![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwSame-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe is by one John Boswell. I know nothing about the author other than that the blurb says he is a Yale historian. This book rocks several kinds of awesome. He lets the reader know in the prefatory matter that he's aiming to keep the main text fairly direct, and that the various meta-quibbles will all go live in the footnotes. He accomplishes this with grace - the text does move in a direct manner [after the first chapter about terminology, which is slow-going], and the footnotes do pause for all the linguistic comparison anyone's heart could ever desire.
The reason for the so-precise titling of the book makes me hesitant to summarize it the way I'm inclined to do. My inclination would be to say "this is a history of gay marriage in the classical and early-to-mid medieval world of Europe and the Mediterranean." But that isn't precisely a claim the book makes. The claim the book makes is more for a history of formal relationships between people of the same gender containing legal, affective, and property elements, recognized in varying degrees by church, community, and state, and performed by priests in church, as well as being written up as model rituals in church records.
The author is direct about finding the two things relatively equivalent as much as can be, given differences in culture, language, perception of how relationships functioned. I'm convinced too. But Boswell deliberately keeps interpretation out of it a lot of the time, because one of his main points is that homophobic writers/expositors and others who may not have been homophobic but were conscious of writing in homophobic society have interpreted against the linguistic/historical evidence to cover up these bits of history, and he seems conscious of trying not to overstate things in the opposite direction.
The sheer level of language skills this guy had to be rocking to write this book absolutely boggle my brain. The footnotes are full of untranslated Greek, Latin, Arabic, Armenian, various Slavic languages, in addition to the French, Spanish, Italian, German, and so forth - untranslated not because he didn't read them [in fact, the last 50-70 pages are comprised of his translations of some of the documents he cites in the text] but because he's trying to be scrupulously fair about providing the originals of the words he's translating where their particular translation is contested.
Also there's the contextual knowledge of both Roman and Byzantine Christian history, of Greek and Roman literature, of European monasticism. Color me deeply impressed.
Contextual thoughts:
1) Why don't I recall ever seeing this book cited or referred to in any of the many articles in the popular press about debates on gay marriage in current Christian churches?
2) Dear Fantasy Secondary worlds: you can now stop telling me forever that the reason your !historical cultures are full of homophobia is because that's how all of history was. No, that's how the period from the Victorian era through the 1950s was, and we've been reading history translated, expurgated, and taught by people of that era for a long time. That doesn't mean the past is shaped that way.
3) I want to read a fantasy story about the posestra Balkan women of the early 20th century who could get out of marriage by swearing perpetual virginity and dress as men if it pleased them, eating and smoking with men and carrying weapons and perhaps having affairs with each other!
The reason for the so-precise titling of the book makes me hesitant to summarize it the way I'm inclined to do. My inclination would be to say "this is a history of gay marriage in the classical and early-to-mid medieval world of Europe and the Mediterranean." But that isn't precisely a claim the book makes. The claim the book makes is more for a history of formal relationships between people of the same gender containing legal, affective, and property elements, recognized in varying degrees by church, community, and state, and performed by priests in church, as well as being written up as model rituals in church records.
The author is direct about finding the two things relatively equivalent as much as can be, given differences in culture, language, perception of how relationships functioned. I'm convinced too. But Boswell deliberately keeps interpretation out of it a lot of the time, because one of his main points is that homophobic writers/expositors and others who may not have been homophobic but were conscious of writing in homophobic society have interpreted against the linguistic/historical evidence to cover up these bits of history, and he seems conscious of trying not to overstate things in the opposite direction.
The sheer level of language skills this guy had to be rocking to write this book absolutely boggle my brain. The footnotes are full of untranslated Greek, Latin, Arabic, Armenian, various Slavic languages, in addition to the French, Spanish, Italian, German, and so forth - untranslated not because he didn't read them [in fact, the last 50-70 pages are comprised of his translations of some of the documents he cites in the text] but because he's trying to be scrupulously fair about providing the originals of the words he's translating where their particular translation is contested.
Also there's the contextual knowledge of both Roman and Byzantine Christian history, of Greek and Roman literature, of European monasticism. Color me deeply impressed.
Contextual thoughts:
1) Why don't I recall ever seeing this book cited or referred to in any of the many articles in the popular press about debates on gay marriage in current Christian churches?
2) Dear Fantasy Secondary worlds: you can now stop telling me forever that the reason your !historical cultures are full of homophobia is because that's how all of history was. No, that's how the period from the Victorian era through the 1950s was, and we've been reading history translated, expurgated, and taught by people of that era for a long time. That doesn't mean the past is shaped that way.
3) I want to read a fantasy story about the posestra Balkan women of the early 20th century who could get out of marriage by swearing perpetual virginity and dress as men if it pleased them, eating and smoking with men and carrying weapons and perhaps having affairs with each other!
