Tuckahoe NY Pride

John Boswell was a Yale historian whose scholarship reshaped debates on Christianity and homosexuality. Trained in medieval studies and languages, he mined canon law, liturgy, and social records to argue that attitudes toward same-sex love varied widely across time and place. His landmark book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) documented periods of relative acceptance in early and medieval Europe, challenging claims of an unbroken tradition of condemnation. In Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (1994) he examined rites he interpreted as liturgical blessing of same-sex partnerships. Boswell’s work advanced religious tolerance by historicizing doctrine and widening interpretive possibilities today.

Quote: “It is, on the other hand, the province of the historian not to praise or blame but merely to record and explain.”