Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe

At a time when strictures against homosexuality are the subject of impassioned debate, this groundbreaking work of scholarship has generated extraordinary controversy. In Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, Yale historian John Boswell, one of our most respected authorities on the Middle Ages, produces extensive evidence that at one time the Catholic and eastern Orthodox churches not only sanctioned unions between partners of the same sex but sanctified them — in ceremonies that bear striking resemblance to the heterosexual marriage ceremonies.