ABSTRACT
The great cultural renaissance during the twelfth century in Western Europe included a sudden flourishing of homosexual poetry.1 Just as men were laying the foundations for universities, reviving interest in law and science, developing the tools of scholastic philosophy, and learning again to appreciate classical literature, so too were men writing poems of love and seduction among men or between older men and boys, as well as poetic defenses and condemnations of homosexuality. Thus in the century before the great shift in attitude toward homosexuality, from tolerance to intolerance — a shift John Boswell has described in Chris tianity , Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality — we find the culmina tion of a long if sparse tradition of medieval homosexual poetry, a tradition that reaches back through the Carolingian poets of the ninth century, the North African poets of the sixth, to the late classical poet Ausonius.2
