests are hardly finished. If same-sex relations are now affirmed or tolerated by a number of religious groups, they are resolutely and articulately condemned by others. If some LGBT organizations now acknowledge that they need to be able to talk religion, they still regard churches and their members with a mixture of suspicion and condescension.

After publishing CSTH, Boswell was sometimes quizzed rather aggressively about his Christian beliefs.8 Others accused him of falsifying history in order to proselytize. With considerable hyperbole, John Lauritsen wrote in 1981: It is not surprising that Professor Boswell has been enthusiastically hailed by the gay Christians to whom he appears as a new Savior who will rescue them not only from queer-hating religionists, but from gay liberation secularists as well.9 I would reverse the accusation: Boswell’s book offers help also to movement activists who mistakenly imagine that profound changes in human sexuality can be accomplished without considering religion. That was a mistake in 1981. It is still a mistake today.

The fate of the book you hold is not yet accomplished. It continues to authorize scholarship and to console seekers. It also gives good example for thinking about Western sexuality. Let me name three points that we would do well to hear again.

The first is the persistence of Christianity’s engagement with the facts and fantasies of same-sex desire. Even if you disagree with every one of Boswell’s reinterpretations and contest every episode in his historical narrative, you learn from him how Christianity has been haunted by same-sex desire, especially between men. (How could it be otherwise for a religion that proclaims that the God of love took flesh only once in a male body?) That haunting is decisive for the conceptions of gender in Christianity and the cultures shaped by it.

A second lesson still to be learned from Boswell concerns the range of languages needed to write adequately about human sex. If our performances of desire are not captured in literal readings of scriptures or religious law, they are also not caught by case histories, self-help books, policy proposals, or press releases. CSTH presents dozens of genres that were used to write unstandardized desire. It thus challenges us to perform some literary experiments of our own—and perhaps even artistic ones. What after all should appear on the mosaic floors or painted walls of our banquet rooms?

One last thing: CSTH is often cited as a salient example of a work of scholarship that achieved political effects. It did indeed. But we should notice again what the book gives its readers. Boswell did not offer a universal theory or a detailed political platform. He refused both. He performed instead the unbounded reading of old books. CSTH is a book about the fate of books. It follows questions across genres, epochs, languages, through dozens of libraries and hundreds of individual volumes. Wherever this book takes you, you could do a lot worse than follow its example of reading.

Mark D. Jordan

1 Terentianus Maurus, De syllabis, ed. Jan-Wilhelm Beck (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1993), line 1286; Robert Burton, Democritus Junior to the Reader, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner et al., vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 13, line 17; Jean Mabillon, Ad studiosos lectores [Praefatio], Museum Italicum . . . (Paris: apud viduam E. Martin, J. Boudot, & S. Martin, 1687), fol. eiv; Walter Benjamin, Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus: Eine Rede über das Sammeln, in his Gesammelte Schriften 4/1, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp, 1972), 388–96, at 389.

2 Robert M. Grant, Out of Obscurity, Christian Century (January 21, 1981): 60–61, at 61.

3 American language has changed since Boswell wrote. He tends to use homosexuality as the neutral, learned term, while gay is for him a more colloquial term that includes both men and women. In this foreword, I try to follow Boswell’s usage, though I would readily acknowledge that for him gay refers mostly to male-male relations (as it does more explicitly now). CSTH does not pretend to give equal attention to female-female relations. For that history, the reader should begin with Bernadette J. Brooten’s Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

4 Ronald E. Modras, review of CSTH, Currents in Theology and Mission 10/1 (Fall 1983): 50.

5 For example, Herm Mank, in the second of two reports under the title General Conference ’76, Christian Circle [Metropolitan Community Church San Francisco] 2, no. 8 (September 1976): 11.

6 Randolph Trumbach, review of Boswell’s Same-Sex Unions, Journal of Homosexuality 30/2 (1995): 111–17, at 112.

7 For a sample of the correspondence, see Bernard Schlager, "Reading CSTH as a Call to Action: Boswell and Gay-Affirming Movements in American Christianity," in The Boswell Thesis, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 74–87. Kuefler’s volume is the best survey of the reception and present evaluation of Boswell’s book.

8 For an example of quizzing, see the interview by Richard Hall, Historian John Boswell on Gay Tolerance and the Christian Tradition, The Advocate no. 318 (May 28, 1981): 20–23, 26–27.

9 John Lauritsen, "Culpa ecclesiae: Boswell’s Dilemma," in Homosexuality, Intolerance and Christianity: A Critical Examination of John Boswell’s Work, Gai Saber Monograph 1 (2nd enlarged ed., New York: The Scholarship Committee, Gay Academic Union / New York City, 1985), 16–22, at 16. This edition reprints the pages of the first edition from 1981 and then appends a bibliography of reviews (23–34).

Preface

It is not possible to write history in a vacuum. No matter how much historians and their readers may wish to avoid contaminating their understanding of the past with the values of the present, they cannot ignore the fact that both writer and reader are inevitably affected by the assumptions and beliefs of the age(s) in which they write and read. Because very many of the issues addressed in this book as historical problems are viewed today chiefly as moral questions, and because their social importance is generally supposed to result from the moral traditions regarding them, it would be impossible to present a persuasive argument for the essentially social significance of such phenomena without examining, at some length, the moral texts and opinions thought to have been determinative in establishing Western attitudes toward them. Very widespread preconceptions regarding historical causations must be addressed in detail; they cannot be refined or altered by judicious silence or a simple assertion to the contrary. If religious texts are widely supposed to have been the origin of a medieval prejudice, their role in determining the attitude in question must be carefully examined; if it is assumed that scholastic opinions on a subject were an inevitable response to the force of the preceding Christian tradition, a historian who wishes to present an alternative explanation must examine the force of the previous tradition in minute detail. Only if he can demonstrate that it is insufficient explanation for the opinions in question can he expect his alternative explanation to carry much weight.

It is, on the other hand, the province of the historian not to praise or blame but merely to record and explain. This book is not intended as support or criticism of any particular contemporary points of view—scientific or moral—regarding homosexuality. Where extended discussion of arguments against homosexual behavior has been presented, the aim has been twofold: to demonstrate that what may seem to have been the origin of popular antipathy in the past often was not, and to clarify crucial differences between ostensibly analogous ancient and modern objections to homosexuality. The analysis of ideas about the unnaturalness and nonreproductivity of homosexuality presented in Chapter 1, for instance, is aimed not at defending it from such criticism but at providing a clearer perspective on the most common specific objections employed against it by ancient and medieval writers (as, e.g., in a text on medieval alchemical ideas one might employ current scientific data to demonstrate the feasibility of alchemical theories or procedures). What will strike some readers as a partisan point of view is chiefly the absence of the negative attitudes on this subject ubiquitous in the modern West; after a long, loud noise, a sudden silence may seem deafening.

* * *

Because the material considered in this volume comprises both a very broad geographical and temporal expanse and many very detailed and technical issues, it has been somewhat difficult to provide a scholarly apparatus of use to all who might desire it and still make the book accessible to the general reader. Specialists may be surprised at explanations of facts or material which seem perfectly obvious, and nonspecialists may find it difficult to wade through dense, recondite notes. Few who are interested in the niceties of biblical lexicography will be familiar with the nuances of Hispano-Arab poetry, and many people quite interested in the general areas of intolerance or homosexuality may have very limited acquaintance with medieval history of any sort. Every effort has been made to keep the text readable, self-explanatory, and focused on central issues. As far as possible, all purely technical and linguistic considerations have been placed in footnotes or appendices. Brief introductions to relevant aspects of some of the periods and cultures involved have been provided, in the hope that whatever ennui or amusement they provide historians will be offset by the help they offer readers from other disciplines.

Citations have been particularly troublesome in this regard, since inconsistencies which might bother specialists may enable those less familiar with the same literature to locate passages with greater ease.1 Most works are cited for this reason in their most familiar or recognizable form, even where this has required erratic use of foreign or English titles for the same author (e.g., Plutarch), and many convenient editions (e.g., the Patrologia) have been preferred to better or more modern versions of the same texts. Only where the text itself bears on the historical issues have efforts been made to address textual problems.

For reasons outlined below, it has seemed essential to consult all sources in their original, even when modern translations exist. All translations provided in the text, except where specifically noted, are my own, and every effort has been made to effect them as accurately and candidly as possible, even to the point of employing obscene language. Perhaps the medieval dictum that to cite heresy is not to be a heretic may be modified in this context to urge that to cite obscenity is not to be obscene. It would at any rate be arrogant to assume that readers could not judge such material for themselves without the intervention of censorship by historians. Renderings of literary material, including poetry, have been effected with clarity and literal accuracy the paramount considerations; no effort has been made to reflect literary nuances unless these provide insight into the questions at hand.

* * *

A word of explanation may be appropriate regarding the relative absence of materials relating to women. Most of the sources for this (as for nearly all) history were written by men about men, and where they deal with women, they do so peripherally. Wherever possible, examples involving women have been cited, and an effort has been made to consider the feminine correlates of scientific, philosophical, religious, and social aspects of male homosexuality, but no one could offset the overwhelming disproportion of data regarding male and female sexuality without deliberate distortion.

* * *

The research for this book was begun nearly a decade ago, and it would be impossible now to recall all those who contributed in some way to its preparation. An incalculable debt is owed Ralph Hexter, who rendered practical assistance at every stage of the endeavor, read the entire manuscript several times and offered valuable critical advice, and provided information on many matters; in the realm of literature, for example, he brought to my attention the existence of the poems Ganymede and Hebe and Married Clergy, published here for the first time. No words of thanks could suffice to express my gratitude for his assistance or to apprise readers of the extent of his contributions.

Several colleagues, notably James Weinrich of Harvard, Douglas Roby of Brooklyn College, and John Winkler and James Rodman of Yale, have contributed generously of their time and knowledge, and I am grateful to them. I am equally indebted to my students at Yale, both graduate and undergraduate, especially to Ruth Mazo for her sensitive and erudite study of Aelred of Rievaulx, Richard Styche for his work on Icelandic law, and Frances Terpak and Vasanti Kupfer for their advice and assistance in locating materials relating to medieval art.

I also wish to thank David Frusti and Libby Berkeley for more practical but no less important help; the Council on the Humanities of Yale University for a grant through the A. Whitney Griswold Faculty Research Fund; and the librarians and archivists of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Munich, Karl Marx Universität in Leipzig, Gonville and Caius College of Cambridge University, the Bodleian library of Oxford University, and the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona.

1. For example, it is impossible to be entirely consistent in transliterating Persian and Arabic in a work of this nature, because many names and some titles are cited from works in other languages which employ differing systems of transliteration, and because many names have become familiar in forms which do not correspond to a specific system. Where I have transliterated and was not limited by a tradition or published version, I have used a slightly modified version of the system employed by the editors of the EI, which will, I think, provide no difficulty to readers of Arabic and Persian.

I       Points of Departure

1  Introduction

All those whose lives are spent searching for truth are well aware that the glimpses they catch of it are necessarily fleeting, glittering for an instant only to make way for new and still more dazzling insights. The scholar's work, in marked contrast to that of the artist, is inevitably provisional. He knows this and rejoices in it, for the rapid obsolescence of his books is the very proof of the progress of scholarship.1

Between the beginning of the Christian Era and the end of the Middle Ages, European attitudes toward a number of minorities underwent profound transformations. Many groups of people passed from constituting undistinguished parts of the mainstream of society to comprising segregated, despised, and sometimes severely oppressed fringe groups. Indeed the Middle Ages are often imagined to have been a time of almost universal intolerance of nonconformity, and the adjective medieval is not infrequently used as a synonym for narrow-minded, oppressive, or intolerant in the context of behavior or attitudes. It is not, however, accurate or useful to picture medieval Europe and its institutions as singularly and characteristically intolerant. Many other periods have been equally if not more prone to social intolerance:2 most European minorities fared worse during the Renaissance than during the Dark Ages, and no other century has witnessed anti-Semitism of such destructive virulence as that of the twentieth. Moreover, treating these two subjects—intolerance and medieval Europe—as if each were in some sense a historical explanation of the other almost wholly precludes understanding of either one. The social history of medieval Europe and, perhaps even more, the historical origins and operations of intolerance as a social phenomenon require far subtler analysis.

This study is offered as a contribution to better understanding of both the social history of Europe in the Middle Ages and intolerance as a historical force, in the form of an investigation of their interaction in a single case.3 It would obviously be foolhardy to attempt any broader approach to the first; it may be slightly less obvious why there is no general treatment of the second in the study which follows.

In the first place, it would be extremely difficult to define the boundaries of such a general study. Although intolerance has weighed heavily on the conscience of the twentieth century, so little is known about its nature, extent, origins, and effects in a historical context that merely delineating the outlines and proportions of the problem would require a study of considerably greater length than the present one. The writer would need not only to be familiar with the techniques and findings of a host of specialized fields—anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.—but also to have some means of adjudicating the validity of their competing claims and assessing their relative importance. Arbitrarily pursuing some and excluding others would be perilous in so understudied a field.4

Moreover, even if the problem could be defined, it would not be possible to write about a subject as comprehensive and far-reaching as intolerance with the degree of historical detail provided in this study except in a work of encyclopedic proportions. From the historian's point of view, however, general theories are of little value unless rooted in and supported by specific studies of particular cases, and since there are so few of these at present to substantiate ideas regarding intolerance, it has seemed more useful to provide data for eventual synthetic analysis by others than to embark prematurely on the analysis itself. This appoach has the egregious disadvantage of producing, in effect, an elaborate description of a single piece of an unassembled puzzle, but given the extreme difficulty of even identifying, much less assembling, all the other pieces, it appears to be the most constructive effort possible at present. It has, moreover, the compensating advantage of allowing the data assembled to be employed within any larger theoretical framework, historical or scientific, current or subsequent, since there is little built-in theoretical bias.

Of the various groups which became the objects of intolerance in Europe during the Middle Ages, gay people5 are the most useful for this study for a number of reasons. Some of these are relatively obvious. Unlike Jews and Muslims, they were dispersed throughout the general population everywhere in Europe; they constituted a substantial minority in every age6—rather than in a few periods, like heretics or witches—but they were never (unlike the poor, for instance) more than a minority of the population. Intolerance of gay people cannot for the most part be confused with medical treatment, as in the case of lepers or the insane, or with protective surveillance, as in the case of the deaf or, in some societies, women. Moreover, hostility to gay people provides singularly revealing examples of the confusion of religious beliefs with popular prejudice. Apprehension of this confusion is fundamental to understanding many kinds of intolerance, but it is not usually possible until either the prejudice or the religious beliefs have become so attenuated that it is difficult to imagine there was ever any integral connection between them. As long as the religious beliefs which support a particular prejudice are generally held by a population, it is virtually impossible to separate the two; once the beliefs are abandoned, the separation may be so complete that the original connection becomes all but incomprehensible. For example, it is now as much an article of faith in most European countries that Jews should not be oppressed because of their religious beliefs as it was in the fourteenth century that they should be; what seemed to many Christians of premodern Europe a cardinal religious duty—the conversion of Jews—would seem to most adherents of the same religious tradition today an unconscionable invasion of the privacy of their countrymen. The intermingling of religious principles and prejudice against the Jews in the fourteenth century was so thorough that very few Christians could distinguish them at all; in the twentieth century the separation effected on the issue has become so pronounced that most modern Christians question the sincerity of medieval oppression based on religious conviction. Only during a period in which the confusion of religion and bigotry persisted but was not ubiquitous or unchallenged would it be easy to analyze the organic relation of the two in a convincing and accessible way.

The modern West appears to be injust such a period of transition regarding various groups distinguished sexually, and gay people provide a particularly useful focus for the study of the history of such attitudes.7 Since they are still the objects of severe proscriptive legislation, widespread public hostility, and various civil restraints, all with ostensibly religious justification, it is far easier to elucidate the confusion of religion and intolerance in their case than in that of blacks, moneylenders, Jews, divorced persons, or others whose status in society has so completely ceased to be associated with religious conviction that the correlation—even if demonstrated at length—now seems limited, tenuous, or accidental.

Much of the present volume, on the other hand, is specifically intended to rebut the common idea that religious belief—Christian or other—has been the cause of intolerance in regard to gay people. Religious beliefs may cloak or incorporate intolerance, especially among adherents of revealed religions which specifically reject rationality as an ultimate criterion of judgment or tolerance as a major goal in human relations. But careful analysis can almost always differentiate between conscientious application of religious ethics and the use of religious precepts as justification for personal animosity or prejudice. If religious strictures are used to justify oppression by people who regularly disregard precepts of equal gravity from the same moral code, or if prohibitions which restrain a disliked minority are upheld in their most literal sense as absolutely inviolable while comparable precepts affecting the majority are relaxed or reinterpreted, one must suspect something other than religious belief as the motivating cause of the oppression.

In the particular case at issue, the belief that the hostility of the Christian Scriptures to homosexuality caused Western society to turn against it should not require any elaborate refutation. The very same books which are thought to condemn homosexual acts condemn hypocrisy in the most strident terms, and on greater authority: and yet Western society did not create any social taboos against hypocrisy, did not claim that hypocrites were unnatural, did not segregate them into an oppressed minority, did not enact laws punishing their sin with castration or death. No Christian state, in fact, has passed laws against hypocrisy per se, despite its continual and explicit condemnation by Jesus and the church. In the very same list which has been claimed to exclude from the kingdom of heaven those guilty of homosexual practices, the greedy are also excluded. And yet no medieval states burned the greedy at the stake. Obviously some factors beyond biblical precedent were at work in late medieval states which licensed prostitutes8 but burned gay people: by any objective standard, there is far more objurgation of prostitution in the New Testament than of homosexuality. Biblical strictures have been employed with great selectivity by all Christian states, and in a historical context what determines the selection is clearly the crucial issue.

Another advantage in employing gay people as the focus of this study is the continued vitality of ideas about the danger they pose to society. Almost all prejudice purports to be a rational response to some threat or danger: every despised group is claimed to threaten those who despise it; but it is usually easy to show that even if some danger exists, it is not the origin of the prejudice. The threat posed by most groups previously oppressed by Christian society (e.g., witches, moneylenders), however, now seems so illusory that it is difficult for modern readers to imagine that intelligent people of the past could actually have been troubled by such anxieties. In fact one is apt to dismiss such imagined dangers out of hand as willful misrepresentations flagrantly employed to justify oppression. Not only is this untrue; it obscures the more important realities of the relationship between intolerance and fear.

No such skepticism obscures this relationship in the case of gay people. The belief that they constitute some sort of threat is still so widespread that an assumption to the contrary may appear partisan in some circles, and those who subscribe to the notion that gay people are in some way dangerous may argue that for this very reason they are not typical victims of intolerance.

It should be noted that whether a group actually threatens society or not is not directly relevant to the issue of intolerance unless the hostility the group experiences can be shown to stem from a rational apprehension of that threat. Traveling gypsies may actually have been at some point a hazard to isolated communities if they carried infections and diseases to which local residents had no immunity, but it would be injudicious to assume that it was this threat which resulted in antipathy toward them, particularly when it can be shown that such hostility antedates by centuries any realization of the communicability of most infections and when the content of antigypsy rhetoric bears no relation to disease at all.

The claims about the precise nature of the threat posed by gay people have varied extravagantly over time, sometimes contradicting each other directly and almost invariably entailing striking internal inconsistencies. Many of these are considered in detail below, but it may be worth alluding here to two of the most persistent.

The first is the ancient claim that societies tolerating or approving homosexual behavior do so to their own manifest detriment, since if all their members engaged in such behavior, these societies would die out. This argument assumes—curiously—that all humans would become exclusively homosexual if given the chance. There seems to be no reason to make such an assumption: a great deal of evidence contradicts it. It is possible that the abandonment of social sanctions against homosexuality occasions some increase in overt homosexual behavior, even among persons who would not otherwise try it; it is even conceivable (though not at all certain) that more people will adopt exclusively homosexual life-styles in societies with tolerant attitudes. But the fact that a characteristic increases does not demonstrate its danger to the society; many characteristics which, if adopted universally, would presumably redound to the disadvantage of society (e.g., voluntary celibacy, self-sacrifice) may nonetheless increase over periods of time without causing harm and are often highly valued by a culture precisely because of their statistical rarity. To assume that any characteristic which increases under favorable conditions will in the course of time eliminate all competing characteristics is bad biology and bad history. No current scientific theories regarding the etiology of homosexuality suggest that social tolerance determines its incidence. Even purely biological theories uniformly assume that it would be a minority preference under any conditions, no matter how favorable.9

Moreover, there is no compelling reason to assume that homosexual desire induces nonreproductivity in individuals or population groups.10 No evidence supports the common idea that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are incompatible; much data suggests the contrary.11 The fact that gay people (definitionally) prefer erotic contact with their own gender would imply a lower overall rate of reproductive success for them only if it could be shown that in human populations sexual desire is a major factor in such success. Intuition notwithstanding, this does not appear to be the case.

Only in societies like modern industrial nations which insist that erotic energy be focused exclusively on one's permanent legal spouse would most gay people be expected to marry and produce offspring less often than their nongay counterparts, and it appears that even in these cultures a significant proportion of gay people—possibly a majority—do marry and have children. In other societies (probably most literate premodern cultures), where procreation is separable from erotic commitment and rewarded by enhanced status or economic advantages (or is simply a common personal ambition), there would be no reason for gay people not to reproduce.12 With the exception of the clergy, most of the gay people discussed in the present study were married and had children. The persistence of the belief in the nonreproductivity of gay people must be ascribed to a tendency to notice and remember what is unusual about individuals rather than what is expected. Far fewer people are aware that Oscar Wilde was a husband and father than that he was gay and had a male lover. Socrates' relationship with Alcibiades attracts more attention than his relationship with his wife and children. The love of Edward II of England for his four children is scarcely mentioned in texts which dwell at length on his passion for Piers Gaveston. To a certain extent such emphasis is accurate: the persons in question obviously devoted the bulk (if not the entirety) of their erotic interest to persons of their own gender. But the fact remains that they married and had children, and fascination with their statistically less common characteristics should not give rise to fanciful explanations of these traits—or of popular hostility to them—which overlook or contradict the more ordinary aspects of their lives.13

The second threat which might be adduced as explanation of intolerance of homosexuality relates to its naturalness. May it not be that human society reacts with hostility to gay people because their preferences are inherently unnatural? So much space in this volume is devoted to assessing the precise meaning of natural and unnatural in various philosophical and historical contexts that it may be worth devoting several pages here to some preliminary observations on this subject. It should be noted, in the first place, that the meanings of natural and unnatural will vary according to the concept of nature to which they are related.

1. Some ideas of nature are primarily realistic, i.e., related to the physical world and observations of it. For example, (i) one may speak of nature as the character or essence of something (the nature of love, human nature). Unnatural, as opposed to this concept, means uncharacteristic, as to do otherwise would be ‘unnatural' to him. (ii) In a broader sense, nature may be used for all of the natures (properties and principles) of all things, or the observable universe (death is part of ‘nature'; the laws of nature).14 As the negation of this sense, unnatural refers to what is not part of the scientifically observable world, e.g., ghosts or miracles.15 (iii) In a less consistent way,16 nature is opposed to humans and their efforts, to designate what does or would occur without human intervention (man-made elements not found in nature). Here unnatural either means characteristic only of humans, as hunting for sport rather than food is ‘unnatural,' or simply artificial, like unnatural (or nonnatural) fibers, foodstuffs, etc.17

Although realistic categories of natural and unnatural are used with great imprecision,18 two major assumptions may be mentioned as underlying the belief that homosexuality is unnatural in comparatively realistic conceptions of nature. The most recent of these, the idea that behavior which is inherently nonreproductive is unnatural in an evolutionary sense, is probably applied to gay people inaccurately. Nonreproductivity can in any case hardly be imagined to have induced intolerance of gay people in ancient societies which idealized celibacy or in modern ones which consider masturbation perfectly natural, since both of these practices have reproductive consequences identical with those of homosexual activity. This objection is clearly a justification rather than a cause of prejudice.

The second assumption is that homosexuality does not occur among animals other than humans. In the first place, this is demonstrably false: homosexual behavior, sometimes involving pair-bonding, has been observed among many animal species in the wild as well as in captivity.19 This has been recognized since the time of Aristotle and, incredible as it seems, has been accepted by people who still objected to homosexual behavior as unknown to other animals. In the second place, it is predicated on another assumption—that uniquely human behavior is not natural—which is fundamentally unsupportable in almost any context, biological or philosophical. Many animals in fact engage in behavior which is unique to their species, but no one imagines that such behavior is unnatural; on the contrary, it is regarded as part of the nature of the species in question and is useful to taxonomists in distinguishing the species from other types of organisms. If man were the only species to demonstrate homosexual desires and behavior, this would hardly be grounds for categorizing them as unnatural. Most of the behavior which human societies most admire is unique to humans: this is indeed the main reason it is respected. No one imagines that human society naturally resists literacy because it is unknown among other animals.

2. An entirely separate category of natural/unnatural opposition depends on what might be termed ideal nature.20 Although concepts of ideal nature resemble and are strongly influenced by meanings of real nature, they differ significantly from the latter in explicitly presupposing that nature is good.21 Whether ideal nature is understood to include all physical things or simply the nonhuman, it is always believed to operate to the good. Some natural things may be sad or distressing, may even give the appearance of evil, but all can be shown to result in something which is desirable or worthwhile in the long run or on a grand scale. Anything which is truly vicious or evil must be unnatural, since nature could not produce evil on its own. Concepts of ideal nature are strongly conditioned by observation of the real world, but they are ultimately determined by cultural values. This is particularly notable in the case of unnatural, which becomes in such a system a vehement circumlocution for bad or unacceptable. Behavior which is ideologically so alien or personally so disgusting to those affected by ideal nature that it appears to have no redeeming qualities whatever will be labeled unnatural, regardless of whether it occurs in (real) nature never or often, or among humans or lower animals, because it will be assumed that a good nature could not under any circumstances have produced it.

Not surprisingly, adherents of ideal concepts of nature frequently characterize as unnatural sexual behavior to which they object on religious or personal grounds. What is surprising is the extent to which those who consciously reject ideal nature are nonetheless affected by such derogation. This confusion, like that of religious conviction and personal antipathy, is particularly well illustrated in the case of attitudes toward gay people.

The idea that homosexuality is unnatural (perhaps introduced by a chance remark of Plato)22 became widespread in the ancient world due to the triumph of ideal concepts of nature over realistic ones.23 Especially during the centuries immediately following the rise of Christianity, philosophical schools of thought using idealized nature as the touchstone of human ethics exercised a profound influence on Western thought and popularized the notion that all nonprocreative sexuality was unnatural. Although this argument subsequently fell into disfavor, it was revived by Scholastics in the thirteenth century and came to be a decisive, even controlling concept in all branches of learning, from the technical sciences to dogmatic theology. The scientific, philosophical, and even moral considerations which underlay this approach have since been almost wholly discredited and are consciously rejected by most educated persons, but the emotional impact of terms like unnatural andagainst nature persists. Although the idea that gay people are violating naturepredates by as much as two millennia the rise of modern science and is based on concepts wholly alien to it, many people unthinkingly transfer the ancient prejudice to an imagined scientific frame of reference, without recognizing the extreme contradictions involved, and conclude that homosexual behavior violates the nature described by modern scientists rather than the nature idealized by ancient philosophers.

Even at the level of personal morality, the persistence of the concept of unnatural in this context, when it has been abandoned in nearly all others, is a significant index of the prejudice which actually inspires it. Historical ethical systems based on nature opposed shaving, growing flowers indoors, dyeing garments, regular bathing, birth control, and scores of other activities performed daily by the same people who use the term unnatural to justify their antipathy toward gay people. The objection that homosexuality is unnatural appears, in short, to be neither scientifically nor morally cogent and probably represents nothing more than a derogatory epithet of unusual emotional impact due to a confluence of historically sanctioned prejudices and ill-informed ideas about nature. Like illiberal, unenlightened, un-American, and various other imprecise negations, it may provide a rallying point for hostility but can hardly be imagined to constitute the origin of the emotions involved.

In addition to casting a clearer light on the relationship of intolerance and religious beliefs and imaginary dangers to society, the study of prejudice against gay people affords, as the final advantage to be discussed here, revealing insights into the similarities and differences of intolerance toward many different groups and characteristics. In a number of ways the separate histories of Europe's minorities are the same story, and many parallels have been drawn in this study with groups whose histories relate to or reflect the history of gay people. Most societies, for instance, which freely tolerate religious diversity also accept sexual variation, and the fate of Jews and gay people has been almost identical throughout European history, from early Christian hostility to extermination in concentration camps. The same laws which oppressed Jews oppressed gay people; the same groups bent on eliminating Jews tried to wipe out homosexuality; the same periods of European history which could not make room for Jewish distinctiveness reacted violently against sexual nonconformity; the same countries which insisted on religious uniformity imposed majority standards of sexual conduct; and even the same methods of propaganda were used against Jews and gay people—picturing them as animals bent on the destruction of the children of the majority.24

But there are significant differences, and these bear heavily on the present analysis. Judaism, for example, is consciously passed from parents to children, and it has been able to transmit, along with its ethical precepts, political wisdom gleaned from centuries of oppression and harassment: advice about how to placate, reason with, or avoid hostile majorities; how and when to maintain a low profile; when to make public gestures; how to conduct business with potential enemies. Moreover, it has been able to offer its adherents at least the solace of solidarity in the face of oppression. Although European ghettos kept the Jews in, they also kept the Gentiles out; and Jewish family life flourished as the main social outlet for a group cut off from the majority at many points in its history, imparting to individual Jews a sense not only of community in the present but of belonging to the long and hallowed traditions of those who went before.

Gay people are for the most part not born into gay families. They suffer oppression individually and alone, without benefit of advice or frequently even emotional support from relatives or friends. This makes their case more comparable in some ways to that of the blind or left-handed, who are also dispersed in the general population rather than segregated by heritage and who also are in many cultures the victims of intolerance. Gay people are even more revealing than most such dispersed minorities, however, because they are usually socialized through adulthood as ordinary members of society, since parents rarely realize that children are gay until they are fully grown. Their reactions and the reactions of those hostile to them thus illustrate intolerance in a relatively uncomplicated form, with no extraneous variable such as atypical socialization, inability to contribute to society, or even visible abnormality. In every way but one, most gay people are just like those around them, and antipathy toward them is for this reason an unusually illuminating instance of intolerance.

Only when social attitudes are favorable do gay people tend to form visible subcultures. In hostile societies they become invisible, a luxury afforded them by the essentially private nature of their variation from the norm, but one which greatly increases their isolation and drastically reduces their lobbying effectiveness. When good times return, there is no mechanism to encourage steps to prevent a recurrence of oppression: no gay grandparents who remember the pogroms, no gay exile literature to remind the living of the fate of the dead, no liturgical commemorations of times of crisis and suffering. Relatively few gay people today are aware of the great variety of positions in which time has placed their kind, and in previous societies almost none seem to have had such awareness.

Because of this, except in cases where they happen to wield considerable authority, gay people have been all but totally dependent on popular attitudes toward them for freedom, a sense of identity, and in many cases survival. The history of public reactions to homosexuality is thus in some measure a history of social tolerance generally.

It is only fair to point out that in addition to the advantages of using gay people to study intolerance, there are several salient disadvantages. The most fundamental of these is the fact that the longevity of prejudice against gay people and their sexuality has resulted in the deliberate falsification of historical records concerning them well into the present century, rendering accurate reconstruction of their history particularly difficult. Distortion on this issue was little known in the ancient world25 but became more widespread with the dramatic shift in public morality following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. Ignorance was the major force behind the loss of information on this subject in medieval Europe—with Alcibiades occasionally appearing in medieval literature as a female companion to Socrates26—but the heavy hand of the censor was also evident. In a manuscript of Ovid's Art of Love, for example, a phrase which originally read, A boy's love appealed to me less was emended by a medieval moralist to read, A boy's love appealed to me not at all, and a marginal note informed the reader, Thus you may be sure that Ovid was not a sodomite.27

Crudities of this sort are of course easily detected, and more modern ages devised subtler means of disguising gay sentiments and sexuality. Changing the gender of pronouns has been popular at least since Michelangelo's grand-nephew employed this means to render his uncle's sonnets more acceptable to the public;28 and scholars have continued the ruse even where no one's reputation was involved: when the Persian moral fables of Sa'di were translated into English in the early nineteenth century, Francis Gladwin conscientiously transformed each story about gay love into a heterosexual romance by altering the offending pronouns.29 As late as the mid-twentieth century, the ghazels of Hafiz were still being falsified in this way.30

A more honest though hardly more edifying approach is deletion. This may range from the omission of a single word which indicates gender (as is common where the original would reveal that the love object in the Rubaiyat is in fact male)31 to an entire work, like the Amores (Affairs of the Heart) of Pseudo-Lucian, which Thomas Francklin excised from his translation because it contained a dispute about which sex was preferable as erotic focus for males: But as this is a point which, at least in this nation, has been long since determined in favour of the ladies, it stands in need of no farther discussion: the Dialogue is therefore, for this, as well as some other still more material reasons, which will occur to those who are acquainted with the original, entirely omitted.32 (The more material reasons may now be consulted in a reasonably frank translation by M. D. MacLeod in vol. 8 of the LC edition of the works of Lucian.)

Even hostile accounts of gay sexuality are often expurgated in English translations,33 and the suppression of details related to homosexuality affects historical accounts which can hardly be considered lurid or titillating, as when the Oxford Classical Dictionary observes that the Attic lovers Harmodius and Aristogiton were provoked by private differences to kill the tyrant Hippias.34

Probably the most entertaining efforts to conceal homosexuality from the public have been undertaken by the editors of the Loeb Classics, the standard collection of Greek and Latin classical texts with English translation. Until very recently many sections of Greek works in this series dealing with overt homosexuality were translated not into English but Latin, and some explicit passages in Latin found their way into Italian.35 In addition to the ambiguous comment this procedure makes on the morals of Italian readers, it has the curious effect of highlighting every salacious passage in the major classics, since the interested reader (with appropriate linguistic skills) has only to skim the English translation looking for Latin or Italian. The practice applied equally to profane and sacred writers: even Christian condemnations of homosexual acts were deemed too provocative for English readers.36

As in most matters, half-truths are more misleading than whole lies, and the historian's greatest difficulties are presented by slight twists of meaning in translations which appear to be complete and frank. A wealth of information is concealed by the English translation of a line in Cornelius Nepos which reads, In Crete it is thought praiseworthy for young men to have the greatest number of love affairs.37 In a climate of opinion which did not automatically assume that references to love affairs implied heterosexuality, this translation would only be too loose; for modern English readers, it is tantamount to falsehood. The original sense of the comment is "In Crete it is considered praiseworthy for a young man to