LHMP #279a Boswell 1994 Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe

Introduction

The modern West has a peculiar fascination with the topic of romantic love as it existed in older cultures, projecting the 19-20th century cultural obsession with romance onto the past. Other cultures and societies have had entirely different cultural preoccupations to a similar degree, such as personal fame, family lineage, etc. Romantic love does appear as a similar preoccupation in certain other eras, though not always with the odd expectation that love and marriage are tied together. Projecting this concept onto older eras and cultures creates deep misunderstandings of those cultures.

Even within Christian culture, views on marriage have varied widely. There is no single set of necessary and sufficient conditions to explain attitudes toward love and marriage in Western history.

When Western prejudice against same-sex relations collides with this chaotic definition of marriage, the structural issues are even clearer. [Note: To tie this point to more recent politics, a certain amount of the argumentation that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in the USA involved pointed out these structural issues: that there are no logical arguments that support excluding all same-sex marriages that would not also invalidate large numbers of heterosexual marriages.]

This preoccupation + prejudice means that the question modern Western society asks about the same-sex unions discussed in this work is “were they homosexual?” But this question makes little sense in the historic context. Formalized same-sex unions have existed in many cultures in many eras. But the anti-gay attitude in Western culture demands that we make a clear distinction between erotic and non-erotic relations within them.

Boswell makes the usual apology for the predominance of male data over female. He says he made a special effort to examine “female correlates of male-recorded and male-centered phenomena.” [Note: but this assumes that they correlate, as opposed to involving qualitatively different phenomena.]

Chapter 1: The Vocabulary of Love and Marriage

This chapter provides a detailed discussion of various words used for the love/passion range of meanings and their nuances of meaning and use. A similar analysis of vocabulary is provided for marriage-like concepts. The focus is on Greek and Latin and how Greek and Latin vocabulary were translated into English (especially in Biblical contexts) Boswell discusses the problems of translating contextual of “slang” meanings of words. The purpose of this chapter is to shake up the reader’s premise that words must be read and understood in their “literal” meanings. [Note: This is not material that can be summarized in brief. If this summary intrigues you, I highly recommend just going out and reading the whole book.]