Reception Ĭhristianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality won a National Book Award and the Stonewall Book Award in 1981. However, he writes that it, "suffers from an emphasis on negative sanctions which gives a wholly misleading picture of medieval practice, is limited primarily to data regarding France and Britain, and has been superseded even in its major focus, biblical analysis." Publication history Ĭhristianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality was published in 1980 by the University of Chicago Press. In his introduction, Boswell discusses Derrick Sherwin Bailey's Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (1955), which he describes as a "pioneering study" upon which almost all "modern historical research on gay people in the Christian West" has depended.
The work is divided into four parts: “Points of Departure”, “The Christian Tradition”, “Shifting Fortunes” and “The Rise of Intolerance”. "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.This section needs expansion. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, still fiercely relevant today, helped form the disciplines of gay and gender studies, and it continues to illuminate the origins and operations of intolerance as a social force. The historical breadth of Boswell's research (from the Greeks to Aquinas) and the variety of sources consulted make this one of the most extensive treatments of any single aspect of Western social history. John Boswell's National Book Award-winning study of the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the early Christian West was a groundbreaking work that challenged preconceptions about the Church's past relationship to its gay members-among them priests, bishops, and even saints-when it was first published twenty-five years ago. Boswell reveals unexplored phenomena with an unfailing erudition." -Michel Foucault
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