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Book
John Boswell · 1980
Boswell's foundational historical revisionism on Christianity's relationship to same-sex love through the High Middle Ages; pairs with Brooten's Love Between Women for the patristic-through-medieval queer-theology axis.
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Appears in
What this book knows
Medieval Christianity did not uniformly condemn homosexuality; intolerance intensified through political, not purely scriptural, forces across fourteen centuries.
obedience-and-authority
No medieval states burned the greedy at the stake. Biblical strictures have been employed with great selectivity by all Christian states.
BOSW-CSTH-RC-012Aquinas struggled to construct a philosophical justification for classifying homosexual acts as not only serious but worse than comparable heterosexual ones.
BOSW-CSTH-RC-362belonging
Ausonius was passionately loved by Saint Paulinus; their relationship found expression in poetry of exquisite tenderness, setting the tone for medieval love literature.
BOSW-CSTH-RC-153Anselm frequently addressed letters to his 'beloved lover' — wherever you go my love follows you, and wherever I remain my desire embraces you.
BOSW-CSTH-RC-249religion-and-sex
Clement invoked the Alexandrian rule — that sexual intercourse must be directed toward procreation — as the backbone of his argument against homosexuality.
BOSW-CSTH-RC-160The longevity of prejudice against gay people resulted in the deliberate falsification of historical records, rendering accurate reconstruction of their history particularly difficult.
BOSW-CSTH-RC-025Illuminates
6 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis
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