ABSTRACT
John Boswell, an openly gay and avowedly Roman Catholic historian, famous as a pioneering chronicler of ‘gay’ life in early Christian history, and of same-sex unions apparently sanctified by the church, offered a slightly disenchanted view of traditional marriage. He compared marriage in pre-modern Europe with marriage in the modern West. In the earlier period, he argues, marriage began conventionally as a property arrangement, in its middle it was chiefly about raising children, and ended about love. Western marriage, on the other hand, begins about love, in its middle is still largely about raising children, and often ends about property – ‘by which point love is absent or a distant memory’ (Boswell 1994: xxi, xxii).
