![]() Hostility toward same-sex relationships began to surface in Christian Europe only during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The moral neutrality toward homosexual relations that characterized the Early Church, Boswell continues, persisted throughout the early Middle Ages. Those who now believe that they did so, he asserts, misunderstand the sources. Neither the Christian Scriptures nor the early church Fathers, Boswell maintained, expressed blanket disapproval of homosexual practices. In brief, Christianity, according to Boswell, emerged in a Mediterranean world where intimate relations between persons of the same sex were widely tolerated, if not invariably condoned. The opening essay by the editor, Matthew Kuefler, outlines the central tenets of Boswell's argument. ![]() ![]() The sixteen chapters that make up The Boswell Thesis seek to assess some of the ways that Boswell's work has continued to roil historical scholarship during the past quarter of a century. The publication in 1980 of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (hereafter CSTH) by John Boswell marked the beginning of radical changes that persist to the present in the ways that historians, especially medievalists, deal with same-sex relationships. ![]()
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