The history of homosexuality in the West, as understood by most of us until very recently (last week in my case), went something like this: First there were the Greeks, who all did it, very tastefully, and, like Sappho and Plato, wrote elegant poems and treatises about it. Then there were the Romans, who nearly all did it, though rather more vulgarly than the Greeks, and eventually became rather decadent and riotous about it (like Caligula). Then came the Christians (boo, hiss), a few of whom did it, like Saint Sebastian, but most of whom were hostile and puritanical and burned us at the stake and threw us to lions. This unhappy period was called the Dark Ages, and went on, as its name suggests, for simply Ages. Then came the Renaissance, when the Christians, led by several of their popes, began doing it again in increasing numbers, and even became decadent and riotous in their turn. They employed us to paint their ceilings and put up tasteful nudes around their cities.
Then, soon after, came the Reformation, when the Puritans (boo, hiss), none of whom did it at all, denounced the decadent popes and their gay ceiling painters and began burning us again. This state of affairs went on and on for centuries, punctuated by such dreadful episodes as that involving poor Oscar Wilde, until the beginning of the Modern Age, variously supposed to have dawned with Freud, Marx, Kinsey or Don Dunstan, when enlightenment, reform and the Gay Community were born. Now, despite a few tiresome bores like Fred Nile, homosexuals are prosperous, liberated and safe, and only get chained up and beaten by each other.
This neat, linear and comforting view of our history has now been thoroughly and systematically exploded, and our understanding of our present state of relative security and how we got here can never be the same. John Boswell, assistant professor of history at Yale University, has written a long and thoroughgoing "History of Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century." His conclusions are fascinating and disturbing.
The history of attitudes toward, and the treatment of, homosexuals in mediaeval Europe is virtually uncharted territory, and Boswell's exhaustive researches have turned up new evidence in the form of both official documents such as law codes and church edicts, and of personal records such a letters, manuscripts and poetry. Using these, he has been able to reconstruct the rise and fall of successive periods of tolerance and repression, of open expression and furtive concealment. He draws links between the fate of homosexuals and the fates of other identifiable minority groups such as Jews and heretics, showing how they shared common periods of relative security, followed by periods of persecution, and how an attack on one of these groups by the church or the state usually foreshadowed an attack on them all. He is also able to link the pattern of toleration and repression to the general social and economic history of European society, in a way that makes it clear that a period of persecution for homosexuals was not simply the result of a wicked king or a bloody-minded pope, who might soon be expected to die or get thrown in the Tiber, but the result of fluctuations in the growth of trade, changes in the patterns of urbanisation, or the competition between old and new systems of production and the groups that owned them.
Most strikingly Boswell shows how the Christianisation of Europe, which began in the third century and was firmly established by the seventh, did not by itself mean the end of the toleration of homosexuality and its open cultural expression allowed by late Roman society. In fact, despite the anti-homosexual writings of some (though by no means all) of the leaders of the early church, homosexuals continued to enjoy, with some fluctuations, a fairly high degree of toleration until the end of the thirteenth century - well after the period usually called the Dark Ages. What caused the turn against homosexuals at that time was a severe economic crisis, to which both the church and the state responded by searching for scapegoats. Jews, heretics, witches, lepers, Muslims, gypsies, beggars and the disabled all suffered along with homosexuals as the anger and frustration of the population were turned against them.
The turn when it came was particularly vicious. After a long period (known as "the Twelfth century Renaissance"), in which gay bishops and kings could write love poems to each other, came the period when the Castilian government could command that "If any commit this sin, once it is proven, both be castrated before the whole populace and on the third day after be hung by the legs until dead, and that their bodies never be taken down."
Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality is a work of quite dazzling erudition. John Boswell appears to know dozens of languages including (in addition to the standard Latin, Greek and French) Persian, Icelandic and Provencal. His enormous footnotes are a wonderland of comparative philology and exegesical sleight-of-hand. He has, however, tried to keep the body of his text free from such technicalities, and to produce a book accessible both to specialists and to the general reader. Nevertheless, a lot of important points, such as the question of what exactly the scriptures and the church fathers said about homosexuals (and what they meant by what they said), turn upon the precise meaning of, say a particular Greek noun at a particular period, and it is impossible to avoid this sort of argument if one is to get to grips with the subject. The general reader without a taste for this sort of historiographical detective-work will find Boswell's book heavy going.
The task is made easier, however, by the fact that Boswell is an articulate and entertaining writer who sweetens his text with extracts from some wonderful mediaeval love-poems, and by the deadly political relevance of the material he has unearthed. For the most important fact to be gleaned from this book is that toleration is not the same as liberation, and that the security and freedom of expression won by homosexuals is always transitory and conditional if it is not backed up by the ability to defend it when the "turn" comes. No doubt the gay balladeers and poets of the twelfth century Renaissance thought that all their battles were won and their freedoms were secure, but they were wrong, and the lesson of their fate is now before us to be learned.