gizmo_2655 wrote on Jan 10^th, 2014 at 12:23pm:



If he clicks on the picture of the book, he can read a few pages for free:

http://www.amazon.com/Same-Sex-Unions-Premodern-Europe-Boswell/dp/0679751645?tag...

by Camille Paglia.

Boswell's style, here as in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, is to pack an enormous amount of dry, irrelevant bibliographic material into scores of footnotes, building a pretentious barricade around his thin and vacillating central presentation. Meanwhile, crucial research is often avoided. For example, one would expect a historian discussing medieval sexuality to at least cursorily consider the enormous "courtly love" tradition, with its inherent perversities, but that is relegated to a footnote, which glibly lists, without explanation, 23 books and articles for us to read. Boswell's knowledge of psychology or general sexual history seems minimal, confined to a handful of chic, narrow academic books cited from the 1980s.

Whatever medieval ceremonies of union he may have found, Boswell has not remotely established that they were originally homosexual in our romantic sense. Their real meaning has yet to be determined. Sacrilegious misuse of such ceremonies may indeed have occurred, leading to their banning, but historians are unjustified in extrapolating backwards and reducing fragmentary evidence to its lowest common denominator. The cause of gay rights, which I support, is not helped by this kind of slippery, self-interested scholarship, where propaganda and casuistry impede the objective search for truth.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/bosrev-paglia.asp

Nuf said.

Paglia, unlike Boswell, is smart, scholarly, insightful.

Soren wrote on Jan 10^th, 2014 at 12:38pm:



And opinions are like Sorens arseholes.

Datalife wrote on Jan 10^th, 2014 at 12:42pm:



Yes, much more.

Many pages are available when you click on the book.

The pages are very slow to load, but they are certainly there.

Soren wrote on Jan 10^th, 2014 at 12:38pm:


Maybe you should also post the response to Paglia's review?

Datalife wrote on Jan 10^th, 2014 at 12:45pm:



You are looking sillier with each new post you make.

Here is what you requested:

"So are you going to provide a reference at all?  Something that I can look up or are you the only source of this bit of history? "

And, that is exactly what you were provided with.

You're not very good at this, are you?

Datalife wrote on Jan 10^th, 2014 at 12:47pm:



Direct quote from you:

"So are you going to provide a reference at all?  Something that I can look up or are you the only source of this bit of history? "

You're not very good at this, are you?