Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century

John Boswell's highly acclaimed study of the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the Christian West challenges received opinion and our own preconceptions about the Church's past relationship to its gay members, among whom were priests, bishops and even canonized saints. The historical breadth of Boswell's research (from the Greeks to Aquinas) and the variety of sources consulted (legal, literary, theological, artistic, and scientific) make this one of the most extensive treatments of any single aspect of Western social history. The product of ten years of research and analysis of records in a dozen languages, this book opens up a new area of historical inquiry and helps elucidate the origins and operations of intolerance as a social force.

Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality won the National Book Award in 1981.

"What makes this work so exciting is not simply its content--fascinating though that is--but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." --Jean Strouse, Newsweek

"Truly groundbreaking work. Boswell reveals unexplored phenomena with an unfailing erudition."--Michel Foucault

"[Boswell] has mastered one of the rarest skills: the ability to write about sex with genuine wit. Improbable as it might seem, this work of unrelenting scholarship and high intellectual drama is also thoroughly entertaining." --Paul Robinson, New York Times Book Review

John Boswell (1947-1994) was the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale University and the author of The Royal Treasure, The Kindness of Strangers, and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.