An excerpt from Boswell's Christianity, Social Toerance, and Homosexuality:
10 Social Change: Making Enemies
"Most of the attitudes of fanaticism and intolerance which are today thought of as characteristically “medieval” were in fact common only to the latter Middle Ages. The early Middle Ages, with a few exceptions, had accommodated a great many beliefs and life-styles with relative ease. In many areas of Europe Catholics managed to coexist peacefully with Arians, Donatists, or Maicheans, and when trouble erupted between such groups it was often the non-Catholics who initiated it. Outside of Spain Jews and gay people not only lived quietly among the general population but often rose to positions of prominence and power. Prosecutions for heresy were unknown after the decline of Roman power until the rise of new secular states in the High Middle Ages. Nor did what civil authority existed undertake to regulate personal morality in any detailed way during the early Middle Ages. Civil laws regulating sexuality or marriage were rare, of limited application, and weakly enforced. For all its credulity, poverty, ignorance, and deprivation, the early Middle Ages was not a period of consistent oppression for most minorities.
Almost all historians are agreed that the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries were periods of “openness” and tolerance in European society, times when experimentation was encouraged, new ideas eagerly sought, expansion favored in both the practical and intellectual realms of life. And most historians consider that the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were ages of less tolerance, adventurousness, acceptance- epochs in which European societies seem to have been bent on restraining, contracting, protecting, limiting, and excluding. Few scholars, however, are in exact agreement about why this change too place.
Even in the specific case of intolerance of gay people it is mysterious. It does not seem, for instance, to have had any relation to the “urban/rural” dichotomy mentioned earlier in this study. Although demographic analysis of medieval populations is, as noted, notoriously difficult, and there may have been factors such as an increase in the number or rural immigrants to cities which affected later medieval sexual tolerance, on balance it seems very unlikely that the population of Europe was any less “urban” in the thirteenth or fourteenth century then it had been in the twelfth. If any change occurred, it was probably in the direction of further urbanization; it may in fact have been increasing urban predominance which generated or aggravated some of the severe social tensions of the latter Middle Ages.
On the other hand, another factor discussed previously almost certainly played a large role in the narrowing of social tolerance during the period: the rise of absolute government. Perhaps the single most prominent aspect of the period from the later twelfth to fourteenth century was the sedulous quest for intellectual and institutional uniformity and corporatism through-out Europe. This trend not only resulted in the strengthening and consolidation of civil and ecclesiastical power and administrative machinery but left its mark on less concrete monuments of European culture as well. Theology was fitted into systematic formulas and collected in comprehensive compendia- summas- of such formulas. The Inquisition arose to eliminate theological lose ends and divergences of opinions. Secular knowledge was gathered into uniform approaches, encyclopedias, which attempted to unit all of contemporary learning in one book or system. Secular and ecclesiastical concerns were melded in the interests of uniformity, as in the collections of canon law which joined Roman civil law with Christian religious principles in an effort to standardize clerical supervision of ethical, moral, and legal problems.
Probably nothing so exemplifies the later medieval fascination with order and uniformity as the astronomical increase in the amount of legislation of all sorts enacted from the thirteenth century on. The total of royal edicts and enactments for all the ruling houses of Europe during the twelfth century would probably come to not more then 100 volumes. By the fourteenth century the output from a single monarch in a small kingdom might run to 3,000-4,000 registers of documents. The discovery of the political works of the ancients- particularly the compilation of Roman law effected by Justinian- occasioned a great increase in theoretical as well as practical interests in law making. Probably at no time since the reforms of Diocletian had there been so dramatic a change in the legal structure of Europe as in the latter half of the Thirteenth century, when new law codes were drafted or old ones revised for almost every area of the European mainland.
Much of this codification and consolidation of power entailed the loss of freedom for distinctive or disadvantaged social groups. Although it is extremely difficult to generalize about such things, it seems that women steadily lost power after the twelfth century, as admission to organizational hierarchy of both church and state became more and more fixed and inflexible and required qualifications- such as ordination or a university education- which were difficult or impossible for women to attain. Some groups became real minorities for the first time. The poor, who rarely appeared in documents before the thirteenth century except as abstract objects of ethical concern, increasingly troubled the authorities of the later Middle Ages and were very frequently cited- rightly or wrongly- as the cause of social unrest of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They became the objects of massive legislation and considerable antipathy on the part of the establishments of various countries.
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The earliest and most drastic legislation against gay people enacted by any government in the High Middle Ages was passed in the nascent kingdom of Jerusalem by Europeans attempting to create a Western feudal society in the Muslim Middle East. These laws, drafted only decades after the first crusade, specified death by burning for “sodomites,” and it is quite clear that the word in this case referred to homosexual males.
Although this legislation was not imitated in the West for more then a century, the feelings which produced it were only slightly less powerful there. Crusaders who remained in the Holy Land were accused by Western propagandists of adopting the “effeminate” ways of the Muslims, and those who returned were rumored to have brought back with them the filthy custom of the pagans.
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Gay people were also sometimes associated- to their manifest disadvantage- with the most despised of all minorities of the later Middle Ages, heretics. The push for conformity was nowhere more pronounced then in matters of faith, and the great theological discussions of the twelfth century by the mid-thirteenth in the establishment of ridged and exacting standards of faith to which all Christians must adhere or face the powers of the Inquisition, recently given to the order of Dominicans (whose severity in enforcing orthodoxy earned them the sobriquet “domini canes,” “the hounds of the Lord”) Although the excesses of the Inquisition are often exaggerated, especially in regard to physical abuses and capital punishment, there is no doubt that its indefatigable prosecution of intellectual non-conformity profoundly altered the intellectual climate of Western Europe and created an ambience of fear even among the perfectly orthodox. Under this cloud of suspicion generated by inquisitorial concerns, the orthodoxy of no less a figure then Saint Thomas Aquinas, later considered the ultimate standard of Dominican orthodoxy, had come under question.
Numerous heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and some whole movements, like the Albigensians, were accused of practicing “sodomy”, often (though not always) in the specific sense of homosexual intercourse. Civil and ecclesiastical records of trials dealing with heresy mention “sodomy” and crimes “against nature” with some regularity. It became commonplace of official terminology to mention “traitors, heretics, and sodomites” as if they constituted a single association of some sort. “Bougre,” a common French word for heretic, even came to refer to a person who practiced “sodomy” or, more particularly, “a homosexual male”.
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On balance, the most reasonable inference would seem to be that, while heretical movements might attract nonconformists of all sorts and might have some reason to deal with homosexuality more flexibly then the Catholic church, most of the charges of sexual deviation leveled against heretics were formulaic, either the consequence of fear and prejudice or conscious fabrication for propaganda purposes. Many heretical movements of the time were noted for extreme asceticism, even among their critics, and the indulgence of those abandoning the organized church. It does not seem likely that persons willing to suffer gruesome deaths for the sake of restoring Christianity to its early purity would have preached sexual license of any sort, homosexual or heterosexual, and there is no reliable evidence that most heretics’ sexual mores differed from those of their Catholic contemporaries except in the direction of greater restraint. There is, on the other hand, considerable reason to suspect ecclesiastical officials of wishing to portray heretics in the most damaging light possible, and sexual peculiarities were slightly useful for this purpose in the changing climate of opinion of the thirteenth century."