Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society)

Rating:
Summary: Is there life after Boswell?
Review: According to John Boswell's book, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, the Christian tradition was not anti-gay until the late middle ages. Professor Brooten's book makes us revisit that argument and rethink the hegemony of Boswell's thesis in gay circles. Her critique of Boswell's reading of Romans 1 is telling and accurate.

Brooten's book is a very tight and carefully argued presentation of Christian tradition as anti-gay and (especially) anti-lesbian from the outset. The wider context of this argument is fascinating. It includes translations of spells and other original material never seen before. No one interested in gay or lesbian history can neglect this study!

Rating:
Summary: A Confused, Outdated Rehash of a Study
Review: This book aptly demonstrates why biblical scholars are generally not yet ready to address the topic of ancient sexuality: They are clueless. I aim most of my invective against part one of Brooten's study: the ancient Greek and Roman background of female-female erotics. Brooten's main problem is that she does not understand (1) the nature of her primary texts or (2) the social construction of sexuality. The medical and astrological texts she attempts to analyze explain EVERYTHING via medicine and the stars; therefore, it is pointless to try and deduce very much about social constructionism from them. John Winkler makes this point well in _The Constraints of Desire_. Her essentializing conclusions are therefore invalid. The best book on female-female sex and erotics in Antiquity when I originally wrote this review was Juan Francisco Martos Montiel's _Desde Lesbos con amor_, a very strangely ignored study. I suppose Anglo and Germanic scholars consider Spanish beneath them. Now, the best book would have to be _Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World_, a collection of essays edited by Nancy Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger which DOES actually acknowledge Martos Montiel's book as one of the major previous studies in the field. The tirade of part two of Brooten's book does nothing but rehash the traditional view. She therefore repeats the error of anachronistically reading very late notions of "nature" and "natural law" into early Christian texts by confusing a mishmash of disparate texts and theories from several different cultures, subcultures, and historical periods into one miraculously unified and coherent "natural law." I tell you, she makes even the best magician look like an amateur. What she fails to do, however, is convince.Why are biblical scholars so bad at this type of research? I have observed that, even when they are familiar with a fair portion of the secondary literature, biblical scholars just don't understand the arguments. Why is that, then? It seems biblical scholars are still caught up in a long-outdated mode of scholarship, one ill-equipped to handle later forms of social and cultural history, especially when involving a good dose of theory, as LGBT historical studies inevitably do.