Title: Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe Author: John Boswell Published by: Villard Books, 1994 ISBN: 0-679-43228-0 [hardcover, 412 pages]
Hailed as "a major historian" by The New York Times Book Review, John Boswell has established a reputation as one of the preeminent authorities on the Middle Ages.His latest work, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, the result of twelve years of meticulous research, focuses on the author's discovery of Catholic and Orthodox liturgies for same-sex unions - here translated into English for the first time. These ceremonies, which were performed throughout Christendom into modern times, are shown to bear striking resemblance to heterosexual nuptial services.
With his characteristic rigor and erudition, Boswell traces same-sex unions from Platonic Greece, where the bonding of brotherly equals was considered the noblest form of human contact; to Rome, with its elaborate systems of legal adoption; to Christianized Europe, in which moral ambivalence toward human sexuality of any kind gradually gave way to intolerance, but not before the Church created liturgies to bless loving unions both straight and gay. The analysis required to place these ceremonies in their proper context makes this book a virtual history of the roots of all modern marriages.
A work of paramount significance, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe irrefutably demonstrates that same-sex relationships have been sanctioned and even idealized in Western societies for over two thousand years.
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