John Boswell

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John Eastburn Boswell (born March 20, 1947 in Boston , Massachusetts , † December 24, 1994 in New Haven , Connecticut ) was an American historian who dealt with the Christian Middle Ages and Moorish Spain . His books are considered to be the foundations of gay and lesbian studies .

Life

Boswell graduated from Harvard University , became a history professor at Yale University , where he helped set up the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center in 1987 . Between 1990 and 1992 he was chairman of the Yale History Department . He died of complications from AIDS at the age of 47 .

plant

The productive tension in Boswell's work was due to the fact that he was looking for a way to reconcile his commitment to Catholicism with his gayness, politicized by the Stonewall uprising . Throughout his life he saw his central intellectual task as being "to reject the widespread notion that religious beliefs - Christian or any other - were the cause of intolerance towards gay men".

In his major work from 1980, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality - for which he received the American Book Award and the Gay Book Award in 1981 - he tries to substantiate his thesis using a comprehensive corpus of sources. He comes to the conclusion that the decisive upheaval towards bitter hostility towards homosexual men did not occur until the 12th century, when the death penalty for male-male intercourse was introduced across Europe. For him, this upheaval stands in the context of a new understanding of nature as an empty abstraction, the expansion of state administration, the popular pogroms against Jews and the crusade movement against Islam . He contrasts this with numerous sources from the first eleven centuries of Christianity, which either demonstrate a relative carelessness towards the subject of homosexuality or can even be understood as a celebration of same-sex love between men.

Boswell is one of the first gay historians to break out of the previously common construction of a closed history of repression . However, his work also attracted numerous critics. While some accused him of downplaying traditional Christianity's hostility towards homosexuality and overrating sources expressing a neutral or positive attitude, others questioned his timeless use of the term gay , which was only adopted by the gay movement in the late 1960s had been coined.

In the ensuing debate between constructivists and essentialists , Boswell tried to take a mediating position with his essay Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories (1982). However, the dispute has not yet been resolved. Essentialists still assume that there has always been a gay minority and that their story can best be described in terms of tolerance and persecution. In contrast, constructivists emphasize the difference between premodern concepts of love for friends and “ sodomy ” on the one hand and the modern concept of homosexual identity on the other.

St. Sergius and St. Bacchus (7th century)

Although Boswell is generally classified as an essentialist on the basis of the formulations in his book from 1980, this discussion only marginally touched his actual interest in knowledge . In his second major work, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe , which he published shortly before his death in 1994, he turned to his old thesis that the Catholic Church was not always hostile to same-sex relationships. This time, as evidence, he used the rite of Adelphopoiesis (Greek: "making brothers"), which was also translated into Latin , with which the Orthodox Church blessed the love of two men and tied them together forever, following the example of male saints like Sergius and Bacchus . Boswell saw this institution as a kind of Christian forerunner of same-sex marriage , as it is opposed with great vehemence by almost all denominations today. In doing so, he sparked a broad controversy about the significance and value of the sworn brotherhoods , which had hardly been noticed until then , and which - rather unusual for a medievalist - immediately drew political circles.

In addition, Boswell also tried to correct the prevailing image of allegedly homophobic Islam by pointing out the prominent role that same-sex love played in the Arab world at the time of the Moorish rule in Spain, not only for the secular, but also especially for the religious Poetry played.

criticism

In 1986 Richard B. Hays, who was then also at Yale University, published the article Relations Natural and Unnatural: A Response to John Boswell's Exegesis of Romans I , in which he describes John Boswell's interpretation of Romans 1 as a prime example of Eisegese and Boswell's historical reconstruction in Question asks. Boswell did not reply to the article and reportedly refused to even greet Hays afterwards.

Fonts

  • Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities Under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century (1977) - libro.uca.edu
  • Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980)
  • Rediscovering Gay History: Archetypes of Gay Love in Christian History (1982)
  • The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (1989)
  • Homosexuality in the Priesthood and the Religious Life (1991, co-author)
  • Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy (1992)
  • The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Union in Premodern Europe (1994)
  • Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago / London 1980, ISBN 0-226-06711-4 .
  • Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories. In: Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey, Jr. (Eds.): Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past. New York 1989, ISBN 0-452-01067-5 (first reprinted 1982).
  • Same-Sex-Unions in Premodern Europe. New York 1994, ISBN 0-679-75164-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Richard B. Hays: Relations Natural and Unnatural: A Response to John Boswell's Exegesis of Romans I. In: Journal of Religious Ethics. Volume 14, 1986.
  2. ^ Richard B. Hays: The Credibility of Boswell's Historical Reconstruction. In: Journal of Religious Ethics. Volume 14, 1986.
  3. ^ Tim Stafford: New Theologians. In: Christianity Today. February 8, 1999.
personal data
SURNAME Boswell, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Boswell, John Eastburn (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 1994
Place of death New Haven (Connecticut)